in its earnest, humble, and tireless labours for the advancement of
men's spiritual and temporal welfare--if it may do any one of these
things, it shall have more than realized the fond and fervent wish of
the author's heart: it shall have reaped her a golden harvest for the
tiresome task she has just accomplished, and shall have stimulated
anew her every energy, to associate itself more strongly and ardently
than ever, with the cause which struggles for men's freedom from the
fetters of a sordid and tyrant worldliness.







CHAPTER I.

Five-and-thirty years ago, before many of my fair young readers were
inflicted with the burdens of life, there came into this great world,
under the most ordinary and unpretending circumstances, a helpless
little baby girl: a dear, chubby, little thing, who at that moment, if
never afterwards in the long and intricate course of her mortal
career, looked every jot as interesting and as promising of a possible
extraordinary destiny as did the little being who, some years before
that, opened her eyes for the first time upon the elegant surroundings
of a chamber in Kensington Palace; and neither the Princess Louise of
Sachsen-Koburg, nor Edward the Duke of Kent, were any more elated or
gratified over the grand event which came into their lives on the
twenty-fourth of May, in the year of Our Lord 1819, than Amey and
Alfred Hampden were on the eighth of December, 185-, at the advent of