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

Most of our every-day reading also came to us over the sea. Miss Edgworth's juvenile stories were in general circulation, and we knew "Harry and Lucy" and "Rosamond" almost as well as we did our own playmates. But we did not think those English children had so good a time as we did; they had to be so prim and methodical. It seemed to us that the little folks across the water never were allowed to romp and run wild; some of us may have held a vague idea that this freedom of ours was the natural inheritance of republican children only. Primroses and cowslips and daisies bloomed in these pleasant story-books of ours, and we went a-Maying there, with our transatlantic playmates. I think we sometimes started off with our baskets, expecting to find those English flowers in our own fields. How should children be wiser than to look for every beautiful thing they have heard of, on home ground? And, indeed, our commonest field-flowers were, many of them, importations from the mother-country--clover, and dandelions, and ox-eye daisies. I was delighted when my mother told me one day that a yellow flower I brought her was a cowslip, for I thought she meant that it was the genuine English cowslip, which I had read about. I was disappointed to learn that it was a native blossom, the marsh-marigold. My sisters had some books that I appropriated to myself a great deal: "Paul and Virginia;" "Elizabeth, or the Exiles of Siberia;" "Nina: an Icelandic Tale;" with the "Vicar of Wakefield;" the "Tour to the Hebrides;" "Gulliver's Travels;" the "Arabian Nights;" and some odd volumes of Sir Walter Scott's novels.