Pierre or the Ambiguities

By some strange arts, Isabel’s wonderful story might have been, some way, and for some cause, forged for her, in her childhood, and craftily impressed upon her youthful mind; which so–like a slight mark in a young tree–and now enlargingly grown with her growth, till it had become this immense staring marvel. Tested by any thing real, practical, and reasonable, what less probable, for instance, than that fancied crossing of the sea in her childhood, when upon Pierre’s subsequent questioning of her, she did not even know that the sea was salt.