PREFACE. IN venturing to place before the public these "fragments" of a journal addressed to a friend, I cannot but feel considerable misgiving as to the reception such a work is likely to meet with, particularly at this time, when the country to which it partly refers is the subject of so much difference of opinion, and so much animosity of feeling. This little book, the mere result of much thoughtful idleness and many an idle thought, has grown up insensibly out of an accidental promise. It never was intended to go before the world in its present crude and desultory form; and I am too sensible of its many deficiencies, not to feel that some explanation is due to that public, which has hitherto regarded my attempts in literature with so much forbearance and kindness. While in Canada I was thrown into scenes and regions hitherto undescribed by any traveller, (for the northern shores of Lake Huron are almost new ground,) and into relations with the Indian tribes, such as few European women of refined and civilized habits have ever risked, and none have recorded. My intention was to have given the result of what I had seen, and the reflections and comparisons excited by so much novel experience, in quite a different form-and one less obtrusive; but owing to the intervention of various circumstances, and occupation of graver import, I found myself reduced to the alternative of either publishing the book as it now stands, or of suppressing it altogether. Neither the time nor the attention necessary to remodel the whole were within my own power. In preparing these notes for the press, much has been omitted of a personal nature, but far too much of such irrelevant matter still remains; far too much which may expose me to misapprehension, if not even to severe criticism; but now, as heretofore, I throw myself upon "the merciful construction of good women," wishing it to be understood that this little book, such as it is, is more particularly addressed to my own sex. I would fain have extracted, altogether, the impertinent leaven of egotism which necessarily mixed itself up with the journal form of writing; but in making the attempt, the whole work lost its original character-lost its air of reality, lost even its essential truth, and whatever it might possess of the grace of ease and pic |