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—

“So that was how I got my start.” True enough, for the real start comes in the impulse, doesn’t it? After that has been felt intervals hardly matter....

Cross Currents was successful and Mrs. Porter was persuaded to write a sequel, The Turn of the Tide. She had developed a habit, now fixed, of clipping from newspapers and magazines bits of news, comments, whatnot, that were significant to her. These she filed, filed and card indexed. One day she saw in some magazine four lines expressing wonder as to what would happen, if feminine influence came into the home life of three bachelors.

From those four lines, or rather, from the idea in them, came Miss Billy; and from Miss Billy came Miss Billy’s Decision and Miss Billy—Married. Not immediately; Mrs. Porter filed the clipping. She thought vaguely that perhaps, maybe, some day, she would write a short story—only a short story—based on the idea in this sentence or so....

Pollyanna—

So many think of Mrs. Porter only as the author of Pollyanna—they are not her real readers who know better!—that it is much fairer to her and ourselves to consider her other books. After the Pollyanna stories came Just David, easily accounted for. Mrs. Porter says that her thoughts had often played around the idea of a child brought up to know only what is good. You shudder, or laugh. Good heavens, don’t you wish that you could have been spared some of the things you were brought up to know? At the bottom of your acquired attitude is there no faint wistfulness, no trace of longing for something once loved and lost—not awhile but forever?

David is the only son of a violinist. After his mother’s death the father carries the boy to a cabin in the mountains. Six years afterward he is brought to a quiet country town—a lad in love with music, with birds and flowers.

“Mr. and Mrs. Holly, more than ever now, were learning to look at the world through David’s eyes. One day—one wonderful day—they went to walk in the woods with the boy; and whenever before had Simon Holly left his work for so frivolous a thing as to walk in the woods!