'Tieck, who has embodied so many Runic secrets, explained to
me what I have often felt toward myself, when he tells of
the poor changeling, who, turned from the door of her adopted
home, sat down on a stone and so pitied herself that she wept.
Yet me also, the wonderful bird, singing in the wild forest,
has tempted on, and not in vain.'

Thus wrote Margaret in the noon of life, when looking back through
youth to the "dewy dawn of memory." She was the eldest child of
Timothy Fuller and Margaret Crane, and was born in Cambridge-Port,
Massachusetts, on the 23d of May, 1810.

Among her papers fortunately remains this unfinished sketch of youth,
prepared by her own hand, in 1840, as the introductory chapter to an
autobiographical romance.




PARENTS.


'My father was a lawyer and a politician. He was a man largely
endowed with that sagacious energy, which the state of New
England society, for the last half century, has been so well
fitted to develop. His father was a clergyman, settled as
pastor in Princeton, Massachusetts, within the bounds of whose
parish-farm was Wachuset. His means were small, and the great
object of his ambition was to send his sons to college. As a
boy, my father was taught to think only of preparing himself