The Minister's Wooing

Transcriber's Note: This cover has been created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.
LONDON: PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, STAMFORD STREET.
The author has endeavoured in this story to paint a style of life and manners which existed in New England in the earlier days of her national existence.
Some of the principal characters are historic: the leading events of the story are founded on actual facts, although the author has taken the liberty to arrange and vary them for the purposes of the story.
The author has executed the work with a reverential tenderness for those great and religious minds who laid in New England the foundations of many generations, and for those institutions and habits of life from which, as from a fruitful germ, sprang all the present prosperity of America.
Such as it is, it is commended to the kindly thoughts of that British fireside from which the fathers and mothers of America first went out to give to English ideas and institutions a new growth in a new world.
H. B. STOWE.
18 Montague Street, Russell Square, August 25, 1859.

Mrs. Katy Scudder had invited Mrs. Brown, and Mrs. Jones, and Deacon Twitchel’s wife to take tea with her on the afternoon of June second, A. D. 17—.
When one has a story to tell, one is always puzzled which end of it to begin at. You have a whole corps of people to introduce that you know and your reader doesn’t; and one thing so presupposes another, that, whichever way you turn your patchwork, the figures still seem ill-arranged. The small item that I have given will do as well as any other to begin with, as it certainly will lead you to ask, ‘Pray, who was Mrs. Katy Scudder?’—and this will start me systematically on my story.
You must understand that in the then small seaport-town of Newport, at that time unconscious of its present fashion and fame, there lived nobody in those days who did not know ‘the Widow Scudder.’