herself, nor to any single individual. Her ground-plots, seldom within
the widest scope of probability, were filled up with homely and natural
incidents, the gradual accretions of a long course of years, and fiction
hid its grotesque extravagance in this garb of truth, like the Devil (an
appropriate simile, for the old woman supplies it) disguising himself,
cloven-foot and all, in mortal attire. These tales generally referred
to her birthplace, a village in, the valley of the Connecticut, the
aspect of which she impressed with great vividness on my fancy. The
houses in that tract of country, long a wild and dangerous frontier,
were rendered defensible by a strength of architecture that has
preserved many of them till our own times, and I cannot describe the
sort of pleasure with which, two summers since, I rode through the
little town in question, while one object after another rose familiarly
to my eye, like successive portions of a dream becoming realized. Among
other things equally probable, she was wont to assert that all the
inhabitants of this village (at certain intervals, but whether of
twenty-five or fifty years, or a whole century, remained a disputable
point) were subject to a simultaneous slumber, continuing one hour's
space. When that mysterious time arrived, the parson snored over his
half-written sermon, though it were Saturday night and no provision made
for the morrow,--the mother's eyelids closed as she bent over her
infant, and no childish cry awakened,--the watcher at the bed of mortal
sickness slumbered upon the death-pillow, and the dying man anticipated
his sleep of ages by one as deep and dreamless. To speak emphatically,
there was a soporific influence throughout the village, stronger than if
every mother's son and daughter were reading a dull story;
notwithstanding which the old woman professed to hold the substance of
the ensuing account from one of those principally concerned in it.

One moonlight summer evening, a young man and a girl sat down together