WORTHY AND GENTLE READER,

I DEDICATE this little book to thee with many fears and misgivings of heart. Being a stranger to thee, and having never administered to thy wants nor to thy pleasures, I can ask nothing at thy hands saving the common courtesies of life. Perchance, too, what I have written will be little to thy taste; for it is little in accordance with the stirring spirit of the present age. If so, I crave thy forbearance for having thought that even the busiest mind might not be a stranger to those moments of repose when the clock of time clicks drowsily behind the door, and trifles become the amusement of the wise and great.

Besides, what perils await the adventurous author who launches forth into the uncertain current of public favor in so frail a bark as this! The very rocking of the tide may overset him; or peradventure some freebooting critic, prowling about the great ocean of letters, may descry his strange colors, hail him through a gray goose-quill, and perhaps sink

HURDIS.

him without more ado. Indeed, the success of an unknown author is as uncertain as the wind. "When a book is first to appear in the world," says a celebrated French writer, "one knows not whom to consult to learn its destiny. The stars preside not over its nativity. Their influences have no operation on it; and the most confident astrologers dare not foretell the diverse risks of fortune it must run."

It is from such considerations, worthy reader, that I would fain bespeak thy friendly offices, at the outset. But in asking these, I would not forestall thy good opinion too far, lest in the sequel I should disappoint thy kind wishes. I ask only a welcome and God-speed; hoping, that, when thou hast read these pages, thou wilt say to me, in the words of Nick Bottom, the weaver, "I shall desire you of more acquaintance, good Master Cobweb." Very sincerely thine,

BRUNSWICK, Maine, 1833.

THE AUTHOR.

"LYSTENYTH, ye godely gentylmen, and all that ben hereyn !" I am a pilgrim benighted on my way, and crave a shelter till the storm is over, and a seat by the fireside in this honorable company. As a stranger I claim this courtesy at your hands; and will repay your hospitable welcome with tales of the countries I have passed through in my pilgrimage.

This is a custom of the olden time. In the days of chivalry and romance, every baron bold, perched aloof in his feudal castle, welcomed the stranger to his halls, and listened with delight to the pilgrim's tale and the song of the troubadour. Both pilgrim and troubadour had their tales of wonder from a distant land, embellished with the magic of Oriental exaggeration. Their salutation was,

"Lordyng lystnith to my tale,

That is meryer than the nightingale."

The soft luxuriance of the Eastern clime bloomed in the song of the bard; and the wild and romantic tales of regions so far off as to be regarded as almost a fairy land were well suited to the childish credulity of an age when what is now called the Old World was in its childhood. Those times have passed away. The world has grown wiser and less credulous; and the tales which then delighted delight no longer. But man has not changed his nature. He still retains the same curiosity, the same love of novelty, the same fondness for romance and tales by the chimney-corner, and the same desire of wearing out the rainy day and the long winter evening with the illusions of fancy and the fairy sketches of the poet's imagination. It is as true now as ever, that

"Off talys, and tryfulles, many man tellys; Sume byn trew, and sume byn ellis;

A man may dryfe forthe the day that long tyme dwellis

THE FOUR PS.

Wyth harpyng, and pipyng, and other mery spellis,
Wyth gle, and wyth game."

The Pays d'Outre-Mer, or the Land beyond the Sea, is a name by which the pilgrims and crusaders of old usually designated the Holy Land. I, too, in a certain sense, have been a pilgrim of Outre-Mer; for to my youthful imagination the Old World was a kind of Holy Land, lying afar off beyond the blue horizon of the ocean; and when its shores first rose upon my sight, looming through the hazy atmosphere of the sea, my heart swelled with the deep emotions of the pilgrim, when he sees afar the spire which rises above the shrine of his devotion.

In this my pilgrimage, "I have passed many lands and countries, and searched many full strange places." I have traversed France from Normandy to Navarre; smoked my pipe in a Flemish inn; floated through Holland in a Trekschuit; trimmed my midnight lamp in a German university; wandered and mused amid the classic scenes of Italy; and listened to the gay guitar and merry castanet on the borders of the blue Guadalquivir. The recollection of many of the scenes I have passed through is still fresh in my mind; while the memory of others is fast fading away, or is blotted out forever. But now I will stay the too busy hand of time, and call back the shadowy past. Perchance the old and the wise may accuse me of frivolity; but I see in this fair company the bright eye and listening ear of youth, an age less rigid in its censure and more willing to be pleased. "To gentlewomen and their loves is consecrated all the wooing language, allusions to love - passions, and sweet embracements feigned by the Muse 'mongst hills and rivers; whatsoever tastes of description, battel, story, abstruse antiquity, and law of the kingdome,