Page:History of Oregon Literature.djvu/475

Rh I do not observe any set period for work. Nevertheless, I believe that it is quite possible to sit down and write a few words and thus work yourself into a mood. I never had any rules nor any advice until I did not need any. My advice to beginners is simply this: Write all the time. If you like it well enough to have patience, you will finally gain original expression.... It is only the worker that wins success. "I work while others play," is the best motto I know for success. . . . When I was writing Alaska, the Great Country I was at my desk at eight o'clock in the morning and worked till five o'clock in the afternoon; then from eight at night till one or two in the morning, for a full year. Some of my poems are written a dozen times before they suit me.

Her home used to be referred to as being located on one of the high terraces of Sehome Hill. With municipal exactness, it is now 605 High Street, Bellingham. She and her husband picked out its site in 1892, and built the house, which became one of the sights of the town and is now a large, ivy-clad, old-fashioned place, with views from all its windows. It looks out upon Bellingham Bay and is several hundred feet above it—and, still further, it looks out upon the white Olympics and the blue smoothness of the Gulf of Georgia. It is filled with books, and with antiques—old china, Georgian silver, old Dutch marquetry, buhl work, old crystal chandeliers, English furniture from British Columbia and Russian samovars from Alaska. "I don't mind dying," she says, "but I just can't leave my home."

On a side saddle and in a long habit, she mastered some very spirited horses in the Grand Ronde days soon after her marriage. For several years riding was her chief recreation. "I became more famous as a