riend may have been.
Neither can I doubt that she would have destroyed the packet, but for the
circumstance of her sudden death.

"After hesitating a little--I hardly know why--I summoned my resolution,
and broke the seal. Of the horror with which I read the contents of the
packet I shall say nothing. Who ever yet sympathized with the sorrows and
sufferings of strangers? Let me merely announce that I knew my ancestors
at last, and that I am now able to present them in their true characters,
as follows:

V

"My grandfather was tried on a charge of committing willful murder--was
found guilty on the clearest evidence--and died on the scaffold by the
hangman's hands.

"His two sons abandoned the family name, and left the family residence.
They were, nevertheless, not unworthy representatives of their atrocious
father, as will presently appear.

"My uncle (a captain in the Army) was discovered at the hazard table,
playing with loaded dice. Before this abject scoundrel could be turned
out of his regiment, he was killed in a duel by one of his brother
officers whom he had cheated.

"My father, when he was little more than a lad, deserted a poor girl who
had trusted him under a promise of marriage. Friendless and hopeless, she
drowned herself and her child. His was the most infamous in the list of
the family crimes--and he escaped, without answering to a court of law or
a court of honor for what he had done.

"Some of us come of one breed, and some of another. There is the breed
from which I drew the breath of life. What do you think of me now?"

VI

"I looked back over the past years of my existence, from the time of my
earliest recollections to the miserable day when I opened the sealed
packet.

"What wholesome influences had preserved me, so far, from moral
contamination by the vile blood that ran in my veins? There were two
answers to that question which, in some degree, quieted my mind. In the
first place, resembling my good mother physically, I might hope to have
resembled her morally. In the second place, the happy accidents of my
career had preserved me from temptation, at more than one critical period
of my life. On the other hand, in the ordinary course of nature, not one
half of that life had yet elapsed. What trials might the future have in
store for me? and what protection against them would the better part of
my nature be powerful enough to afford?

"While I was still troubled by these doubts, t