know not into whose hands this paper will fall, but it is my
earnest, perhaps dying entreaty that it may be placed in the hands
of my parents, my sister, Dr. Brier, or Howard Pemberton, all of
whose addresses will be found elsewhere.

I write this letter to the man whose name I bear and whom I have
most deeply wronged.

Much sorrow, and anxiety, my dear father, must have resulted from
my cruel conduct, and I would confess, without a wish to conceal
one single fact, the sins which wrought such mischief and have
brought such strange punishments. I can only do so by telling the
story of how one sin led to another, until all culminated in that
fearful fraud, the pretense of death.

For the first year that I was at Blackrock school I strove with all
my strength to do and be what Dr. Brier and his kind, good wife
would wish. Their influence over me was kind and gentle and good. I
can never repay the debt of gratitude I owe them. But by degrees I
grew to hate the restraints of school, and I was drifting,
drifting, I knew not whither.

My best friends at school were Howard Pemberton and Martin
Venables. I loved them at the first with all the enthusiasm a boy
feels when he thinks he has found his ideal friends. They supplied
to me the lack of brothers; they were true, manly, high-minded
friends. But as soon as I began to drift away from the good I had
ceased to strive after, I loosened my hold on them.

It was about a year before I left Blackrock school when my aversion
to study and to all restraint became almost uncontrollable. During
my holidays I once fell in with a young man, James Williams, who
led a wild, reckless life. He had run away from home, had crossed
the seas, and had raised money in various ways, which enabled him
to indulge freely his wild fancies. His yarns about the sea, and
the adventures he had met and dangers encountered, fired me with a
mania to follow a similar career. The constant reading by stealth
of pernicious books, of which smugglers and pirates were the
heroes, stimulated the desire, and undermined the principle in
which I had been educated; until, at length, when you informed me
that I was to study under Mr. Vickers for the law, I determined to
run away from school and seek my living by adventure. James
Williams fostered the resolve, and often urg