PREFACE.
Reading edition
Some of the sketches contained in this volume have appeared in the Boston True Flag, the American Union, and, one of them—“The New Minister”—in Gleason’s Pictorial; the remainder have not been published before.
A great variety of sketches has been introduced, nearly all of them practical in their application, and illustrative of the social and domestic duties of life. No attempt at “fine writing” has been made in them; they are simply home thrusts at the follies of the parlor and the kitchen; of the shop and the counting-room; in short, of life “in doors and out.”
The author is encouraged to collect these simple stories in a volume, by the advice of partial friends, and by a desire to redeem them of a kind of literary orphanage to which the unscrupulousness of some reckless man of paste and scissors has reduced them. Many of them are now travelling over the country, like a dog without a collar; but unlike that highly respectable puppy which isn’t any body’s dog, they have an anxious friend at home, who takes this method of calling them back to the fold again.
W. T. A.
Dorchester, Sept. 12, 1854.