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

But she became more and more romantic in her inventions. A distant aristocratic-looking mansion, which we could see half-hidden by trees, across the river, she assured me was a haunted house, and that she had passed many a night there, seeing unaccountable sights, and hearing mysterious sounds. She further announced that she was to be married, some time, to a young man who lived over there. I inferred that the marriage was to take place whenever the ghostly tenants of the house would give their consent. She revealed to me, under promise of strict secrecy, the young man's name. It was "Alonzo." Not long after I picked up a book which one of my sisters had borrowed, called "Alonzo and Melissa," and I discovered that she had been telling me page after page of "Melissa's" adventures, as if they were her own. The fading memory I have of the book is that it was a very silly one; and when I discovered that the rest of the romantic occurrences she had related, not in that volume, were to be found in "The Children of the Abbey," I left off listening to her. I do not think I regarded her stories as lies; I only lost my interest in them after I knew that they were all of her own clumsy second-hand making-up, out of the most commonplace material. My two brothers liked to play upon my credulity. When my brother Ben pointed up to the gilded weather-cock on the Old South steeple, and said to me with a very grave face,--