[figure description] Preface iii.[end figure description]

Reader, you will like this volume. There are
several reasons why you will like it—why it cannot
but be to you a pleasant companion. In the first
place, it has abundant variety; and in the next place,
the matters that form that variety are the very best of their kind, and from several of the most popular writers
known in the United States. Let us glance a moment at the contents of the book.

If `The First Locomotive' had not possessed a
rare order of merit, Mr. Washington Irving would
never have written the admirable continuation of it,
which follows it in the present volume.

The `Blank Book of a Country Schoolmaster,
' by Henry W. Longfellow, has never been
included in any of his published volumes. It will
commend itself to every reader, and needs no comment
from the Editor.

[figure description] Preface iv.[end figure description]

The story of `Ralph Ringwood,' by Washington
Irving, is what it purports to be, an authentic
narrative. Ralph Ringwood, though a fictitious
name, is a real personage. It can do no harm to mention
now, since the fact has transpired in some of the
public journals, that Governor Duval of Florida sat
for the faithful picture. Mr. Irving informed the
Editor, that meeting the narrator at the house of a
mutual friend in New-York, he become so interested
in his personal adventures, related in a style peculiarly
his own, that he could not resist the inclination to accompany
him to a Southern city, on his journey home,
and every day after dinner record portions of his narrative,
while yet fresh from his lips. `I have given
some anecdotes of his early and eccentric career,'
says Mr. Irving, in a note to the Editor, `in as nearly
as I can recollect the very words in which he related
them. They certainly afforded strong temptations to
the embellishments of fiction; but I thought them so
strikingly characteristic of the individual, and of the
seenes and society into which his peculiar humors
carried him, that I preferred giving them in their original
simplicity.' The reader will admit that nothing
could be more attractive than the plain and truthful
style of the narrative.

The `Story of the Skeleton in Armor,' by
Longfellow, is one of the most powerful and spirited
performances of that popular writer's pen. It

[figure description] Preface v.[end figure description]

forms a succession of pictures, which are so vividly
presented to the mind, that `it requires but a little
stretch of the imagination to transfer them, in fancy,
to actual canvass.'

`Peter Cram at Tinnecum' is from the pen of
Mr. Frederick W. Shelton, of Long-Island, a most
humorous and felicitous writer, of whom it has been
well said, that `no daguerreotype could more accurately
and vividly present nature, animate and inanimate,
human and animal, than he.' The reader will
have an opportunity to test the justice of this praise.

Geoffrey Crayon's Communipaw Legend, the
`Guests from Gibbet-Island,' is as wild and
`thrilling' (to adopt a hackneyed word) as any kindred
effort of that eminent writer's pen. The story will
compare favorably with any one of a similar character
in any of Mr. Irving's published works.

The name of the author of `Childhood' is unknown
to the Editor. The Essay was sent to him
anonymously; but he would be doing injustice to the
writer, not to declare it as his belief, that no other portion
of the contents of the present volume better deserves,
or is more likely to secure, the favorable regard
of the reader.

`The Iron Foot-Step' was committed to paper
by its author, at the suggestion of Geoffrey Crayon,
who had heard it with admiration from the writer's
lips. It is a strange and mysterious narrative,

[figure description] Preface vi.[end figure description]

and yet is in all its particulars strictly true. Its manner
could not be improved.

The next is the narrative of `Mountjoy, or some
Passages out of the Life of a Castle-Builder.'
It is sufficient to say of this faultless performance,
that it is by the author of the `Sketch-Book,'
and was written and prepared for publication in that
work; but owing to circumstances, operative at the
time, it was laid aside, and never opened to the light
of day until more than twenty-years afterward. It
is therefore a truthful record of young, untutored, unhackneyed
fancies, feelings and affections.

`The Married Man's Eye' will arrest and sustain
the attention of nine Wives in every ten, who
have been subjected—and what wife has not?—to
the silent but potent influence, so well described by
the author; herself a wife, who depicts, we doubt not,
`what she has seen, and part of which she was.'

For the plan of the series, of which the present volume
is the first, the reader is referred to the second
and fourth pages of the cover of the present volume.

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