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,--

"Did you know that whenever that cock crows every rooster in town crows
too?" I listened out at the window, and asked,--

"But when will he begin to crow?"

"Oh, roosters crow in the night, sometimes, when you are asleep."

Then my younger brother would break in with a shout of delight at my
stupidity:--

"I'll tell you when, goosie!--

'The next day after never;
When the dead ducks fly over the river.'"

But this must have been when I was very small; for I remember thinking
that "the next day after never" would come some time, in millions of
years, perhaps. And how queer it would be to see dead ducks flying
through the air!

Witches were seldom spoken of in the presence of us children. We
sometimes overheard a snatch of a witch-story, told in whispers, by the
flickering firelight, just as we were being sent off to bed. But, to
the older people, those legends were too much like realities, and they
preferred not to repeat them. Indeed, it was over our town that the
last black shadow of the dreadful witchcraft delusion had rested.
Mistress Hale's house was just across the burying-ground, and Gallows
Hill was only two miles away, beyond the bridge. Yet I never really
knew what the "Salem Witchcraft" was until Goodrich's "History of the
United States" was put into my hands as a schoolbook, and I read about
it there.

Elves and gnomes and air-sprites and genii were no strangers to us, fo