Poor Miss Finch

DEANERY,

ation of this book, in remembrance of an

ed to produce and sustain interest in this central personage of my story, it does not become me to speak. It is for my readers to say if "Lucilla" has found her way to their sympathies. In this character, and more especially again in the characters of "Nugent Dubourg" and "Madame Pratolungo," I have tried to present human nature in its inherent inconsistencies and self-contradictions - in its intricate mixture of good and evil, of great and small - as I see it in the world about me. But the faculty of observing character is so rare, the curiously mistaken tendency to look for logical consistency in human motives and human actions is so general, that I may possibly find the execut

e conditions of human happiness are independent of bodily affliction, and that it is even possible for bodily affliction itself to take its place among the ingredients of happ

.

h, 1872.