gained favorable attention in the reviews and, though far from being a best seller, it did well enough to bring new encouragement to the author and to be regarded as a successful book by those who published it. Ten years later, A. C. McClurg & Company spoke with satisfaction of the "steady" sale it had enjoyed and issued an illustrated edition with drawings by L. Maynard Dixon. The author was well enough known by 1900 so that the Pacific Monthly had an article about him and printed two of his poems. The Oregonian ran a half-page feature on him in 1902, and the same year J. B. Horner in the second edition of his Oregon Literature devoted to him a picture, two and a half pages of biography and nine and a half pages of quotations from The Bridge of the Gods.
The book was indeed steadily making its way, but it was given its first quick impulse towards being a famous book in 1911, when it was presented as "a spectacular drama" at the Astoria Centennial Exposition under the direction of Miss Mabel Farris, and was later repeated on Multnomah Field in Portland. It has now reached its 29th edition, meaning an average of about two editions every three years since it was published. Such is the history of a book that was rejected by practically all the leading publishers doing business in 1890.
Meanwhile, in 1889, he secured a leave of absence from the Hood River Church and enrolled in the Pacific Theological Seminary at Oakland, California. He earned his way by filling pulpits in the city and country and working in the little mission churches. He saw more and more of the Scotch girl until he became
