Lanreath Cottage, Breconshire.

MY DEAR FRIEND,

I find, by your last letter, that you doubt whether I still remember
the circumstances under which I made a certain promise to you, more than
eight years ago. You are mistaken: not one of those circumstances has
escaped my memory. To satisfy you of this, I will now recapitulate them.
You will own, I think, that I have forgotten nothing.

After my removal from Cornwall (shall I ever forget the first sight of
Clara and Ralph at my bedside!), when the nervous malady from which
I suffered so long, had yielded to the affectionate devotion of my
family--aided by the untiring exercise of your skill--one of my first
anxieties was to show that I could gratefully appreciate your exertions
for my good, by reposing the same confidence in you, which I should
place in my nearest and dearest relatives. From the time when we first
met at the hospital, your services were devoted to me, through much
misery of mind and body, with the delicacy and the self-denial of a true
friend. I felt that it was only your due that you should know by what
trials I had been reduced to the situation in which you found me, when
you accompanied my brother and sister to Cornwall--I felt this; and
placed in your hands, for your own private perusal, the narrative which
I had written of my error and of its terrible consequences. To tell you
all that had happened to me, with my own lips, was more than I could do
then--and even after this lapse of years, would be more than I could do
now.

After you had read the narrative, you urged me, on returning it into my
possession, to permit its publication during my lifetime. I granted the
justness of the reasons which led you to counsel me thus; but I told
you, at the same time, that an obstacle, which I was bound to respect,
would prevent me from following your advice. While my father lived, I
could not suffer a manuscript in which he was represented (no matter
under what excess of provocation) as separating himself in the bitterest
hostility from his own son, to be made public property. I could not
suffer events of which we never afterwards spoke ourselves, to be given
to others in the form of a printed narrative which might perhaps fall
under his own eye. You acknowledged, I remember, the justice of these
considerations and promised, in case I died before him, to keep back
my manuscript from publication as long as my father lived. In binding
yourself to that