The bulk of the papers had been once lightly sewn to each other--they had come undone, perhaps in Burley's rude hands; but their order was easily apparent. Leonard soon saw that they formed a kind of journal--not, indeed, a regular diary, nor always relating to the things of the day. There were gaps in time--no attempt at successive narrative. Sometimes, instead of prose, a hasty burst of verse, gushing evidently from the heart--sometimes all narrative was left untold, and yet, as it were, epitomized, by a single burning line--a single exclamation--of woe, or joy! Everywhere you saw records of a nature exquisitely susceptible; and where genius appeared, it was so artless, that you did not call it genius, but emotion. At the outset the writer did not speak of herself in the first person. The MS. opened with descriptions and short dialogues, carried on by persons to whose names only initial letters were assigned, all written in a style of simple, innocent freshness, and breathing of purity and happiness, like a dawn of spring. Two young persons, humbly born--a youth and a girl--the last still in childhood, each chiefly self-taught, are wandering on Sabbath evenings among green dewy fields, near the busy town, in which labor awhile is still. Few words pass between them. You see at once, though the writer does not mean to convey it, how far beyond the scope of her male companion flies the heavenward imagination of the girl. It is he who questions--it is she who answers; and soon there steals upon you, as you read, the conviction that the youth loves the girl, and loves in vain. All in this writing, though terse, is so truthful! Leonard, in the youth, already recognizes the rude, imperfect scholar--the village bard--Mark Fairfield. Then, there is a gap in description--but there are short weighty sentences, which show deepening thought, increasing years, in the writer. And though the innocence remains, the happiness begins to be less vivid on the page.