BOSTON:
PUBLISHED AND FOR SALE BY ALL THE
PERIODICAL DEALERS.
1845
SECOND EDITION,—REVISED.
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1845, by Silas Estabrook, in the
Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts.
PREFACE.
“I COME NOT TO DESTROY.”—Our Savior.
For the principal facts embodied in the following narrative, the Author is indebted to the ill-fated female who is the subject of them. It was his lot to be the bearer of a letter to her, in the spring of 1845, from a companion of her childhood. Aware of her forlorn condition, and of many acts of atrocity which characterized the latter part of her erring life, he made it his purpose to learn the history of her career, which was frankly communicated by her own lips.
The Author tenders his acknowledgments to the person who generously placed in his hands the original letters which reveal the passion flame of her FIRST LOVE with a medical student of Brunswick, in Maine. The contents of these letters establish the fact that this student became her seducer, and that he afterwards heartlessly abandoned her to remorse, and the jeers of a scoffing world. She was but fifteen years of age at the time of writing the letters, and they evince not only much purity and depth of feeling, but likewise a mind endowed with rare gifts.
It is not a pleasing duty to record the vicissitudes of the unfortunate. To draw aside the veil which conceals the cherished treasures, the blighted hopes, and the undying remorse of an erring soul, traced through long seasons of unredeeming, rayless wo, is to perform a labor for the benefit of the living. In this the author has striven to be faithful, impartial, and truthful.
Life, as a spectacle, is but dimly seen and feebly comprehended; as a mystery, it is unfathomable indeed. Blown, as it were, a bubble—dark as the transgressions by which it is checkered, it bursts in an hour we know not, as the globe of glass is dashed into fragments. We look on the wreck, and wonder why it had a being, to gather in its train a multitudinous throng of evils, and make its exit in ignominy and shame. The author, it will be seen, is a fatalist—a believer in an unalterable destiny. It is unnecessary here to enter into a defence of that belief—he hopes that all people have an opinion of their own upon this, as on other subjects.
Ye rich and great! ye poor and destitute—children of sin and wanderers from virtue—ye world wronged! cast your eyes over the panorama spread out to your view in the following pages, and, from the sounding depths of crime, learn lessons of wisdom.