ENTERED, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1867, by

D. APPLETON & CO.,

In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the Southern District of New York.

A WORD FROM THE AUTHOR TO

THE READER.

You may not be indulgent, dear reader; and in truth, one who thrusts himself before the public, without being compelled to do so, has no right to exact indulgence.

It is the reader's province to be a judge; good or bad, a judge he is, and no one can depose him from his office. Indulgence is a favor, and to sue for it a politeness, which no author will omit who has read Lord Chesterfield.

And first, we desire to clear ourselves of certain charges which will be brought against

us.

Balzac says, "We shall all die misunderstood. This is the death of women and authors." How

true this is!

Those who consider the celebrated Heloise as the true type of a woman crossed in love, will perhaps look upon our Elia as insipid and false to nature, under similar circumstances; but we would remind them that the pure love of a girl, brought up in a convent and attached to it, is, in every respect, the opposite of that of the self-willed woman, who regards the convent in which she is immersed as a hateful prison that separates her from the man whom she elevates by her affection.

It may be that a woman who does not love to madness is not the ideal of the masses, but she is, we feel sure, of all those-less romantic but more poetical—who sympathize with truth and simplicity rather than with fiction and affectation.

This want of passion, when it proceeds from purity of soul, the force of reason, the influence