naming you as executor of
my last will, because you are my friend, and the only man of my
acquaintance whom I feel that I can trust to carry out my wishes,
appreciate my motives, and preserve the silence I desire.

I have, first, a confession to make. Inclosed in this letter you will
find a certificate of marriage between my child Janet's mother and
myself. While I have never exactly repented of this marriage, I have
never had the courage to acknowledge it openly. If I had not married
Julia, I fear Polly Ochiltree would have married me by main force,--as
she would marry you or any other gentleman unfortunate enough to fall in
the way of this twice-widowed man-hunter. When my wife died, three years
ago, her sister Polly offered to keep house for me and the child. I
would sooner have had the devil in the house, and yet I trembled with
alarm,--there seemed no way of escape,--it was so clearly and obviously
the proper thing.

But she herself gave me my opportunity. I was on the point of
consenting, when she demanded, as a condition of her coming, that I
discharge Julia, my late wife's maid. She was laboring under a
misapprehension in regard to the girl, but I grasped at the straw, and
did everything to foster her delusion. I declared solemnly that nothing
under heaven would induce me to part with Julia. The controversy
resulted in my permitting Polly to take the child, while I retained the
maid.

Before Polly put this idea into my head, I had scarcely looked at Julia,
but this outbreak turned my attention toward her. She was a handsome
girl, and, as I soon found out, a good girl. My wife, who raised her,
was a Christian woman, and had taught her modesty and virtue. She was
free. The air was full of liberty, and equal rights, and all the
abolition claptrap, and she made marriage a condition of her remaining
longer in the house. In a moment of weakness I took her away to a place
where we were not known, and married her. If she had left me, I should
have fallen a victim to Polly Ochiltree,--to which any fate was
preferable.

And then, old friend, my weakness kept to the fore. I was ashamed of
this marriage, and my new wife saw it. Moreover, she loved me,--too
well, indeed, to wish to make me unhappy. The ceremony had satisfied her
conscience, had set her right, she said, with God; for the opinions of
men she did not care, since I loved her,--she only wanted to compensate
me, as best she could, for the great honor I had d