Little Annie’s Ramble, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, is another outstanding example of a children’s story that can be  further appreciated and understood from an adult perspective.  Annie is a little girl that loves a good adventure.  So when she hears that exotic animals from all over the world have been shipped into her town she is immediately drawn in.  Annie and her neighbor, a much older man who has lost a child’s perspective on the wonders of life, head into town with expectations of the fantastic .  They explore the exotic animals, wonder in the colorful displays and each finds a sense of awe in their individual perspectives.

It isn’t until the town crier’s second appearance that the narrator, also the young girl’s companion, realizes that they had left home without notifying the child’s parents.  Each of them was so lost in the spectacle of the circus-she in the present, and he in the past- that reality had been displaced by the marvelous.

Unlike some of the other stories that we have read, I believe that the narrator’s intentions were very innocent.  The old man didn’t want to do anything creepy with little Annie, but instead sought to rekindle his own childlike sense of wonderment that he saw in the young daughter of his good friends.  It was a great bonding experience between an adult and a child.  And, it afforded an opportunity to revisit his own youthful spirit and take a break from his own dreary ponderings  of adulthood.