Every work partaking of the nature of an autobiography is supposed to
demand an apology to the public. To refuse such a tribute, would be to
recognize the justice of the charge, so often brought against our
countrymen--of a too great willingness to be made acquainted with the
domestic history and private affairs of their neighbors.

It is, doubtless, to refute this calumny that we find travellers, for
the most part, modestly offering some such form of explanation as this,
to the reader: "That the matter laid before him was, in the first place,
simply letters to friends, never designed to be submitted to other eyes,
and only brought forward now at the solicitation of wiser judges than
the author himself."

No such plea can, in the present instance, be offered. The record of
events in which the writer had herself no share, was preserved in
compliance with the suggestion of a revered relative, whose name often
appears in the following pages. "My child," she would say, "write these
things down, as I tell them to you. Hereafter our children, and even
strangers, will feel interested in hearing the story of our early lives
and sufferings." And it is a matter of no small regret and
self-reproach, that much, very much, thus narrated was, through
negligence, or a spirit of procrastination, suffered to pass unrecorded.

With regard to the pictures of domestic life and experience (preserved,
as will be seen, in journals, letters, and otherwise), it is true their
publication might have been deferred until the writer had passed away
from the scene of action; and such, it was supposed, would have been
their lot--that they would only have been dragged forth hereafter, to