[Gutenberg 49003] • Marion Harland's Autobiography: The Story of a Long Life

From the time when, as a mere baby, I dreamed myself to slumber every night by “making up stories,” down to the present hour, every human life with which I have been associated, or of which I had any intimate knowledge, has been to me a living story. All interest me in some measure. Many enlist my sympathy and fascinate the imagination as no tale that is avowedly fictitious has ever bewitched me.

I hold and believe for certain that if I could draw aside the veil of conventional reserve from the daily thinking, feeling, and living of my most commonplace acquaintance, and read these from “Preface” to “Finis,” I should rate the wildest dream of the novelist as tame by comparison.

My children tell me, laughingly, that I “turn everything into a story.” In my heart I know that the romances are all ready-made and laid to my hand.