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PREFACE.

anonymously, there would be no guarantee for their truth; being moreover desirous to shun publicity, and unequal to the task of authorship, the undertaking has been postponed from time to time, and, perhaps, would have been delayed still longer, but for the pressure of calamitous circumstances, which compels her to hesitate no more, but, with all their imperfections on their head, to send these pages at once into the world.

The authoress may compare her feelings, as she launches her little vessel on the waters, to those of Shelley, when, haying exhausted his whole stock of paper, he twisted a bank-note into the shape of a littic boat, and then committing it to the stream, waited on the other side for its arrival with intense anxiety. Her shipbuilding powers, she fears, are as feeble, her materials as frail; but she has seen the little Paper Nautilus floating with impunity and confidence on the bosom of that

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