Produced by Suzanne Shell, Louise Pryor and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net [Transcriber's note: The spellings in this book are inconsistent in the original, and have not been corrected except in the index as explicitly noted below.] [Illustration: Fanny Kemble] RECORDS OF A GIRLHOOD BY FRANCES ANN KEMBLE _SECOND EDITION._ [Illustration] NEW YORK HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 1880. COPYRIGHT, 1879, BY HENRY HOLT & CO. JOHN A. GRAY, Agent, TYPE-SETTING MACHINERY, 16 & 18 JACOB STREET, NEW YORK. PREFATORY NOTE. Considerable portions of this work originally appeared in the _Atlantic Monthly_, but there is added to these a large amount of new matter not hitherto published, and the whole work has been thoroughly revised. RECORDS OF A GIRLHOOD. CHAPTER I. A few years ago I received from a friend to whom they had been addressed a collection of my own letters, written during a period of forty years, and amounting to thousands--a history of my life. The passion for universal history (_i.e._ any and every body's story) nowadays seems to render any thing in the shape of personal recollections good enough to be printed and read; and as the public appetite for gossip appears to be insatiable, and is not unlikely some time or other to be gratified at my expense, I have thought that my own gossip about myself may be as acceptable to it as gossip about me written by another. I have come to the garrulous time of life--to the remembering days, which only by a little precede the forgetting ones. I have much leisure, and feel sure that it will amuse me to write my own reminiscences; perhaps reading them may amuse others who have no more to do than I have. To the idle, then, I offer these lightest of leaves gathered in the idle end of autumn days, which have succeeded years of labor often severe and sad enough, though its ostensible purpose was only that of affording recreation to the public. * * * * *