midnight
With an ironic satisfaction was it that a writer who is not unaccustomed to be called a mere realist here attempted fantasy , even though the results of his effort may reveal invention only and not imagination . It may even be that it was memory -LRB- mother of the muses -RRB- rather than invention -LRB- daughter of necessity -RRB- which inspired the ` Primer of Imaginary Geography . ' I have an uneasy wonder whether I should ever have gone on this voyage of discovery with Mynheer Vanderdecken , past the Bohemia which is a desert country by the sea , if I had not in my youth been allowed to visit ` A Virtuoso 's Collection ' ; and yet , to the best of my recollection , it was no recalling of Hawthorne 's tale , but a casual glance at the Carte du Pays de Tendre in a volume of Molière , which first set me upon collecting the material for an imaginary geography . In the second of these little fantasies the midnight wanderer saw certain combats famous in all literature and certain dances . Where it was possible use was made of the actual words of the great authors who had described these combats and these dances , the descriptions being condensed sometimes and sometimes their rhythm being a little modified so that they should not be out of keeping with the more pedestrian prose by which they were accompanied . Thus , as it happens , the dances of little Pearl and of Topsy could be set forth , fortunately , almost in the very phrases of Hawthorne and of Mrs. Stowe , while I was forced to describe as best I could myself the gyrations of the wife who lived in ` A Doll 's House ' and of her remote predecessor as a `` new woman , '' the daughter of Herodias . The same method was followed in the writing of the third of these tales , although the authors then drawn upon were most of them less well known ; and the only quotation of any length was the one from Irving describing the mysterious deeds of the headless horseman .