The author was born and lived in the USA in the first decades of the 19th century. In these fifteen stories, which he published throughout his life, the imprint of the events linked to the formation of the settlers' settlements in New England and elsewhere in the American East is noticeable. They have a strong historical flavor and are tinged with a religiosity of various Protestant branches; lack of education and imagination make one see with reason or without it. Well written, some have more realistic features than others and evoke a historical process, such as the description of the same place over decades, in which it changes from being a road between trees to being the street of a town. Frame the stories in a geographical and cultural context that you know well.