OR, "SIXTY YEARS SINCE" IN AMERICA. BY THE AUTHOR OF "HOPE LESLIE," "REDWOOD," &c. PUBLISHED BY HARPER & BROTHERS, AND SOLD BY THE PRINCIPAL BOOKSELLERS THROUGHOUT THE UNITED STATES. 1836. Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1835, By HARPER & BROTHERS, In the Clerk's Office of the Southern District of New-York. PREFACE. THE title of these volumes will render their readers liable to a disappointment, from which a few prefatory words may save them. It was chosen simply to mark the period of the story, and that period was selected as one to which an American always gratefully recurs, and as affording a picturesque light for domestic features. The writer has aimed to exhibit the feeling of the times, and to give her younger readers a true, if a slight, impression of the condition of their country at the most-the only * It has been suggested, that the title might be deemed ambitious; that it might indicate an expectation, that "this sixty years since in America" would take place with the "sixty years since" of the great Master. I have not yet forgotten the literature of my childhood-the fate of the ambitious frog. To those who know me, I need not plead "not guilty" to a charge of such insane vanity, and those who do not will believe me when I say, that the only moment when I could wish the benefactor of the universal reading public to be forgotten, is when my humble productions are under perusal. |