Prior to the appearance of _A Daughter of the Land_ this was Mrs. Porter’s best book, unquestionably. All she says about it is perfectly true, but she does not give herself proper credit in respect of one or two of the book’s qualities. There is much humor in it and the delineation of Kate Comstock, particularly in the first half of the book, has the sharpness of line and the sureness of handling visible in a fine etching. Consciously or subconsciously Mrs. Porter created at the very outset of her story, in the second chapter, a situation which appeals to the most thrilling and satisfying instinct in the human breast. Elnora, pitifully dressed, has spent a humiliating first day at high school in town. Since her mother will not provide them, Margaret and Wesley Sinton go forth at nightfall to buy the clothes the girl needs to wear and sit up half the night to get them ready quickly. It is both humorous and genuinely moving. The reader shares their burst of generosity. He shops with them and sits up with them and worries with them and rejoices and partakes of their happiness in “doing for” the girl; he is all the while quite conscious of the humor of the situation without any abatement of the tenderness and delight that is his as well as theirs. This is great work; it may not be great literature; whether it is or not depends on what you require “literature” to give you. The innumerable readers who require literature to give them what life gives them (or even more, what life unjustly withholds from them)--emotion, pure, deep, contenting and cleansing--these will ask no more than Mrs. Porter gives them here. The idea of _The Harvester_ was suggested to Mrs. Porter by an editor who wanted a magazine article, with human interest in it, about ginseng diggers. As she looked into the raising of the drug, the idea came to her of a man growing drug plants professionally and of a sick girl healed by them. “‘I wrote primarily to state that to my personal knowledge, clean, loving men still exist in this world, and that no man is forced to endure the grind of city life if he wills otherwise.... I wrote the book as I thought it should be written, to prove my points and establish my contentions. I think it did. Men the globe around promptly wrote me that they had always observed the moral code; others that the subject never in all their lives had been presented to them from my point of view, but now that it had been, they would change and do what they could to influence all men to do the same.’” _Laddie_--“‘Of a truth, the home I described in this book I know to the last grain of wood in the doors, and I painted it with absolute accuracy; and many of the people I described I knew more intimately than I ever have known any others.... There was such a man as Laddie, and he was as much bigger and better than my description of him as a real thing is always better than its presentment.’”