For several years she reviewed books for the Club Room Department in The Galaxy. Dr. J. G. Holland gave her the Bric-a-brac Department in Scribner's, and at this time she met ever week a class of married women at Mrs. Holland's, condensing and discussing new books. Meanwhile she was an individual and potent factor in New York social and literary life. At Mrs. John Sherwood's—or in any place where wit and wisdom gathered—she was at home, unpretending, picturesque, humorous.
She has written over forty lectures, and read them in many places in New York and the West and all over New England. Calendars are her recreation: they run right off her pen, or are collected from other penmen. "Our Calendar" gives to each date a few lines from an American author. Then we have "Cupid's," "Children's," "Sunshine," "Rainbow," "Starlight," "Indian Summer" calendars; and, just so long as Kate Sanborn exists in the flesh, they will keep coming. Certainly that is our hope.
Club work is outside her kingdom, but she was the first president of New Hampshire's Daughters, an association of women born in New Hampshire, but living in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. Hers was a notable administration, and brought to the organization a prestige which remains. Rules might fail, but the brilliant president never. She governed a merry company, many of them famous, but she was chief. They loved her, and that affection and pride still exist.
She is with her sister, Mrs. Paul Babcock, at Montclair, N.J., or in New York, some part of each winter; but her home is at Breezy Meadows, Metcalf, Mass., where several years since she "adopted" an abandoned farm, which later she deserted for a farm only a short distance beyond it, on the opposite side of the road, where she settled down to agriculture, hospitality, and authorship. In each of these industries she excels, most of all in pen work.
Life is beautiful to Kate Sanborn, the homes of friends delightful; but Breezy Meadows, with its cattle, horses, and dogs, its busy outdoor life, its growing crops and old-fashioned flowers and hen-coops, its century-old fireplace and friends beside it, is ever the land of her heart's desire. Her thoughts are transfixed on the point of a sharp and fearless pen.
Miss Sanborn has published "Home Pictures of English Poets" (commendations called out by this one volume would make a book. College men and students of literature point to it as a fascinating study of facts, holding a permanent ])lace of its own); "Wit of Women" ("Its play [of wit] is like that of summer lightning on the clouds, so quick, varied, and irradiant," writes Frances Willard); "Adopting an Abandoned Farm"; "Abandoning an Adopted Farm"; "A Truthful Woman in Southern California"; "'My Literary Zoo"; "Favorite Lectures"; "Vanity and Insanity Shadows of Genius." Not a dull volume or lecture from this rarely gifted writer, and every book does one good. If sentences are picturesque, witty, they are also lessons in excellent English. How well this woman was equipped for her work, how healthy and sunny, strong and laughable, instructive and amusing, is the product of her mind! And she is still busy, preparing two new books, writing regular book chats for one paper and reviews for the National Magazine.
FLORENCE COLLINS PORTER, of the editorial staff of the Los Angeles Herald, was born in Caribou, Aroostook County, Me., August 14, 1853, daughter of Samuel Wilson and Dorcas S. (Hardison) Collins. Mrs. Porter's father, Samuel W. Collins, one of the early pioneers of Aroostook County, served several terms in the Maine Legislature, at first as Representative and later as State Senator, and also held important town offices. He was a manufacturer of lumber and a man noted for generous and kindly deeds and democratic principles. He died in 1898 at the advanced age of eighty-seven.
The Hardisons also were a family of early pioneers, descendants of Ivory Hardison, who made an impress on the life and character of the new town in the Aroostook forest. Mrs. Dorcas S. Collins inherited many of the sterling qualities of her mother, Mrs. Dorcas Abbott Hardison, a very capable woman, of great strength of character, for whom she was named.
