Herewith you will receive what I have called No. 1, which was never intended to have met your eye as it is; but, as contrary to my expectation, my No. 2 was so cordially received by you, I had intended to send you only an abridgment of it, because it contains many things which must be very uninteresting and almost unintelligible to you on account of your being unacquainted with the (then) manners and customs of this country, besides requiring to remember that my father and mother were born and educated some hundred and twenty years back. But I must send it as it is, or destroy it immediately, for I feel I shall _now_ never get well enough for making any alteration further than running my eye over it and adding a note here and there where necessary. But I wish not to leave my memorandums any longer to the chance of falling into the hands of officious would-be learned ignorance, to furnish a paragraph in some newspaper or journal. I will, however, save you and myself the trouble of further apologising for sending you these papers, but just explain my reason for taking a copy of them with me. When I took my leave of the contents of your father’s library, it was parting from _all_ with which my heart and soul had been engaged for the best part of my life, and I could not withstand the temptation of carrying away with me an index for assisting my memory when in my reveries I should imagine myself to be on the spot where I took leave of all that had been most dear to me. What is contained in No. 1 I had intended for an everlasting pleasing melancholy subject for conversation with my brother Dietrich, if I should go back again to the place where I first drew my breath, and where the first twenty-two years of my life (from my eighth year on) had been sacrificed to the service of my family under the utmost self-privation without the least prospect or hope of future reward. Or in case I had died in England, it was to have been sent to D., for I wished him to get a more correct idea of our father than what I thought he had formed of that excellent being. [Sidenote: 1827. _Letter to her Nephew._] He never recollected the eight years’ care and attention he had received from his father, but for ever murmured at having received too scanty an education, though he had the same schooling we all of us had had before him.