Children -- Conduct of life -- Juvenile fiction; Girls -- Juvenile fiction; Time travel -- Juvenile fiction
Letitia gasped. That settled it. Captain John Hopkins was her
great-great-great-grandfather. Great-aunt Peggy had often told her
about him. He had been a notable man in his day, among the first
settlers, and many a story concerning him had come down to his
descendants. A queer miniature of him, in a little gilt frame, hung
in the best parlor, and Letitia had often looked at it. She had
thought from the first that there was something familiar about the
man's face, and now she recognized the likeness to the miniature.
It seemed awful, and impossible, but the little green door led into
the past, and Letitia Hopkins was visiting her great-great-great-
grandfather and grandmother, great-great-grandmother, and her
great-great-aunts.
Letitia looked up in the faces, all staring wonderingly at her, and
all of them had that familiar look, though she had no miniature of
the others. Suddenly she knew that it was a likeness to her own face
which she recognized, and it was as if she saw herself in a
looking-glass. She felt as if her head was turning round and round,
and presently her feet began to follow the motion of her head, then
strong arms caught her, or she would have fallen.
When Letitia came to herself again, she was in a great feather
bed, in the unfinished loft of the log-house. The wind blew in
her face, a great star shone in her eyes. She thought at first
she was out of doors. Then she heard a kind but commanding voice
repeating: "Open your mouth," and stared up wildly into her
great-great-great-grandmother's face, then around the strange little
garret, lighted with a wisp of rag in a pewter dish of tallow,
and the stars shining through the crack in the logs. Not a bit of
furniture was there in the room, besides the bed and an oak chest.
Some queer-looking garments hung about on pegs and swung in the
draughts of the wind. It must have been snowing outside, for little
piles of snow were scattered here and there about the room.
"Where--am--I?" Letitia asked feebly, but no sooner had she opened
her mouth than her great-great-great-grandmother, Goodwife Hopkins,
who had been watching her chance, popped in the pewter spoon full of
some horribly black and bitter medicine.
Letitia nearly choked.
"Swallow it," said Goodwife Hopkins. "You swooned away, and it is
good physic. It will soon make you well."
Goodwife Hopkins had a kind and motherly way, but a way from which
there was no appeal. Letitia swallowed the bitter dose.
"Now go to sleep," ordered Goodwife Hopkins.
Letitia went to sleep. There might have been something quieting to
the nerves in the good physic. She was awakened a little later by her
great-great-grandmother and her two great-great-aunts coming to bed.
They were to sleep with her. There were only two beds in Captain John
Hopkins's house.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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