Page:History of Oregon Literature.djvu/465

 This inconsiderate exposure finished her poetry writing for another year. There was another editor in town, of a more trustful and less analytic nature, who was also her Sunday school teacher. At the age of 1 6 she was taken into his newspaper office to learn the business from typesetting to editorial writing. His confidence in her progress was cheering for her but in the outcome rather hard on him. During his absence he left her to run the paper for a week while a vigorous political campaign was going on. It was in the course of this journalistic rise and fall, when she was no older than a modern high school girl, that she first met Sam. L. Simpson. About this time, also, she wrote her first short story. Its central figure was a burglar and it was not then or ever published.

She continued somewhat haphazardly with the writing of both prose and verse, and established the basis of a talent that received rapid and national recognition when it got started in earnest in 1890. Oregon City was the place of that preliminary development, but no significant published writing was done while her home was there. Her father died, and her sister married, became Carrie Blake Morgan and contributed to magazines. In that historic town, so richly-flavored and stimulating an environment in the 70's and 80's, she acquired a deep harmony with the Pacific Northwest which was to be her subject matter; and there, quite apart from a poetic ability as yet unconfirmed by any fame, she grew into an attractive young woman as glad to the sight of little girls as the stern old novelist's daughter Nora had been to her—and pleasing also in the eyes of a very discriminating