“She began by sending photographic and natural history hints to _Recreation_, and with the first installment was asked to take charge of the department and furnish material each month, for which she was to be paid at current prices in high-grade photographic material. We can form some idea of the work she did under this arrangement from the fact that she had over $1,000 worth of equipment at the end of the first year. The second year she increased this by $500, and then accepted a place on the natural history staff of _Outing_, working closely with Mr. Caspar Whitney. After a year of this helpful experience, Mrs. Porter began to turn her attention to what she calls ‘nature studies sugar-coated with fiction.’ Mixing some childhood fact with a large degree of grown-up fiction, she wrote a little story entitled _Laddie, the Princess, and the Pie_.” She dreaded failure, she who had been bred to believe that failure was disgraceful. “‘I who waded morass, fought quicksands, crept, worked from ladders high in the air, and crossed water on improvised rafts without a tremor, slipped with many misgivings into the postoffice and rented a box for myself, so that if I met with failure my husband and the men in the bank need not know what I had attempted.’” That was in May; in September the storekeeper congratulated her on her story in the _Metropolitan_. She had not seen it. She wrote to the editor and got a quick reply. An office boy had lost or destroyed her address and he had been waiting to hear from her. Would she do a Christmas story? She would, and did, and he asked for illustrations. She found that his time limit gave her one day to do them in. She worked from 8 A. M. to 4 A. M. to make the necessary photographs, which required special settings and costuming. Not long after, Mrs. Porter wrote a short story of 10,000 words and sent it to the _Century_. Richard Watson Gilder advised her to make a book of it. This is the origin of _The Song of the Cardinal_. “Following Mr. Gilder’s advice, she recast the tale and, starting with the mangled body of a cardinal some marksman had left in the road she was traveling, in a fervor of love for the birds and indignation at the hunter she told the cardinal’s life history.” The book was published in 1903. She illustrated the book herself after dangers and hardships of which the reader seldom has any conception. Securing a mere tailpiece picture once cost her three weeks in bed where she lay twisted in convulsions and insensible most of the time.