The reader draws in his breath sharply. This is a _writer!_ And she has style. Yes, but so have dozens of others. And they never do anything with it. They write charming little essays, fanciful, forgotten. What else has she? She has keen eyes, a keen mind, a heart to understand and a silence and time to come to the understanding. This much you make sure of as you go deeper into the book, reading the accounts of _The Pocket Hunter_ and _Jimville: A Bret Harte Town_. When you have finished you know Mrs. Austin’s promise but unless you have read her later books you do not know her performance. It began right after the appearance of _The Land of Little Rain_ with her next work, the novel _Isidro_, a romance dealing with the California of the padres, and it reached its high and sustained level with _A Woman of Genius_. She did not remain on the edge of the desert. To do so would have been fatal. She moved about and with benefit to herself and her work. Now she lives in a house facing on Gramercy Park, New York, where she has a studio. She has exchanged the Mojave desert for the desert of Manhattan, but she is sheltered in an oasis touched with the lingering loveliness of the New York H. C. Bunner knew. Ask her about the advantages of her new environment and she will tell you a story: “A young Californian who came East to try his fortune gravitated naturally to Washington Square where Genius is supposed to germinate. He was personally conducted to the Liberal Club where a young woman in bobbed hair and a futurist dress asked him if he didn’t think the Liberal Club the most remarkable thing in America. “‘Well,’ said the Westerner, ‘there’s the Grand Canyon, you know.’ “There you have it,” concludes Mrs. Austin. “If you haven’t seen the Grand Canyon you had better keep away from the Liberal Club; but once you have caught the lift and bigness of America outside New York, then New York is the most inspiring place in the world in which to work.” Ask her about her fine novel _The Ford_, a story of present day California which takes its title from a river shallow where the boy Kenneth Brent rescues a lamb from drowning: “The book records incidents in my own life in the struggle for the waters of Owens River which the city of Los Angeles stole from us,” Mrs. Austin explains. “That was a very wicked episode, and I did not begin to do justice to the chicanery of Los Angeles. I am saving some of these things for the sequel to _The Ford_! It was I who discovered and made public the attempt of the city to secure the surplus rights of the river in just such fashion as I have described Anne and Kenneth Brent doing in the book.” We have had Mary Austin’s portrait of herself in 1902; let us have a portrait of her by a visitor who met her about that time. Elia W. Peattie, writing in the Boston _Transcript_, supplies just those externals that we need to round out our picture: