Though she tends to be distant from adults, Esther Dudley enjoys the company of children, as this excerpt from "Old Esther Dudley" reveals. She also becomes a means for them to learn about the past.

"Yet Esther Dudley's most frequent and favored guests were the children of the town. Towards them she was never stern. A kindly and loving nature, hindered elsewhere from its free course by a thousand rocky prejudices, lavished itself upon these little ones. By bribes of gingerbread of her own making, stamped with a royal crown, she tempted their sunny sportiveness beneath the gloomy portal of the Province House, and would often beguile them to spend the whole day there, sitting in a circle round the verge of her hoop-petticoat, greedily attentive to her stories of a dead world." (courtesy of Eric Eldred)