INTRODUCTION.
A charming writer, Miss Lucy Larcom, published a few years ago a charming book called "A New England Girlhood." She described in it her own early life, first in Beverly, opposite Salem on the seashore of Massachusetts, with its gardens and beaches and fishing boats; then in Lowell in its infant days, with its river and waterfalls and Arcadian cotton factories.
Mr. Horace Scudder, editor of the Atlantic Monthly, was as much attracted by this pleasant book as the rest of us. It suggested to him the possibility of another book, which should deal with the same years, now becoming mythical, as a New England boy saw life in the little New England city of those days—the only city of New England which took that name before 1826, excepting the city of Ver-
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