and old-time fireplaces filled with cut boughs of the spicy fir balsam,
and various antique pieces of furniture lend to the inner atmosphere of
Quillcote a fine artistic and colonial effect, while not a stone's
throw away, at the foot of a precipitous bank, flows--in a very
irregular channel--the picturesque Saco River.

In this summer home Mrs. Wiggin has the companionship of her mother,
and her sister, Miss Nora Smith, herself a writer, which renders it
easy to abandon herself wholly to her creative work; this coupled with
the fact that she is practically in seclusion banishes even a thought
of interruption.

And now, what was the beginning and the growth of the delightful
literary faculty, which has already given birth to so many pleasant
fancies and happy studies, especially of young life? A glimpse is
given in the following playful letter and postscript from herself and
her sister to a would-be biographer.


MY DEAR BOSWELL,--I have asked my family for some incidents of my
childhood, as you bade me,--soliciting any "anecdotes,"
"characteristics," or "early tendencies" that may have been, as you
suggest, "foreshadowings" of later things.

I have been much chagrined at the result. My younger sister states
that I was a nice, well-mannered, capable child, nothing more; and that
I never did anything nor said anything in any way remarkable. She
affirms that, so far from spending my childhood days in composition,
her principal recollection of me is that of a practical stirring little
person, clad in a linsey woolsey gown, eternally dragging a red and