168 Bailey, In Memoriam: Olive Thome Miller. [April 



In 1902 Mrs. Miller had visited her oldest son, Charles W. Miller, 

 in California, and fascinated by the outdoor life and the birds and 

 flowers of southern California, she would have returned to live, 

 without delay, had it not been that her married daughter, Mrs. 

 Smith, and her grandchildren lived in Brooklyn. In 1904, however, 

 accompanied by her younger daughter, Mary Mann Miller, she 

 did return to California, where her daughter built a cottage on the 

 outskirts of Los Angeles on the edge of a bird-filled arroyo where 

 rare fruits and flowers ran riot and the cottage — El Nido — 

 became embowered in vines and trees. 



From 1870-1915, as nearly as can be determined by her manu- 

 script lists, Mrs. Miller published about seven hundred and eighty 

 articles, one booklet on birds and twenty-four books — eleven of 

 them on birds, her books being published mainly by the Houghton 

 Mifflin Company and E. P. Dutton. When we stop to consider 

 that her real work did not begin until she was fifty-four, after which 

 four hundred and five of her articles and nineteen of her books were 

 written, and moreover that during her later years, by remarkable 

 self-conquest, she became a lecturer and devoted much of her time 

 to lecturing on birds in New York, Brooklyn, Philadelphia, and 

 other towms, we come to a realization of her tireless industry and 

 her astonishing accomplishment. 



When living in Brooklyn she was a member of some of the lead- 

 ing women's clubs of New York and Brooklyn, giving her time to 

 them with the earnest purpose that underlay all her work. In the 

 midst of her busy life, it is good to recall as an example of her 

 devotion to her friends, that for years Mrs. Miller gave up one 

 day a week to visiting an old friend who had been crippled by an 

 accident; and after she had gone to California took time to make 

 for her a calendar of three hundred and sixty-five personally 

 selected quotations from the best in literature. 



Among Mrs. Miller's pleasures during her later years in the East 

 were the meetings of the Linnsean Society held in the American 

 Museum of Natural History in New York, and the A. O. U. meet- 

 ings which she attended in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and 

 Washington, enjoying not only the papers of other workers, but the 

 rare opportunity to meet those interested in her beloved work. In a 

 letter written after one of the meetings she exclaimed — " You don't 



