A Life Unveiled By a Child of the Drumlins

I fancy that this “Child of the Drumlins” did not know she was living amid drumlins when she passed her youth there. She knew them only as the long, smooth, loaf-shaped hills that were scattered over her native landscape, upon which she saw cattle grazing and grain ripening, and upon which she roamed and played in the freedom of childhood.

These curious-looking hills are found in certain parts of New England, and in a large section of the central and western parts of New York state. They would suggest artificial mounds were they not so large as to preclude all idea of their being the work of man. They were indeed made, but not by human hands. They are the work of the great continental ice-sheet which tens of thousands of years ago crept slowly over a large part of the Northern hemisphere, giving to the landscape, among many other strange new features, these long, low, rounded hills, called by the geologists drumlins, amid which the “Child” passed her early life. Carpeted with grass and often dotted with trees, these peaceful pastoral elevations are seldom more than a quarter of a mile long, and perhaps a hundred feet high. Their trend is in one direction, from northeast to southwest—the general course the ice-flood took. They are simply huge heaps of clay and water-worn boulders shovelled together by the gods of the Ice Age, though just how it all came about the geologists are not clear. But there they stand, making a marked feature in the landscape.

To the Land of the Drumlins, rich in its early associations, the writer of this narrative turns, giving a moving record of real life which to me makes fiction insipid. It presents the natural history of an American girl in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. (And why should we not have such a history, as well as that of much less interesting animals?) Herein we see pictured typical and representative conditions and individuals which contributed to the development of a dreaming, aspiring girl into a woman of serious purpose and substantial achievement in a strenuous and useful career. A notable piece of work of permanent literary and psychological value, it sweeps one along by its intrinsic interest, its candour, its playfulness, and its seriousness. Childhood memories, trivial and signal events, portraiture, incidents, form a picture of real life convincing as only real things can convince. Through it we look into a heart and a life. It is life. One sees the writer from her forebears up. With what admirable art she brings certain scenes before us! One is present, sees and feels them all, and shares her inmost thoughts and emotions. One’s tears stand trembling at the doorway; smiles and laughter are irresistibly evoked. The feeling with which the writer has invested the narrative is the principal source of its charm and value; it is that which makes us a sharer in all her life. The book does not appear to be written, but rather an unveiling of memories, with an entire absence of literary consciousness. Her mind seems transparent; her life like an open book before her where she can trace every passage. Does she forget nothing? Few persons can see themselves objectively and at the same time achieve such self-analysis.