“Shocking!” said Cousin Virginia. “A descendant of the Puritans!”
“As to that,” broke in Wendell’s brother Alden, who was a Junior at Harvard, specializing in Original Sources, “the Puritans had some imagination. Look at witchcraft. Look at the Wishing Stone.”
“What wishing stone?” asked Cousin Virginia. “I’ve seen the kind they set in a ring on a girl’s third finger. Do you mean that kind?”
This bit of levity fell flat.
“The Wishing Stone,[A]” said Alden, “was a projecting boulder in the Common, somewhere near the present junction of the Beacon Street mall and the Oliver Wendell Holmes walk. There was a tradition that if one walked or ran nine times around the stone and then stood or sat on it and silently made a wish, the wish would come true.”
[A] Winsor’s Memorial History of Boston, vol. I., p. 554.
“And here you’ve shown me all the sights of Boston and left that out!” cried Cousin Virginia. “Why, it’s much more interesting than Bunker Hill Monument. Let us hie us thither by moonlight as soon as we finish dinner. Careful, Wendell; if your eyes should pop right out, you couldn’t put them back.”
“The stone,” said Alden, “is no longer there.”
“Oh, where is it, Alden?” cried Wendell.
“According to the early diarists,” returned Alden, “most of those boulders on the Common were used for building stone from time to time. I doubt whether its history could possibly be traced.”