Life of Count Riunford. 221 



there was something so fragmentary and desultory in 

 her school training as to secure to her from it very 

 imperfect results. She had now for two or three years 

 been in correspondence with her father, and her letters 

 had been of such a character as to have raised his expec- 

 tation of her accomplishments higher than were realized 

 when they met. It was said that her teacher, Mrs. 

 Snow, helped her in the composition of these letters. 



The manuscript has a wrapper inscribed, " The his- 

 tory of my life: begun at Paris, in, possibly, 1842, and 

 ended in May, 1845." It is entitled, "Memoirs of a 

 Lady, written by herself." Indulging in the senti- 

 mental vein common in her girlhood among female 

 writers and correspondents, she takes the name of 

 " Serafena," and addresses herself to Mrs. Baldwin, 

 by whose request she was induced to give this account 

 of some particulars of her life. Her experience, she 

 says, had led her through so many strange scenes, with 

 rapid changes, beginning when she was four years old, 

 that she might easily refer it to supernatural agency. 

 The absence of her father, and her mother's illness, led 

 to her being sent away from Concord, at the age just 

 mentioned, to the care of an aunt. She was put in 

 charge of a female slave, to whom she was much at- 

 tached, who left her at her relative's, the indulgent 

 mother of " many young children badly brought up" 

 Her little companions engaged her in rude and danger- 

 ous plays ; in one of which, having been severely 

 burned, she was taken back to her mother. On ac- 

 count of that mother's long invalidism the child was 

 left very much to herself, and her early education was 

 defective, the effects of which she felt through, life. 

 She gives an account of her grandfather Walker, and of 



