Mrs. Burnham rather minimizes the difficulties of getting started. Her first stories were unfavorably passed upon but the verdicts did not deter her. A poem sent to _Wide Awake_ was her first accepted work. _No Gentlemen_ was her first novel. It should be stated that her mother also was musically gifted. Though born in Newton, Massachusetts, the girl lived for some years in North Reading, Massachusetts. She was nine when the family went to Chicago to live. She was married young and it was after her marriage that her brother induced her to write. She is a member of the Little Room Club of Chicago and lives there at The Elms Hotel. Her first play, or rather the first play made from one of her books, was _The Right Princess_, and when, after the usual hitches, it was staged smoothly at the Alcazar Theater in San Francisco late in 1912, Mrs. Burnham confessed to the dramatist’s deepest thrill. “I will not act the doting parent except to say that after so many years of seeing one’s characters in black and white on the printed page you can’t imagine how fascinating it is to watch them move about in the flesh, your own creations, speaking your own lines; and then my first--my very first--villain lives in that little play.” To get to Bailey Island, Mrs. Burnham’s summer home in Maine, you go first to Portland, where the author is as “widely and favorably known” as if she had lived there all her life. It is, in fact, almost a quarter of a century since she began spending her summers in Maine. She has failed to show up but rarely since 1894, although she did spend two summers abroad and one visiting Yellowstone Park. “I only spared a summer to go to Yellowstone because it was open only in summer,” she explained afterward. Her Bailey Island house, a roomy shingled structure, stands on a steep, shelving headland, not rocky but covered with grass and with a pebbled beach at its foot. It is called The Mooring. Beside it stands her brother’s house, of the same character but a little larger. The view is over the Atlantic and Casco Bay and you may see the White Mountains clearly. The story of how Mrs. Burnham came to live there is related, with changes of names, in her novel _Dr. Latimer_. The old tide mill, which figures so importantly in _The Opened Shutters_, was a real mill which, two years after the novel’s appearance in 1906, sank into the sea. Do you remember this passage in the last chapter of _The Opened Shutters_? “She paused, her lips apart, her eyes wide, for all at once she caught sight of the Tide Mill. Every one of its shutters had turned back. The sunlight was flooding in. She grew pale, sank down upon a rock near by, and gazed.” And then a few pages later John Dunham’s words to Sylvia Lacey: