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Realm of Music [Realm of Music italicized] By Gladys St. Clair Morgan [Realm of Music is encircled with musical notes on a scale]

Rachel Field, a magical name to be added to my Hall of Fame; a jewel to be laid away in my treasure trove of priceless memories. Rachel Field, author of many children's stories, among them "Hitty", a winner of the Newberry Medal, poems of rare loveliness, and in more recent years "God's Pocket" and "Time Out of Mind" which remains at the head of the best sellers after many months and has taken the young author far up on the ladder of success. Though she was born in Stockbridge, Mass., and makes her permanent home in New York City. she has spent many summers in Sutton, a small island off Mt. Desert, and in these sojourns she has become so imbued with Maine atmosphere that she writes more sensitively of it than some of our native-born writers.

It was from Sutton she motored up to Camden the other afternoon to address the Maine Library Association meeting, and it was my great privilege to hear her. She came to Camden with her husband, a blond giant with so much distinctive personality that one cannot imagine speaking of him as "Rachel Field's husband". His name is Arthur Pedersen.

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Rachel Field is young and lovely. Dark auburn hair curling back from her face and caught in a soft knot at the nape of her neck. Vivid blue eyes very white teeth. A warm glowing face. To me she conveyed a composite picture of Hedwig Benedict and Ethel Lee Hayden, interesting? She was wearing a blue knitted suit, one of those heavenly blues so popular this season; her hat was a darker blue felt.

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Opening her talk on "How Books Happen", Miss Field said: "It seems foolish for me to spend my time talking about books to a roomful of people who know so much more about books than I ever shall" She gave just what we wanted most to hear, behind the scene sketches of how her own books were written. "Books can rise and fall like cakes," was a laughing remark," and tight rope walkers and writers have much in common, you never know when you're going to fall off! Doctors and their patients were also used as a comparison, a doctor may nurse his patient along to a point where complete recovery is in sight, and then there is a relapse. So with a writer and his book.

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She was seven or eight when she first had the impulse to write a book. It was a very nice book, blank white leaves cut and carefully sewed together and bound in a cover prettily printed in bright crayons: "B-O-O-K". She decided the nice white blank pages looked better than anything she could put on them, so that first book was never written, and "Perhaps it was my best book, who knows?" she queried.

She told of a play she wrote during her second year at Radcliffe which enjoyed no small success. It seemed to her to be very original in thought, and when later she wrote the poem "If Once You've Stepped on an Island", she had the idea that she alone experienced the feeling expressed therein. Yet in both instances she had come to realize that hundreds of others have the same feelings, the same ideas, the same thoughts; that her own thoughts were not original in the least, but simply an expression of another's thoughts on paper.

Miss Field voiced her love for Maine, and Maine appears over and over again in her writing. She says she feels Maine more keenly after she has returned to her New York apartment, and there can readily put on paper pictures visioned during her summer sojourn that elude her when actually in Maine.

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She gave a delightful story of "Hitty". One day when she and Dorothy Lathrop, illustrator, were strolling down a New York avenue, they spied a tiny wooden doll, not more than a finger's length, more than 100 years old, in an antique shop window. To her diminutive apron was attached the inscription in almost illegible handwriting "Hitty". It was too expensive to be purchased, but one could admire and long through the glass. Miss Field and Miss Lathrop corresponded later about Hitty. She is so tanned she must have been on a long ocean voyage", or "I am sure she was in a shipwreck" for what would a long ocean voyage be without a shipwreck! Hitty kept popping up in letters, embroidered more and more, and one day Miss Lathrop wrote: Why don't you write a story about Hitty and I will illustrate it for you?" and so all at once there was the book Hitty". It was easy writing, Miss Field told us, because she had Hitty do all the things she always wanted to do when a child nine or so, interweaving stories she had heard her mother and grandmother tell.

She told of Calico Bush" another charming young story, concerning The Maypole, around which is one of those curious stories that have come down from generation to generation; from the first settlers on Cranberry Isles, to be exact, of the French wife of an early settler who had set a maypole up on the spot now known as The Maypole.

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