Page:History of Oregon Literature.djvu/684

 sons, persons identified by the intimate descriptions of them, things that could have been remembered in de tail only by being recorded at the time they happened. Whole sections are the beautiful, innocent, sincere un veiling of the heart of a precocious tot in composition childishly expressive; fact and fancy so cleverly inter woven as to be almost inseparable; improbable and probable imagery told with the same naive charm, humor, tragedy, human interest; everything a story should contain for sustained interest. These were enough to have assured Opal a niche in the hall of fame, to have proclaimed her a literary genius, to have brought her a welcome from the literati.

It is my belief that what was presented to Ellery Sedgwick—at least what he examined before he staked his own reputation and that of his magazine upon its genuineness—appeared to be the kind described in the preceding paragraph, the kind that would have been accepted under such auspices as the Atlantic Monthly  for what it pretended to be.

As it is, many want to know how a child of six could have a nimble familiarity with French yet never use a word of that language in conversation or at any other time; they want to know why The Fairyland Around Us contained many of the odd references and classical names later found in the diary when pieced together; they want to know why Opal couldn't re member at any time in her life the name of her father when at six or seven she constructed involved acrostics that named her father and all his family; they want to know how she could remember trivial things that happened when she was three years of age, yet couldn't