It is a wearisome while. And yet the lives of but sixty old
women, such as live under the hill, say of a century each, strung
together, are sufficient to reach over the whole ground. Taking
hold of hands they would span the interval from Eve to my own
mother. A respectable tea-party merely,--whose gossip would be
Universal History. The fourth old woman from myself suckled
Columbus,--the ninth was nurse to the Norman Conqueror,--the
nineteenth was the Virgin Mary,--the twenty-fourth the Cumaean
Sibyl,--the thirtieth was at the Trojan war and Helen her
name,--the thirty-eighth was Queen Semiramis,--the sixtieth was
Eve the mother of mankind. So much for the
"Old woman that lives under the hill,
And if she's not gone she lives there still."
It will not take a very great-granddaughter of hers to be in at
the death of Time.
We can never safely exceed the actual facts in our narratives.
Of pure invention, such as some suppose, there is no instance.
To write a true work of fiction even, is only to take leisure and
liberty to describe some things more exactly as they are.
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