TO MY READER.
It is a curious thing to keep a diary—for one's self only. I cannot conceive how it can be done. Once in my earliest youth I kept a diary, or rather a kind of moral account current, in which each day was entered with a short observation, of good, or bad, or middling. At the close of the year the days were added up; but when, after a few years' time, I discovered that the amount of the middling days was ever the greatest, I grew tired of the thing, and have never since kept a diary for—myself.
Besides, when one is happy enough to be surrounded, in one's home, by beloved brothers and sisters, one scarcely finds the necessity of keeping a written account of one's life for one's self. The heart's sighs, the questionings of the mind, the occurrences of the day, find immediate sympathy from the near and the dear who are at hand. When distant, one writes letters to them, and in these, one's diary. I had often done so, and latest in my letters from America. For I then possessed a mother and a sister in my home.
But a change came over my home; death entered; my home was made desolate, and I—solitary.
I felt it severely, when, two years afterwards, I again
