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 rarify 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 appre-
