| Caroline Cowles Richards | Frontispiece |
| FACING PAGE | |
| Grandfather Beals | [8] |
| Grandmother Beals | [8] |
| Mr. Noah T. Clarke | [30] |
| Miss Upham | [30] |
| First Congregational Church | [38] |
| Rev. Oliver E. Daggett, D.D. | [54] |
| Judge Henry W. Taylor | [54] |
| Miss Zilpha Clark | [54] |
| “Frankie Richardson” | [54] |
| Horace Finley | [54] |
| Tom Eddy and Eugene Stone | [66] |
| “Uncle David Dudley Field” | [66] |
| Grandmother’s Rocking Chair | [88] |
| The Grandfather Clock | [88] |
| Hon. Francis Granger | [100] |
| Mr. Gideon Granger | [100] |
| The Old Canandaicua Academy | [124] |
| The Ontario Female Seminary | [132] |
| “Old Friend Burling” | [138] |
| Madame Anna Bishop | [138] |
| “Abbie Clark and I Had Our Ambrotypes Taken To-day” | [152] |
| “Mr. Noah T. Clarke’s Brother and I” | [152] |
After this book was in type, on March 29, 1913, the author, Mrs. Caroline Richards Clarke, died at Naples, New York.
The Diary of Caroline Cowles Richards fell into my hands, so to speak, out of space. I had no previous acquaintance with the author, and I sat down to read the book one evening in no especial mood of anticipation. From the first page to the last my attention was riveted. To call it fascinating barely expresses the quality of the charm. Caroline Richards and her sister Anna, having early lost their mother, were sent to the home of her parents in Canandaigua, New York, where they were brought up in the simplicity and sweetness of a refined household, amid Puritan traditions. The children were allowed to grow as plants do, absorbing vitality from the atmosphere around them. Whatever there was of gracious formality in the manners of aristocratic people of the period, came to them as their birthright, while the spirit of the truest democracy pervaded their home. Of this Diary it is not too much to say that it is a revelation of childhood in ideal conditions.
The Diary begins in 1852, and is continued until 1872. Those of us who lived in the latter half of the nineteenth century recall the swift transitions, the rapid march of science and various changes in social customs, and as we meet allusions to these in the leaves of the girl’s Diary we live our past over again with peculiar pleasure.
Far more has been told us concerning the South during the Civil War than concerning the North. Fiction has found the North a less romantic field, and the South has been chosen as the background of many a stirring novel, while only here and there has an author been found who has known the deep-hearted loyalty of the Northern States and woven the story into narrative form. The girl who grew up in Canandaigua was intensely patriotic, and from day to day vividly chronicled what she saw, felt, and heard. Her Diary is a faithful record of impressions of that stormy time in which the nation underwent a baptism of fire. The realism of her paragraphs is unsurpassed.
Beyond the personal claim of the Diary and the certainty to give pleasure to a host of readers, the author appeals to Americans in general because of her family and her friends. Her father and grandfather were Presbyterian ministers. Her Grandfather Richards was for twenty years President of Auburn Theological Seminary. Her brother, John Morgan Richards of London, has recently given to the world the Life and Letters of his gifted and lamented daughter, Pearl Mary-Terèse Craigie, known best as John Oliver Hobbes. The famous Field brothers and their father, Rev. David Dudley Field, and their nephew, Justice David J. Brewer, of the United States Supreme Court, were her kinsmen. Miss Hannah Upham, a distinguished teacher mentioned in the Diary, belongs to the group of American women to whom we owe the initiative of what we now choose to call the higher education of the sex. She, in common with Mary Lyon, Emma Willard, and Eliza Bayliss Wheaton, gave a forward impulse to the liberal education of women, and our privilege is to keep their memory green. They are to be remembered by what they have done and by the tender reminiscences found here and there like pressed flowers in a herbarium, in such pages as these.