Preble always said she didn't know how she and Phoebe would have got along without the Old Peddler, for it took all three of them, besides Andy the chore boy, to keep the fires going and to water and feed the horse, the cow, and the chickens in the barn. The wind blew such a gale it heaped great drifts across the road in no time and he was forced to come knocking at the kitchen door of the Preble House, where he had seen a light. Snow caught him on a road between the sea and a rough, woody country. But that year he tramped further north than he had been before. Mostly he did his best business from May to November when roads were open and the weather not too cold for farmers' wives and daughters to stand on their doorsteps as he spread out his wares. That was the reason he had carried this about in the bottom of his pack ever since he had started peddling. A piece mountain-ash wood is a good thing to keep close at hand, for it brings luck besides having power against witchcraft and evil. It was a small piece, which accounts for my being slightly under-sized even for a doll, and he treasured it, having brought it across the sea from Ireland.

I have heard the story told so often by one or another of the Preble family that at times it seems I, also, must have looked on as the Old Peddler carved me out of his piece of mountain-ash wood. The narrative unfolds through the eyes of a tiny wooden doll named Mehitabel (Hittie), who was carved early in the nineteenth century from the magical wood of the Mountain Ash tree by a peddler for a little girl, Phoebe Preble, who lives on Great Cranberry Island in Maine, during a winter when her father was away at sea. In 1999, Susan Jeffers and Rosemary Wells updated, simplified, and rewrote Hitty's story, adding an episode about Hitty's experiences in the American Civil War. The book is told from the point of view of an inanimate doll named Hitty (short for Mehitabel), who was constructed in the 1820s and has since traveled around the world, through many different owners. It won the Newbery Medal for excellence in American children's literature in 1930.

Hitty, Her First Hundred Years is a children's novel written by Rachel Field and published in 1929.

Hitty doll book