1900. Mary E. Wilkins (Freeman), American author whose short stories are highly regarded by the critics. Her stories and novels paint a picture of Massachusetts and Vermont still under the influence of Puritanism, in her view, a philosophy made rigid by time. The Heart's Highway begins: In 1682, when I was thirty years of age and Mistress Mary Cavendish just turned eighteen, she and I together one Sabbath morning in the month of April were riding to meeting in Jamestown. We were all alone except for the troop of black slaves straggling in the rear, blurring the road curiously with their black faces. It seldom happened that we rode in such wise, for Mistress Catherine Cavendish, the elder sister of Mistress Mary, and Madam Cavendish, her grandmother, usually rode with us-Madam Judith Cavendish, though more than seventy, sitting a horse as well as her granddaughters, and looking, when viewed from the back, as young as they, and being in that respect, as well as others, a wonder to the countryside. See other titles by this author available from Kessinger Publishing.