A New England Girlhood, Outlined from Memory (Beverly, MA)

There was much questioning in those days as to whether fictitious reading was good for children. To "tell a story" was one equivalent expression for lying. But those who came nearest to my child-life recognized the value of truth as impressed through the imagination, and left me in delightful freedom among my fairy-tale books. I think I saw a difference, from the first, between the old poetic legends and a modern lie, especially if this latter was the invention of a fancy as youthful as my own. I supposed that the beings of those imaginative tales had lived some time, somewhere; perhaps they still existed in foreign countries, which were all a realm of fancy to me. I was certain that they could not inhabit our matter-of-fact neighborhood. I had never heard that any fairies or elves came over with the Pilgrims in the Mayflower. But a little red-haired playmate with whom I became intimate used to take me off with her into the fields, where, sitting, on the edge of a disused cartway fringed with pussy-clover, she poured into my ears the most remarkable narratives of acquaintances she had made with people who lived under the ground close by us, in my father's orchard. Her literal descriptions quite deceived me; I swallowed her stories entire, just as people in the last century did Defoe's account of "The Apparition of Mrs. Veal."