y. It is a delightful opening
of his whole heart to his reader. One sees with him the smallest object of
nature about the home of his childhood; and it is impossible not to enter
into all his feelings of little joys and poignant sorrows. I am not without
the hope, therefore, that, in the few records which I am about to give you;
partly of personal experience and partly of personal observation, I shall
be able to enlist the attention of your readers; for, after all, each one
of us, friend Godey, in our own more mature joys and sorrows, is but an
epitome, so to speak, the great mass, who alike rejoice and grieve us.

I do not wish to exhibit anything like a spirit of egotism, and I assure
you that I write with a gratified feeling that is a very wide remove from
that selfish sentiment, when I tell you that I have received from very many
parents, in different parts of the country, letters containing their "warm
and grateful thanks" for the endeavor which I made, in a recent number of
your magazine, to _create more confidence in childhood and youth_; to
awaken, along with a "sense of _duty_"--that too frequent excuse for
domestic tyranny--a feeling of generous forbearance for the trivial, venial
faults of those whose hearts are just and tender, and whom "kindness wins
when cruelty would repel." You must let me go on in my own way, and I will
try to illustrate the truth and justice of my position.

I must go back to my very earliest schooldays. I doubt if I was more than
five years old, a little boy in the country, when I was sent, with my
twin-brother, to a summer "district school." It was kept by a
"school-ma'am," a pleasant young woman of some twenty years of age. She was
positively my _first love_. I am afraid I was an awkward scholar at first;
but the enticing manner in which Mary ---- (I grieve that only the faint
_sound_ of her unsyllabled name comes to me now from "the dark backward and
abysm of Time") coaxed me through the alphabet and the words of one
syllable; encouraged me to encounter those of two (the first of which I
remember to this day, whenever the baker's bill for my children's daily
bread is presented for audit); stimulated me to attack those of three;
until, at the last, I was enabled to surmount that tallest of orthoepical
combinations, "_Mi-chi-li-mack-i-nack_", without a particle of fear; the
enticing manner, I say, in which Mary ---- accomplished all this, won my
heart. She would stoop over and kiss me