I

       Table of Contents

      When the Editor of Everywoman’s World asked me to write “The Story of My Career,” I smiled with a little touch of incredulous amusement. My career? Had I a career? Was not—should not—a “career” be something splendid, wonderful, spectacular at the very least, something varied and exciting? Could my long, uphill struggle, through many quiet, uneventful years, be termed a “career”? It had never occurred to me to call it so; and, on first thought, it did not seem to me that there was much to be said about that same long, monotonous struggle. But it appeared to be a whim of the aforesaid editor that I should say what little there was to be said; and in those same long years I acquired the habit of accommodating myself to the whims of editors to such an inveterate degree that I have not yet been able to shake it off. So I shall cheerfully tell my tame story. If it does nothing else, it may serve to encourage some other toiler who is struggling along in the weary pathway I once followed to success.

      Many years ago, when I was still a child, I clipped from a current magazine a bit of verse, entitled “To the Fringed Gentian,” and pasted it on the corner of the little portfolio on which I wrote my letters and school essays. Every time I opened the portfolio I read one of those verses over; it was the key-note of my every aim and ambition:

      “Then whisper, blossom, in thy sleep

       How I may upward climb

       The Alpine path, so hard, so steep,

       That leads to heights sublime;

       How I may reach that far-off goal

       Of true and honoured fame,

       And write upon its shining scroll

       A woman’s humble name.”

      It is indeed a “hard and steep” path; and if any word I can write will assist or encourage another pilgrim along that path, that word I gladly and willingly write.

      I was born in the little village of Clifton, Prince Edward Island. “Old Prince Edward Island” is a good place in which