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my sister Emilie--she who heard me say my hymns, and taught me to
write--was mistress of an almost limitless fund of imaginative lore.
She was a very Scheherezade of story-tellers, so her younger sisters
thought, who listened to her while twilight grew into moonlight,
evening after evening, with fascinated wakefulness.

Besides the tales that the child-world of all ages is familiar
with,--Red Riding-Hood, the Giant-Killer, Cinderella, Aladdin, the
"Sleeping Beauty," and the rest,--she had picked up somewhere most of
the folk-stories of Ireland and Scotland, and also the wild legends of
Germany, which latter were not then made into the compact volumes known
among juvenile readers of to-day as Grimm's "Household Tales."

Her choice was usually judicious; she omitted the ghosts and goblins
that would have haunted our dreams; although I was now and then visited
by a nightmare-consciousness of being a bewitched princess who must
perform some impossible task, such as turning a whole roomful of straws
into gold, one by one, or else lose my head. But she blended the
humorous with the romantic in her selections, so that we usually
dropped to sleep in good spirits, if not with a laugh.

That old story of the fisherman who had done the "Man of the Sea" a
favor, and was to be rewarded by having his wish granted, she told in
so quaintly realistic a way that I thought it might all have happened
on one of the islands out in Massachusetts Bay. The fisherman was
foolish enough, it seemed, to let his wife do all his wishing for him;
and she, unsatisfied still, though she had been made first an immensely
rich woman, and then a great queen, at last sent her husband to ask
that they two might be made rulers over the sun, moon, and stars.

As my sister went on with the story, I could see the waves grow black,
and could hear the wind mutter and growl, while the fisherman called
for the first, second, and then reluctantly, for the third time:--

"O Man of the Sea,
Come listen to me!
For Alice my wife,
The plague of my life,
Has sent me to beg a boon of thee!"

As his call died away on the sullen wind, the mysterious "Man of the
Sea" rose in his wrath out of the billows, and said,--

"Go back to your old mud hut, and stay there with your wife Alice, and
never come to trouble me again."

I sympathized with the "Man of the Sea" in his righteous indignation at
the conduct of the greedy, grasping woman; and the moral of the s