In these little books, I have complied with a request repeatedly expressed to me, to write stories avowedly for the purpose of “pointing a moral.”

Any one who will take the trouble to look over the “Nightcap,” “Mitten,” or “Sock” books, will see that I have tried to remember this duty; although I own to loving children so tenderly, as to administer my pills, sugar-coated.

Even now, I cannot resist employing the whimsical mask of an odd title; but my dear friends, try my pop-guns, and if then you are convinced that I have sincerely endeavored to “shoot folly as it flies,” pray believe also, that Aunt Fanny well knows that stories called “Pop-Guns,” will make quicker and more enduring marks in the loving hearts of her darlings, the children, than twenty folios, written by a thousand times greater authors, with the dry title of “Moral Lessons for the Young.”

New York, May, 1864.

POP-GUNS.