in the mild weather. Mara read the Roman history through
again, and began it a third time, and read over and over again the
stories and prophecies that pleased her in the Bible, and pondered the
wood-cuts and texts in a very old edition of AEsop's Fables; and as she
wandered in the woods, picking fragrant bayberries and gathering
hemlock, checkerberry, and sassafras to put in the beer which her
grandmother brewed, she mused on the things that she read till her
little mind became a tabernacle of solemn, quaint, dreamy forms, where
old Judean kings and prophets, and Roman senators and warriors, marched
in and out in shadowy rounds. She invented long dramas and conversations
in which they performed imaginary parts, and it would not have appeared
to the child in the least degree surprising either to have met an angel
in the woods, or to have formed an intimacy with some talking wolf or
bear, such as she read of in AEsop's Fables.

One day, as she was exploring the garret, she found in an old barrel of
cast-off rubbish a bit of reading which she begged of her grandmother
for her own. It was the play of the "Tempest," torn from an old edition
of Shakespeare, and was in that delightfully fragmentary condition
which most particularly pleases children, because they conceive a
mutilated treasure thus found to be more especially their own
property--something like a rare wild-flower or sea-shell. The pleasure
which thoughtful and imaginative children sometimes take in reading that
which they do not and cannot fully comprehend is one of the most common
and curious phenomena of childhood.

And so little Mara would lie for hours stretched out on the pebbly
beach, with the broad open ocean before her and the whispering pines and
hemlocks behind her, and pore over this poem, from which she collected
dim, delightful images of a lonely island, an old enchanter, a beautiful
girl, and a spirit not quite like those in the Bible, but a very
probable one to her mode of thinking. As for old Caliban, she fancied
him with a face much like that of a huge skate-fish she had once seen
drawn ashore in one of her grandfather's nets; and then there was the
beautiful young Prince Ferdinand, much like what Moses would be when he
was grown up--and how glad she would be to pile up his wood for him, if
any old enchanter should set him to work!

One attribute of the child was a peculiar shamefacedness and shyness
about her inner thoughts, and therefore the