If these pages should escape the rats and the rage for curl papers, and fall into the hands of any one willing to read them through, I hope the reader will pardon my ignorance, and kindly remember that I write without method, and am totally uninstructed in all the rules prescribed for the keeping of a journal. I am but just sixteen, and the great little matters now occupying so much of my attention, may in the future seem futile and unworthy of having excited so much interest. What will a sensible, sober-minded reader think of all the strange fancies passing through my brain, and the wild dreams of my imagination? But let us now return to the genealogy of my family. [Here follows the chronological enumeration of the Krasinski family, which we omit, as its interest is purely local, and can hence be neither amusing nor instructive to readers not of Polish origin. The Diary thus continues:] Stanislaus Krasinski, starost of Nowemiasto, of Prasnysz, and of Uyscie, is my father; and Angelica Humiecka, daughter of the celebrated palatine of Podolia, my mother: but this branch of the Krasinskis will be extinct at their death, for to my great sorrow I have no brother. We are four, and all girls, Barbara, myself, Sophia, and Mary. The members of our little court often tell me I am the prettiest, but that I do not believe. We have received the education befitting our position as young and noble ladies, in short, as starostines. We are all well grown, and have been taught to hold ourselves as straight as reeds; we are in excellent health, fair, fresh, and rosy. We have a governess, who is charged with the care of us; we call her madame; and when she has laced us, our waists might be spanned, as the saying is, between one's four fingers. Madame has taught us to courtesy easily and gracefully, and to behave ourselves properly in the saloon; we seat ourselves on the edge of our chairs, with our eyes fixed upon the ground, and our arms modestly crossed. Every one believes that we are quite ignorant, and cannot count beyond three; they fancy, too, that we do not know how to walk, and are always as quiet as mummies. What would they say could they see us running and jumping in the fine summer mornings? Ah! then we make up for all this tedious restraint; we are so joyful when our parents permit us to walk in the woods: then we leave our frizzed hair, stays, and our high-heeled shoes all behind us, and run about in our morning dresses like crazy girls; we climb the mountains, and poor madame, who thinks it her duty to follow us, soon loses her breath, halts with weary limbs, and can neither run after us, nor call us back. My two younger sisters and myself have never been far from our own castle. Our longest journeys have been a visit to our aunt, the palatiness Malachowska, who lives at Konskie, and to the village of Piotrkowice, which belongs to us.