middle-aged friends, (and it may serve as a _caveat_,) I can lay no
claim to it whatever.

The trouble has been, that those who have believed one passage, have
discredited another; and those who have sympathized with me in trifles,
have deserted me when affairs grew earnest. I have had sympathy enough
with my married griefs, but when it came to the perplexing torments of
my single life--not a weeper could I find!

I would suggest to those who intend to believe only half of my present
book, that they exercise a little discretion in their choice. I am not
fastidious in the matter, and only ask them to believe what counts most
toward the goodness of humanity, and to discredit--if they will persist
in it--only what tells badly for our common nature. The man, or the
woman, who believes well, is apt to work well; and Faith is as much the
key to happiness here, as it is the key to happiness hereafter.

I have only one thing more to say before I get upon my story. A great
many sharp-eyed people, who have a horror of light reading,--by which
they mean whatever does not make mention of stocks, cottons, or moral
homilies,--will find much fault with my book for its ephemeral
character.

I am sorry that I cannot gratify such: homilies are not at all in my
habit; and it does seem to me an exhausting way of disposing of a good
moral, to hammer it down to a single point, so that there shall be only
one chance of driving it home. For my own part, I count it a great deal
better philosophy to fuse it, and rarefy it, so that it shall spread out
into every crevice of a story, and give a color and a taste, as it were,
to the whole mass.

I know there are very good people, who, if they cannot lay their finger
on so much doctrine set down in old-fashioned phrase, will never get an
inkling of it at all. With such people, goodness is a thing of
understanding, more than of feeling, and all their morality has its
action in the brain.

God forbid that I should sneer at this terrible infirmity, which
Providence has seen fit to inflict; God forbid too, that I should not be
grateful to the same kind Providence for bestowing upon others among
his creatures a more genial apprehension of true goodness, and a hearty
sympathy with every shade of human kindness.

But in all this I am not making out a case for my own correct teaching,
or insinuating the propriety of my tone. I shall leave the book, in this
regard, to speak for itself; and whoever fee