e public
because not fitted for the task; and, thinking of 'the fools that rushed
in,' (there is small aptness in the remainder of the familiar
quotation,) I continued to urge till my young friend yielded, on my
promising to omit passages which relate to the emotions and rites of the
inner temple; Mary Langdon not partaking that incomprehensible frankness
or child-like hallucination which enables some of our very best
writers--Mrs. Browning, for instance--to impart, by sonnets and in
various vehicles of prose and verse, to the curious and all-devouring
public those secrets from the heart's holy of holies that one would
hardly confess to a lover or a priest.

It is to our purpose, writing, as we profess to do, _pour l'utile_, that
our young friend indulged little in sentiment that her circumstances
rendered dangerous to her peace, and that, being a country-bred
New-England girl, she conscientiously, set down the coarser realities
essential to the well-being of a traveler--breakfasts, dinners, etc. But
before proceeding to her journal, I must introduce my _debutante_, if
she who will probably make but a single appearance before the public may
be so styled.

Mary Langdon is still on the threshold of life; at least those who have
reached threescore would deem her so, as she is not more than
three-and-twenty. The freshness of her youth has been preserved by a
simple and rather retired country-life. A total abstinence from French
novels and other light reading has left the purity and candor of her
youth unscathed by their blight and weather-stain. Would that this tree
of the knowledge of evil--not _good_ and evil--were never transplanted
into our New World. 'If ye eat of it,' your love of what is natural and
simple 'will surely die;' ye will lose your perception of the sweet
odors of the flowers Providence has sown along your path, and the vile
exhalations from these fruits of corrupted genius will hide from you the
star of duty--perhaps Nature's sternest light, but her best.

Mary Langdon's simplicity is that of truth, not of ignorance. Her father
has given her what he calls 'a good old-fashioned English education;'
that means, he says, that 'she thoroughly knows how to read, write, and
cipher, which few girls brought up at French boarding-schools do.' As
might be suspected from the practical ideas in her narrative, our young
friend has had that complete development of her faculties which arises
out of the necessities of