The Palfreys.

Boston: Abel Tompkins, 1838 First edition. This didactic novella for young women follows two cousins, Ella and Cornelia, who are offered palfrey horses by their fathers as gifts. Ella declines the gift, but Cornelia accepts it. When Cornelia is thrown from her horse, she must have her leg amputated, leading to her dedication to reading the Bible rather than the "works of fancy and fiction" that she had previously enjoyed (p. 37). At the end of the story, Ella's humility and generosity nevertheless lead her to receive the palfrey she had originally turned down, and Cornelia remarks, "'What a moral…may be learned from the story of the two palfreys! What a righteous judgement has been bestowed, both upon your generosity and my selfishness" (p. 69). Publisher's brown cloth tited in gilt. Twelvemo. . Some rubbing and chipping to cloth. Some foxing. Open tear to edge of p. 43, not affecting legibility. One leaf loose in sixth gathering, laid in at original position. A good copy of an uncommon book. Sarah Carter Edgarton Mayo (1819 – 1848) was an editor, poet, and fiction writer. She grew up in an affluent Massachusetts family and received a quality education at a local school, where her primary interests were geography, botany, and astronomy; she also studied French, German, history, and classical philosophy. Despite her short lifespan, Mayo was fairly prolific, and published two novellas for girls, The Palfreys and Ellen Clifford; or, The Genius of Reform, before she turned twenty. Mayo also edited the Universalist periodicals Ladies Repository (1839 – 1842) and The Rose of Sharon (1840 – 1848), both of which published some of her own writings. She died just a year after marrying her husband, Amory Dwight Mayo, the pastor of the Independent Christian Society in Gloucester, Massachusetts.