especially of youth. The reasons for this are so obvious that they
hardly need to be repeated. No young woman can be constantly in the
company of her mother; no mother can constantly watch over her
daughter. In the best families there are hours of each day, when the
child of every age, especially of youthful age and capacity, must be
left to herself or to the influence of others. What, then, is to become
of her? Is she to yield to that current of the world which every where
sets downward?

You will say, perhaps, that she has good habit on her side, together
with the counsels of good and kind parents. If so, I say again, she is
highly favored. But what if it happen to be otherwise? What if the
parents happen not to be wise and discriminating, or seem unable to
find time, in the bustle of a busy world, to do that which they know it
were desirable to do? What then?

I repeat the sentiment, then: if you have the best of parents, you are
liable, at your age, to be thrown, day after day, into new and untried
circumstances--such as it were next to impossible for parents to
foresee. New feelings will arise unknown to yourself, and
undiscoverable by them. New passions will make their appearance--new
temptations will solicit--new trials will be allotted you, In spite of
the best parental efforts at education, there will still remain to you
a great work of _self_-effort.

To assist you in it, is the leading object of this little volume. It is
not a substitute for parental counsels. It is not a substitute for your
own reflections. If it prove not an aid to parents, in their task, and
if it encourage not the reflection and the self-efforts of the young,
it will not accomplish its object.