If the story of Opal were written by another hand than her own, the central theme of it would be faith. No matter how doubtful the enterprise, the issue she always holds as certain, simply because the world is good and God loves his children. Loving herself all created things, from her barrel-full of caterpillars, whose evolution she would note and chronicle from day to day, to the dogs and horses, squirrels, raccoons, and bats which peopled the world she lived in, she would thank God daily for them, and very early in her life determined to devote the rest of it to spreading knowledge of them and of their kind far and wide among little children.

To accomplish this, needed education, and an education she would have. Those about her showed no interest; but by picking berries, washing, and work of all rough sorts, Opal paid for the books which the high school required. But she must do more than this. She must go to college. To the State University she went, counting it nothing that she should live in a room without furniture other than a two-dollar cot, and two coats for blankets. Family conditions, however, made college impossible for her. After the illness and death of Mrs. Whiteley, Opal borrowed a little money from friends in Cottage Grove, Oregon, and started alone for Los Angeles, determined to seek her livelihood by giving nature lessons to classes of children.

The privations and disappointments of the next two years would make an heroic tale; but she persevered, and her classes became successful. The next step was her nature book, for which, by personal canvass for subscriptions, she raised not less than the prodigious sum of $9400. But the printers with a girl for a client, demanded more and still more money, and when the final $600 necessary to make the booty mount to $10,000 was not forthcoming, with a brutality that would do credit to a Thénardier, first threatened, and then destroyed the plates.

A struggle for mere existence followed, but gradually Opal triumphed, when she was overtaken by a serious illness and taken to the hospital. New and merciful friends, such as are always conjured up by such a life as Opal’s, came to her assistance, and after her recovery she soon started eastward, to find a publisher for her ill-fated volume. The rest we know.

Yet, after all, our theme should not be Opal, but Opal’s book. She is the child of curious and interesting circumstance, but of circumstance her journal is altogether independent. The authorship does not matter, nor the life from which it came. There the book is. Nothing else is like it, nor apt to be. If there is alchemy in Nature, it is in children’s hearts the unspoiled treasure lies, and for that room of the treasure-house, the Story of Opal offers a tiny golden key.

Ellery Sedgwick.

The Atlantic Office, June, 1920.

CONTENTS