It seems reasonable to begin with the assumption, since positive proof is lacking, that Godwin's story has its literary origin in the English essayist Charles Lamb's "DreamChildren: A Reverie" (1822). Here Lamb, a bachelor, creates an imaginary scene in which he, now a widower, is with his two children, who nestle close to him as he tells them about dead relatives, including their (supposed) Great-grandmother Field and his long courtship of their mother ("the fair Alice"). Great-grandmother Field, so runs his story, was once mistress—that is, housekeeper—of a great house in Norfolk, where she lived alone, the owner dwelling elsewhere. That very house had been associated with certain tragic events popularized in a ballad, "Children in the Wood." It was her belief, accustomed as she was to sleeping in utter solitude, "that an apparition of two infants was to be seen at midnight...