An Old Woman's Tale

An elderly village storyteller turns local memory into legend, and Nathaniel Hawthorne follows her lead into a moonlit Connecticut valley where the ordinary grows uncanny. In a weathered frontier village steeped in family history, poor distant relatives David and Esther sit in near-silence beside a spring and the old homes of their kin, speaking of the beautiful stillness as if it were a spell. Around them, the town seems to drift into a half-waking dream. Then a crowd of strange visitors appears, bearing the faces and likenesses of the townspeople yet seeming to belong to another age. They gather around houses, ruins, and remembered places with joy, grief, and anger, as if summoned by the village's own buried past. Playful, intimate, and haunting, this eerie tale becomes a meditation on inheritance, memory, and the way family history can return in ghostly form. At its heart lies a tender reunion of a sailor and a pale young woman, separated for decades. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.