The present work describes more than forty years of life in America, and it is therefore the American reader who will be chiefly interested in it. I should perhaps have mentioned what I reserved for special comment in the future: that during more than ten years' residence in Europe I had _one thing steadily in view all the time_, at which I worked hard, which was to qualify myself to return to America and there introduce to the public schools of Philadelphia the Industrial or Minor Arts as a branch of education, in which I eventually succeeded, devoting to the work there four years, applying myself so assiduously as to neglect both society and amusements, and not obtaining, nor seeking for, pay or profit thereby in any way, directly or indirectly. And if I have, as I have read, since then "expatriated" myself, my whole absence has not been much longer than was that of Washington Irving, and I trust to be able to prove that I have "left my country for my country's good"--albeit in a somewhat better sense than that which was implied by the poet. And I may here incidentally mention, with all due modesty, that since the foregoing paragraph came to me "in revise," I received from Count Angelo di Grubernatis a letter, beginning with the remark that, in consequence of my _gentile ed insistence premura_, or "amiable persistence, begun four-years ago," he has at length carried out my idea and suggestion of establishing a great Italian Folklore Society, of which I am to rank as among the first twelve members. This is the fourth institution of the kind which I have been first, or among the first, to found in Europe, and it has in every case been noted, not without surprise, that I was an American. Such associations, being wide-reaching and cosmopolitan, may be indeed considered by every man of culture as patriotic, and I hope at some future day that I shall still further prove that, as regards my native country, I have only changed my sky but not my heart, and laboured for American interests as earnestly as ever. CHARLES GODFREY LELAND. BAGNI DI LUCCA, ITALY, _August 20_, _1893_. I. EARLY LIFE. 1824-1837. My birthplace--Count Bruno and Dufief--Family items--General Lafayette--The Dutch witch-nurse--Early friends and associations--Philadelphia sixty years ago--Early reading--Genealogy--First schools--Summers in New England--English influences--The Revolutionary grandfather--Centenarians--The last survivor of the Boston Tea-party and the last signer of the Declaration--Indians--Memories of relations--A Quaker school--My ups and downs in classes--Arithmetic--My first ride in a railway car--My marvellous invention--Mr. Alcott's school--A Transcendental teacher--Rev. W. H. Furness--Miss Eliza Leslie--The boarding-school near Boston--Books--A terrible winter--My first poem--I return to Philadelphia.