THE NEW YORK ASTOR, LENOX AND 190 J. SEYMOUR, PRINTER, JOHN-STREET. PREFACE. THE continued encouragement afforded by the Public to her successive series of Village Sketches, has induced the Writer to bring forward a Fourth Volume, on nearly the same plan, which she earnestly hopes may prove as fortunate as its predecessors. A few of the stories were composed purposely for children; but as people do not, now-a-days, write down to those little folks, and as the Authoress has herself, in common with her wisers and betters, a strong propensity to dip into children's books when they happen to fall in her way, she by no means thought it necessary to omit them. Three Mile Cross, INTRODUCTORY LETTER. TO MISS W. Feb. 20, 1830. No, my dearest Mary, the severe domestic calamity which we have experienced will not, as you expect, and as many of our other friends seem to anticipate, drive us from our favourite village. On the contrary, the cottage home, in which she, used to such very different accommodation, closed her peaceful and blameless life, the country church in which her remains lie buried, and the kind neighbours by whom she was so universally respected and beloved, are now doubly endeared to us by their connexion with her whom we have lost. There is no running away from a great grief. Happy are they to whom, as in our case, it comes softened and sanctified by the recollection of the highest and most amiable virtues clothed in manners the most feminine and the most ladylike. To them memory will be the best comforter, for such memories are rare. No, dearest Mary, we certainly shall not think of removing on this account. But, besides that our affliction is too real and too recent✶ to dwell upon, I have no right to sadden you with my sadness. I will rather try to escape from it myself and to answer, as best I may, your kind questions on other subjects, particularly those respecting the place in which you take so kind a concern, and such of its inhabitants as have had the good fortune to interest you. Our Village, (many thanks for your polite inquiry) continues to stand pretty much where it did, and has undergone as little change in the last two years as any hamlet of its inches in the county. Just now it is in an awful state of dirt and dinginess, the white nuisance of snow having subsided into the brown nuisance of mud in the roads, whilst the slippery treachery of ice is converted into the less dangerous but more deplorable misery of sloppiness on the foot way. They talk of the snow as having been so many feet deep. I wonder if any one has undertaken to sound the depth of the dirt. Over-pattens and over-boots give but a faint and modified notion of the discomforts of a country walk during the present fine thaw, to say nothing of the heavy clinging dripping annoyance, called draggled tails. We feel these evils the more since they are of a kind from which our light dry gravelly soil generally protects us. And even now we have the comfort of knowing, not so much that we are better off than our neighbours, but that they are worse off than ourselves a comfort, the value of which nobody who has not had cause to feel it can duly appreciate. Their superior calamity, arises not * My beloved and excellent mother died on the morning of New Year's day. |