Now for my work--the best is “A Land of Little Rain,” and the child verse in the St. Nicholas. I think the best and worst of it is that I am a little too near to my material. Where I seem to skimp a little, I can understand now that the book is cold, it was only that I presupposed a greater knowledge in the reader. During the last six months I have discovered that the same thing is happening to me that I complained of in Jimville.--the desert has “struck in.” But I shall do better work, and still better. I am pleased to learn through some of my editor friends that my verse is rather better paid for and more widely copied than the average product of verse makers, and I conceive it possible that this might be traced to the influence of Piute and Shoshone medicine men and Dancers who are the only poets I personally know. For consider how I get nearer to the root of the poetic impulse among these single-hearted savages than any other where. But if I write at length upon this point you will say with my friend Kern River Jim, “This all blame foolishness.” And this brings me to my work among the Indians in which I am somewhat generally misrepresented. If I deny what is commonly reported, that the Indians regard me worshipfully for the good I do, then is the denial taken for modesty which it is not, but merely truth. They tell me things because I am really interested and a little for the sake of small favors but mostly because I give them no rest until they do. Says my friend Kern River Jim, “What for you learn them Injun songs? You can’t sing um, You go learn songs in a book, that’s good enough for you.” Nevertheless I have been able to do them nearly as much good as they have done me. This is the best I can do for you in this way,--but whatever you are minded to say of my work say this--that I have been writing only four or five years and have not yet come to my full power, nor will yet for some years more. * * * * * So wrote Mary Austin in late fall, 1902. Very nearly a year later Houghton Mifflin Company published _The Land of Little Rain_, a collection of fourteen sketches that were read with admiration and joy, that are rediscovered every year, that established incontestably Mary Austin’s qualifications as a writer. “East away from the Sierras, south from Panamint and Amargosa, east and south many an uncounted mile, is the Country of Lost Borders. “Ute, Paiute, Mojave, and Shoshone inhabit its frontiers, and as far into the heart of it as a man dare go. Not the law, but the land sets the limit. Desert is the name it wears upon the maps, but the Indian’s is the better word. Desert is a loose term to indicate land that supports no man; whether the land can be bitted and broken to that purpose is not proven.”