Page ix of the Preface to the [1853] Clarke, Beeton, & Co. Reprint, Version 1

PREFACE.
ix

rushing out, wild with fury, under the heartless and bitter taunts of the cold-hearted, cruel Miss Fortune—and the same Ellen, as John sees her after a lapse of years, in her uncle's house at Edinburgh ! I give the description word for word:-"Ellen’s eyes were bent on the floor, the expression of her face touched and pleased him greatly. It was precisely what he wished to see. Without having the least shadow of sorrow upon it, there was, in all its lines, that singular mixture of gravity and sweetness that is never seen but where religion and discipline have done their work well: the writing of the wisdom that looks soberly, and the love that looks kindly on all things."

The once wilful, wayward child has grown into the calm, intelligent, self-possessed woman, modest and feminine, but still as warm-hearted and ingenuous as in her childhood ; the identity of her natural character is indeed admirably kept up. She is changed, but it has been by tho Spirit of God; and she has grown into what she is, because she has grown in grace. Her mother's prayers have been answered. Her mother's parting words,“ God bless my darling child, and make her his own, and bring her to that home where parting cannot be;”—these last touching works have been heard. God has blessed the once desolate and unprotected child, and his goodness and mercy have followed her. His blessing has been with her, He has made her his own child, and the is fitted to enter that home to which her fond and anxious mother has been long taken, whenever it may please her Heavenly Father to call her from his little flock below to his heavenly fold. above. But till then, a sphere of usefulness and happiness has been opened to her on* earth. The charming story closes as it should do. Ellen's truth of character and strength of affection cannot be dimmed or shaken by tho high worldly position in which she is placed for a time, and where every inducement is offered to detain her—she goes back to America to spend the remainder of her life with the friends and guardians she best loved; and to be to them still more than she bad been to her Scottish relations, " the light of the eyes."

I cannot help regretting that a book so well, so charmingly written, by one who has not a shadow of vulgarity of mind, should yet be marred in place by vulgarisms of style; and that here and there a sentence or