much oftener to stay at home, and indulge myself in my solitude, than to join in their rambling visits.  I was always fond of being alone, yet always in a manner afraid.  There was a book-closet which led into my mother’s dressing-room.  Here I was eternally fond of being shut up by myself, to take down whatever volumes I pleased, and pore upon them, no matter whether they were fit for my years or no, or whether I understood them.  Here, when the weather would not permit my going into the dark walk, my walk, as it was called, in the garden; here when my parents have been from home, I have stayed for hours together, till the loneliness which pleased me so at first, has at length become quite frightful, and I have rushed out of the closet into the inhabited parts of the house, and sought refuge in the lap of some one of the female servants, or of my aunt, who would say, seeing me look pale, that Hannah [Maria] had been frightening herself with some of those nasty books:  so she used to call my favourite volumes, which I would not have parted with, no not with one of the least of them, if I had had the choice to be made a fine princess and to govern the world.  But my aunt was no reader.  She used to excuse herself, and say, that reading hurt her eyes.  I have been naughty enough to think that this was only an excuse, for I found that my aunt’s weak eyes did not prevent her from poring ten hours a day upon her prayer-book, or her favourite Thomas a Kempis.  But this was always her excuse for not reading any of the books I recommended.  My aunt was my father’s sister.  She had never been married.  My father was a good deal older than my mother, and my aunt was ten years older than my father.  As I was often left at home with her, and as my serious disposition so well agreed with hers, an intimacy grew up between the old lady and me, and she would often say, that she only loved one person in the world, and that was me.  Not that she and my parents were on very bad terms; but the old lady did not feel herself respected enough.  The attention and fondness which she shewed to me, conscious as I was that I was almost the only being she felt any thing like fondness to, made me love her, as it was natural; indeed I am ashamed to say that I fear I almost loved her better than both my parents put together.  But there was an oddness, a silence about my aunt, which was never interrupted but by her occasional expressions of love to me, that made me stand in fear of her.  An odd look from under her spectacles would sometimes scare me away, when I had been peering up in her face to make her kiss me.  Then she had a way of muttering to herself, which, though it was good words and religious words that she was mumbling, somehow I did not like.  My weak spirits, and the fears I was subject to, always made me afraid of any personal singularity or oddness in any one.  I am ashamed, ladies, to lay open so many particulars of our family; but, indeed it is necessary to the understanding of what I am going to