Pencil Sketches; or, Outlines of Character and Manners

So runs the world away. —Shakspeare.
PHILADELPHIA: A. HART, LATE CAREY & HART, 126 CHESTNUT STREET. 1852.
Entered, according to the Act of Congress, in the year 1852, by A. HART, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States, in and for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.
E. B. M EARS, STEREOTYPER. T. K. & P. G. COLLINS, PRINTERS.
The work from which the following is a selection, has been long out of print; and many inquiries have been made concerning it. Since its first appearance, a new generation of young people has grown up; and they may, perhaps, find amusement and improvement in pictures of domestic life, that were recognised as such by their mothers.
The present volume will probably be succeeded by another, containing the remainder of the original Pencil Sketches, with additional stories.
Eliza Leslie.
United States Hotel, Philadelphia, March 25th, 1852.
The course of parties never does run smooth. —Shakspeare.
Bromley Cheston, an officer in the United States navy, had just returned from a three years' cruise in the Mediterranean. His ship came into New York; and after he had spent a week with a sister that was married in Boston, he could not resist his inclination to pay a visit to his maternal aunt, who had resided since her widowhood at one of the small towns on the banks of the Delaware.
The husband of Mrs. Marsden had not lived long enough to make his fortune, and it was his last injunction that she should retire with her daughter to the country, or at least to a country town. He feared that if she remained in Philadelphia she would have too many temptations to exercise her taste for unnecessary expense: and that, in consequence, the very moderate income, which was all he was able to leave her, would soon be found insufficient to supply her with comforts.
We will not venture to say that duty to his aunt Marsden was the young lieutenant's only incentive to this visit: as she had a beautiful daughter about eighteen, for whom, since her earliest childhood, Bromley Cheston had felt something a little more vivid than the usual degree of regard that boys think sufficient for their cousins. His family had formerly lived in Philadelphia, and till he went into the navy Bromley and Albina were in habits of daily intercourse. Afterwards, on returning from sea, he always, as soon as he set his foot on American ground, began to devise means of seeing his pretty cousin, however short the time and however great the distance. And it was in meditation on Albina's beauty and sprightliness that he had often while sailing on the midnight deep, beguiled the long hours of the watch, and thus rendered more tolerable that dreariest part of a seaman's duty.