"Yet haunted as I was by the phantom future, I was happy in the present. I am afraid I was what is called a spoiled child. I loved horses and I loved verses, and on my eighth birthday two presents were made me--a well-equipped saddle horse, and a book of poems. The horse ran away with me that same afternoon while my too sociable father, who was riding with me, stopped to talk town politics with a neighbor; but my steed raced homeward, and I reached my own door in safety. The book of verse I have yet. It was by Mrs. Hemans--now so cruelly forgotten." Her imaginative nature showed itself in many ways. She says: "I was not allowed to read fiction or to play any but the most serious games.... Hence I was thrown upon my own resources for amusement. I remember when I was only eight years old carrying in my head all the summer a sort of Spanish drama, as I called it, though I knew little of Spain except some high-sounding Spanish names which I gave to my characters. Each day, as soon as I could get away by myself, I summoned these characters as if my will had been a sort of invisible call-boy, and then watched them performing. It did not seem to me that I created them, but rather that I summoned them, and their behavior often astonished me. For one of them, a young girl, who obstinately persisted in dying of consumption, I sincerely grieved." She had written from the age of seven verses which would hardly have discredited her maturer years. A stanza written when she was nine runs: Autumn is a pleasant time Breathing beauty in our clime; Even its flowerets breathe of love Which is sent us from above. The lines seem to have written themselves, but as Autumn had been assigned as a theme-subject at school she dealt with it also in prose. She began with the assertion: "Autumn to the contemplative mind is the loveliest season of the year"; and closed with the rather startling line: "All these are beautiful, but let us leave the contemplation of them until another winter dawns on the languid sea of human life." One almost wonders that under a training which permitted English so florid Mrs. Moulton was able to develop her admirable style. At ten she was writing "An Address to the Ocean" and a meditation on "Hope." Another effort was "The Bell of My Native City," and this she explained in a footnote as an imaginative composition, composed to express the feelings of an exile who had been "unjustly banished from his country." She was taken a few months later on a little trip to "Tribes Hill" on the Mohawk, and in a "History of My Journey Home from Tribes Hill" records gravely: