Imari’s lullaby was suggested by an old song with an unprintable name from the book The American Songbag by Carl Sandburg (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1927, p. 455). Sandburg wrote, “Margaret Johnson of Augusta, Georgia, heard her mother sing this, year on year, as the mother had learned it from the singing, year on year, of a Negro woman who comforted children with it. The source of its language may be French, Creole, Cherokee, or mixed.”
In the comet-viewing scene at the park, some of Pryce’s dialogue was suggested by the wonderful book Views of the Architecture of the Heavens: In a Series of Letters to a Lady by John Pringle Nichol (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1837).
I do quote a few of Shakespeare’s words and there are snippets from the King James Bible repeated by Augustin Galway. Hickox’s musing on chaos was suggested by Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
The poem by Anacreon, the lyric poet of Ionia, is taken from the chapter on female influence in the book A Voice to Youth: Addressed to Young Men and Young Ladies by Reverend J. M. Austin (Utica: Grosh and Hutchinson, 1838).
The poem about comets that Pryce quotes was published in the Railroad Advocate (Rogersville, Tennessee) on February 2, 1832.
The map in the front of the book is adapted from one published in the The Pioneers of Utica by Moses Mears Bagg (Utica: Curtis & Childs, 1877). The outline of the Ballou Creek is from the 1939 map called “Historical Map of Utica in 1839,” drawn by L.W. Devereax, published to commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of the Savings Bank of Utica.
The Third Mrs. Galway Page 36