Page:History of Oregon Literature.djvu/463

 "You will sometimes find the "Oregon City Seminary" mentioned in connection with my education. This was a jest. The public school building from which I was graduated in Oregon City had many years before been a young ladies"seminary," and we used laughingly to refer to it as our "seminary."

It was during her school days at Oregon City that she had the author of a favorite book pointed out to her and found his personality formidable and disappointing:

I was about eleven when a schoolmate who was with me on the street, remarked with interest: "Here come Mr. Moss and Nora." I was instantly thrilled by the young woman's beauty and style. After they had passed, my companion said: "You know he wrote The Prairie Flower."

"What!" I cried. "That old man?"

That romantic tale which my sister had told or read to me as she rocked me to sleep in her arms—well, maybe he was tall and handsome when he wrote it! He was so stern that I always ran away at sight of him. His daughter was very charming. She was married and lived at Oregon City—a fascinating woman. Young girls adored her. He had a son, Volney, as tall and handsome as Nora. Their bearing was most aristocratic."

As she passed into her middle and later teens at Oregon City, she too had beauty and style, like Nora, and, in all the years that she has been a well-known author, no one reading her books and then seeing her could be disappointed. Not so much that she has al ways looked like a poet, having the lineaments of one perhaps less than Minnie Myrtle, but rather that she has been given a more universal outward grace that would suit any talent and go properly with any dis tinction. Pictures of her in her mature womanhood