Nobody could be more astonished than I, to find myself famous. I never dreamed of it, when I sat in a small room, at the top of the house where I lodged, scribbling over a sheet of coarse foolscap with noms de plume, out of which I was to choose one for my first article—which article I never thought of preserving, any more than the succeeding ones, supposing my meagre pecuniary remuneration the only reward I was to hope for.

I think the reason I selected the name “Fern,” was because, when a child, and walking with my mother in the country, she always used to pluck a leaf of it, to place in her bosom, for its sweet odor; and that gloomy morning, when I almost despaired of earning bread for my children, I had been thinking of her, and wishing she were living, that I might lay my head upon her bosom 8and tell her all my sorrows; and then memory carried me back, I scarce knew how, to those childish days, when I ran before her in the woods, to pluck the sweet fern she loved; and then I said to myself, my name shall be “Fanny Fern”—little dreaming anybody would ever know or care anything about it.

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