a series of years, with all the pulses of love and hatred and sorrow so transparently unveiled, that the throbs may be almost counted, why should I or they feel embarrassed in responding to this request? Is there not some inconsistency in this shyness about autobiography?
I find myself, then, at nearly sixty years of age, somewhat of a patriarch in the line of American female authors—a kind of Past Master in the order.
The only interesting point connected with my birth, which took place October 8th, 1794, in Boston, Mass., is that I first saw the light where the Mariners’ Church now stands, in the North Square. My father, Samuel Howard, was a shipwright, and to my fancy it seems fitting, that seamen should assemble on the former homestead of one who spent his manhood in planning and perfecting the noble fabrics which bear them over the waves. All the record I have of him is, that on every State thanksgiving day he spread a liberal table for the poor, and for this I honour his memory.
My mother descended from the family of the Brecks, a branch of which is located in Philadelphia as well as in Boston, and which, by those who love to look into such matters, is traced, as far as I have heard, to 1703 in America.
The families of 1794 in the North Square, have changed their abode. Our pastor, the good Dr. Lathrop, minister of the “Old North,” then resided at the head of the Square—the Mays, Reveres, and others, being his neighbours.
It appears to me, that I remember my baptism on a cold November morning, in the aisle of the old North, and how my minister bent over me with one of the last bush-wigs of that century, and touched his finger to my befrilled little forehead: but being only five weeks old, and not a very precocious babe, I suppose I must have learned it from oral tradition.
I presume, also, I am under the same hallucination, when I see myself, at two years of age, sitting on a little elevated triangular seat, in the corner of the pew, with red morocco shoes, clasped with silver buckles, turning the movable balusters, which modern architects have so unkindly taken away from children in churches.
