The Story of Opal

e spirit and callouses the instincts, makes curiosity for most people the criterion of interest. They demand facts and backgrounds, theories and explanations, and

cy, of The Fairyland Around Us, the fairyland of beasts and blossoms, butterflies and birds. The book was quaintly embellished with colored pictures, pasted in by hand, and bore a hundred marks of special loving care. Yet about it there seemed little at first sight to tempt a publisher. Indeed, she had of

went as

book. But you must have had an interestin

ots of lum

w m

east, we moved

other regarding the surroundings of her girlhood. The answers were s

ike that, you must

wide. "Yes, alwa

the book I want,

s destroyed. It's all torn

loved

old it ev

kept the

e doll is rent asunder throws away

hing. The pieces are all

r was of all shades, sorts, and sizes: butchers' bags pressed and sliced in two, wrapping-paper, the backs of envelopes-anything and everything that could hold writing. The early years of the diary are printed in let

most continuously the diarist has labored, piecing it together sheet by sheet, each page a kind

r seventh year. During all these months Opal Whiteley has been a frequent visitor in the Atlantic's office. With friendliness came confidence, and little by little, very gradually, an incident here, another there, her story came to be told. She was at first eager only for the future

; later, fragments of episodes. Whenever one was completed, it was typed by an assistant on a card, and in this way there came into being a card-system that would do credit to a scientific museum of modest proportions. Finally the cards were filed in sequence, the manuscript then typed off and printed just as at first written, with no change whatever other