And first let us hear about Mrs. Porter herself. We have met her at work. Was there anything to suggest direct descent from Governor William Bradford of the Mayflower and the “stern and rockbound coast”? There was not. There was, however, a suggestion of a childhood spent in an oldtime white frame New England house, with green blinds and big pillars in front. There was certainly more than a suggestion of a child brought up to play indoors and out. With a little imagination we could have seen her studying music, always music, loving to improvise. “I liked to play out all my moods and everything I saw and heard. I could get rid of my tempers, too, by sometimes just playing them out. And I liked to play the beautiful things I saw--sunsets, woods and lakes.... In that way, perhaps, _David_ is autobiographical.... The many years’ training in voice as well as instrumental music has never failed to help me in expressing just the mood I want to express.” She was born in Littleton, New Hampshire, a place of some few thousands in the White Mountains, the daughter of Francis H. Hodgman and Llewella Woolson Hodgman. She had a brother to play with. She “knew the woods from early childhood.” Little verses and stories by her commemorated birthdays and other occasions of moment. In high school ill health arrested her studies. For a while books had to be put entirely aside and she lived a good deal outdoors. Spruce, fir, cedar and tamarack, mountain flowers and plants, became personalities to be distinguished one from another and to be delighted in for their peculiarities. When she wrote _Just David_ she had only to recall her youth, after all. Health regained, she went to Boston for more musical study under private teachers and at the New England Conservatory. She sang in concerts and in church choirs. In 1892 she was married to John Lyman Porter. She lived a year in Chattanooga and a few years in New York and Springfield, Vermont; Boston (Cambridge) has been her home with these exceptions. Mr. and Mrs. Porter have lived in Cambridge for the last sixteen years. Mrs. Porter’s mother, Mrs. Hodgman, an invalid, has lived with them. We have said that Mrs. Porter works every morning. Yes, the morning hours are set apart for her work and it is not readily interrupted. Her first book, published in 1907, was _Cross Currents_, a study of child labor, struck out from her by what she had seen in New York of youngsters made to toil at the fashioning of artificial flowers. Indeed, her first impulse to write came to her in New York, on an afternoon several years after her marriage, as she stood in Trinity churchyard. It was a flash, a dramatic impression such as comes to many a visitor. When these dead awaken! _If_ these dead were to awaken, were to come back to us here and now! How would they think and feel about what they would see? What would they say and do? Well--