engagement, however, you stipulated, and I agreed, that
I should reconsider your arguments in case I outlived him. This was my
promise, and these were the circumstances under which it was made.
You will allow, I think, that my memory is more accurate than you had
imagined it to be.

And now, you write to remind me of _my_ part of our
agreement--forbearing, with your accustomed delicacy, to introduce
the subject, until more than six months have elapsed since my father's
death. You have done well. I have had time to feel all the consolation
afforded to me by the remembrance that, for years past, my life was of
some use in sweetening my father's; that his death has occurred in the
ordinary course of Nature; and that I never, to my own knowledge, gave
him any cause to repent the full and loving reconciliation which took
place between us, as soon as we could speak together freely after my
return to home.

Still I am not answering your question:--Am I now willing to permit the
publication of my narrative, provided all names and places mentioned in
it remained concealed, and I am known to no one but yourself, Ralph, and
Clara, as the writer of my own story? I reply that I am willing. In a
few days, you will receive the manuscript by a safe hand. Neither my
brother nor my sister object to its being made public on the terms I
have mentioned; and I feel no hesitation in accepting the permission
thus accorded to me. I have not glossed over the flightiness of Ralph's
character; but the brotherly kindness and manly generosity which lie
beneath it, are as apparent, I hope, in my narrative as they are in
fact. And Clara, dear Clara!--all that I have said of her is only to be
regretted as unworthy of the noblest subject that my pen, or any other
pen, can have to write on.

One difficulty, however, still remains:--How are the pages which I am
about to send you to be concluded? In the novel-reading sense of the
word, my story has no real conclusion. The repose that comes to all
of us after trouble--to _me,_ a repose in life: to others, how often
a repose only in the grave!--is the end which must close this
autobiography: an end, calm, natural, and uneventful; yet not, perhaps,
devoid of all lesson and value. Is it fit that I should set myself, for
the sake of effect, to _make_ a conclusion, and terminate by fiction
what has begun, and thus far, has proceeded in truth? In the interests
of Art, as well as in the interests of Reality, s