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HYLAND he Little Room is a tale as charming as it is uncanny, an unsettling story of memory, illusion, perception, possibly magic. It centers on a mystery experienced at different times by a mother and daughter, one that causes the mother to go mad and die, the daughter to experience dissonance on her wedding day and thereafter in her marriage. An old Vermont farmhouse owned by two maiden aunts contains a space that, through different junctures of time, and through different minds, is perceived either as a "little room" furnished with a chaise covered in blue India chintz with a peacock figure in it, or, alternately, as a mere china closet stacked with gilt edged china. Memory is foiled, refuted, tricked. I will not reveal the denouement to readers; the story intrigues and puzzles. The author, Madeline Yale Wynne, is an interesting figure, for she was not primarily a writer but a noted artisan, credited with having great influence upon the Chicago Arts & Crafts movement. Born in 1847, she learnt metal work as a child in her father's workshop—Linus Yale was inventor of the famed Yale lock. A group of artists in Chicago took the title "The Little Room" as the name of their salon. The story itself has all the satisfying compactness of lock and key; we see in it the workings of an imaginative yet formidably precise mind. T Introduction