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Miss Field calls God's Pocket" her luckiest break. She told of the frequent meetings with the aged grandson of Capt. Hadlock and his wife, the "Prussian lady". "Some days he would talk and some days he wouldn't," said Miss Field, "but always on my part there were gentle proddings and guestionings. One beautiful July day I called on the dear old man, and, in the course of the visit he showed me, to my amazed delight, the tattered diary of Capt. Hadlock, two worn, almost illegible, record books, such as were seen in all country stores a generation or so ago. He was in his most talkative mood that day, and I was profoundly moved to hold in my two hands those records of Capt. Hadlock's travels with his show, records which just by chance had, not been taken with him on that last voyage which spelled diaster. The two old books were placed in my hands, a definite lagacy, for two days later the old man died. My time was then given over almost entirely to deciphering the faded handwriting, making [illegible] the quaint phonetic spelling, and piecing together the travels as they progressed bit by bit. Occasionally there would be a page missing, presumably where the entry had been too spicy to meet the approval of the gently bred "Prussian lady."

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Miss Field pointed out that such books as that grow out of definite pictures, but other books are acquired in a more painful fashion, from incidents noted here and there and dovetailed together, from threads starting we know not where and woven in and out. Such a book is "Time Out of Mind". When Miss Field first began to come to Maine, she was impressed by the beautiful large white houses set on high bluffs amid spruce trees. One of these houses in a seafaring town she named "The Folly", you remember "The Folly' in "Time Out of Mind"? She looked at and studied these old houses, heard stories about them, asked questions about them, and began to realize what the shipbuilding era had meant to Maine.

That probably was the beginning of the story, although it may have been the description of a launching heard in the conversation between two old women in Newburyport, Miss Field listened as they talked, saw their shoulders lift, their eyes brighten, their faded cheeks take on color as they said "Do you remember . . ." and went on to tell of the sound of the hammers, the thrill as the boat left the ways and took the water. "It was so romantic and exciting to hear them talk," said Miss Field," but when I questioned them, one told me, sadly shaking her head, and looking at me with a pitying expression, "You are too young to have ever been to a ship launching."

But from that description I took away the romance, the excitement, the sound of the hammers, to be put in a book. And then the clock which runs through the story, seen in an antique shop, the little figures of two woodsmen coming out on the stroke of the hour to saw away at their unseen log, a French clock that had been brought oversea by a Bath captain. When I saw it l decided then and there that some day this little clock would go into a book, in the white house called "The Folly'."

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Her closing comment was: "Writing books is much like berry picking. You go out to pick blueberries, but you come across some nice blackberries, and chances are that you return home with your basket filled with blackberries instead of blueberries, Some times you return with only a few scattering berries in the bottom · of your basket. One thing is certain, however; you come home with one of two things, with your basket either empty or with contents that may surprise you."

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Rockland Courier-Gazette Sept. 14