Even though it felt a bit like "standing on your head while walking downstairs," Andrew and Susie watched a busy town of 57,000 people grow smaller and smaller until it became nothing but a piece of wilderness with the Indians playing football in the clearings, more than 300 men on one team. Through their grandmother's unusual method of telling history backwards they were able to see the town when there were teams of oxen on the muddy roads, and wild ducks and geese flying over the marshes. They learned what it felt like to live in the days of lamplighters and runaway slaves; in the hectic days of the Revolution, and even back to 1721 when the townspeople threatened to hang Dr. Zabdiel Boylston for his courageous experiments with smallpox inoculation. They learned about the first school, the first fire department, and the first police department which later had to add a one-man traffic squad to control reckless driving by hackmen. They shared their mother's excitement on being invited to have tea and fairy gingerbread with Eliza Orne White, and their grandmother's strawberry ice cream picnic on a frozen pond in the middle of winter — and that great day when everybody had a free ride on the first train, the engine gaily painted in red and gold.

Basing her research on family journals, personal letters and town records, Mrs. Kent has traced the growth of the Town of Brookline, Massachusetts, from its present-day cosmopolitanism back more than 300 years to the original wilderness settlement. She has done this in a delightfully intimate and detailed manner, showing the growth and changes in all phases of the town's life — and the lives of the people in it.

Attractive scratchboard drawings by Barbara Cooney show a warm feeling for each stage of the town's development.

From the dust jacket