culiar pleasure.

Far more has been told us concerning the South during the Civil War than
concerning the North. Fiction has found the North a less romantic field,
and the South has been chosen as the background of many a stirring
novel, while only here and there has an author been found who has known
the deep-hearted loyalty of the Northern States and woven the story into
narrative form. The girl who grew up in Canandaigua was intensely
patriotic, and from day to day vividly chronicled what she saw, felt,
and heard. Her Diary is a faithful record of impressions of that stormy
time in which the nation underwent a baptism of fire. The realism of her
paragraphs is unsurpassed.

Beyond the personal claim of the Diary and the certainty to give
pleasure to a host of readers, the author appeals to Americans in
general because of her family and her friends. Her father and
grandfather were Presbyterian ministers. Her Grandfather Richards was
for twenty years President of Auburn Theological Seminary. Her brother,
John Morgan Richards of London, has recently given to the world the Life
and Letters of his gifted and lamented daughter, Pearl Mary-Terese
Craigie, known best as John Oliver Hobbes. The famous Field brothers and
their father, Rev. David Dudley Field, and their nephew, Justice David
J. Brewer, of the United States Supreme Court, were her kinsmen. Miss
Hannah Upham, a distinguished teacher mentioned in the Diary, belongs to
the group of American women to whom we owe the initiative of what we now
choose to call the higher education of the sex. She, in common with Mary
Lyon, Emma Willard, and Eliza Bayliss Wheaton, gave a forward impulse to
the liberal education of women, and our privilege is to keep their
memory green. They are to be remembered by what they have done and by
the tender reminiscences found here and there like pressed flowers in a
herbarium, in such pages as these.

Miss Richards' marriage to Mr. Edmund C. Clarke occurred in 1866. Mr.
Clarke is a veteran of the Civil War and a Commander in the Grand Army
of the Republic. His brother, Noah T. Clarke, was the Principal of
Canandaigua Academy for the long term of forty years. The dignified,
amusing and remarkable personages who were Mrs. Clarke's contemporaries,
teachers, or friends are pictured in her Diary just as they were, so
that we meet them on the street, in the drawing-room, in church, at
prayer-meeting, anywhere and everywhere, and grasp their hands