We can form some idea of the work she did under this
arrangement from the fact that she had over one thousand dollars'
worth of equipment at the end of the first year. The second year
she increased this by five hundred, and then accepted a place on
the natural history staff of ~Outing, working closely with Mr.
Casper 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."
"I was abnormally sensitive," says the author, "about trying to
accomplish any given thing and failing. I had been taught in my
home that it was black disgrace to undertake anything and fail. My
husband owned a drug and book store that carried magazines, and it
was not possible to conduct departments in any of them and not have
it known; but only a few people in our locality read these
publications, none of them were interested in nature photography,
or natural science, so what I was trying to do was not realized
even by my own family.
"With them I was much more timid than with the neighbours. Least of
all did I want to fail before my man Person and my daughter and our
respective families; so I worked in secret, sent in my material,
and kept as quiet about it as possible. On ~Outing I had graduated
from the camera department to an illustrated article each month,
and as this kept up the year round, and few illustrations could be
made in winter, it meant that I must secure enough photographs of
wild life in summer to last during the part of the year when few
were to be had.
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