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, for 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 fasci-
nated 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."