Risley's was supposed to be just eight miles south of Portland. The interurban has a station in our meadows. The house was about a hundred yards from the river, on a gentle slope, in the midst of a large and lovely orchard. About twenty years ago I went to Oregon City on a steamer, just to see the river again. And God blessed me. We passed under at least fifty rainbows—there was a whole riverful of them. It was a triumphal procession of Color. If the Falls had still been at the end of the journey—but I don't dare dwell upon that.
She cannot recall how long they lived at Risley's Landing, but the farm itself, she says, is one of her clearest remembrances. The farm house had big fireplaces with cranes, flanked with book cupboards that held a fine library for those times—the works of Shakespeare, Scott, Irving, Tennyson, Cooper, Longfellow, Whittier and others of the great ones. Amidst these classics was one less classical but of special charm, The Prairie Flower, which her sister read to her at bedtime. There also was a different and more enticing kind of literature in the hired men's room, into which, during their absence in the fields, a little girl could steal and find Dundenah, the Leaping Fawn, The White Squaw and other volumes of similar vividness and appeal.
There was no drudgery for her on the farm. She who later became such a hard worker as a writer, never had to work as a child. She was much younger than her sister or her brother and was largely indulged in happy idleness. She was never assigned any duties and was never punished. Their house was always filled with visitors, and, though they were poor, it was a place of wonderful things to eat. "They fed everyone
