Page:History of Oregon Literature.djvu/474

 singers as Calve, Caruso, Crossley, Williams and McCormack. "Four-Leaf Clover," written in an apple orchard in Bellingham in the spring of 1890 and first published in the Portland West Shore, has been especially popular. Among those who have set it to music are Leila Brownell, Charles Willeby, Horatio Parker and Whitney Coombs. She herself prefers the settings of the first two. It is in the official song of the Washington Federation of Women's Clubs, of which she is an honorary member.

Of her methods of writing, as reported over the 45-year period of her productive life, the one that has received the most mention is good hard work. William Henry Thorne spoke of her perfect sentences, and he spoke truly. They are that way in letters, even in letters written in pencil while she is ill in bed. No comma is ever missing, never does one of them fail to parse, whatever the complexity of objects in a paragraph the antecedent is always there with shining clarity, the meaning usually has adornment and always has precision. Though she went to school and not to a very advanced school in Oregon City for only a few years, no professor of rhetoric with all the rules freshly in his head could ever find a place where his pencil, red or blue, could leave its accusing check. The unblemished technique of her poetry and its singing quality are part of the perfection she has aimed at so long that carelessness and short-cuts are alien to her habits. Following is a consolidation of three comments made by her at various times in description of how she writes: