urely not!

Whatever remains to be related after the last entry in my journal, will
be found expressed in the simplest, and therefore, the best form, by the
letters from William and Mary Penhale, which I send you with this. When
I revisited Cornwall, to see the good miner and his wife, I found, in
the course of the inquiries which I made as to the past, that they still
preserved the letters they had written about me, while I lay ill at
Treen. I asked permission to take copies of these two documents,
as containing materials, which I could but ill supply from my own
resources, for filling up a gap in my story. They at once consented;
telling me that they had always kept each other's letters after
marriage, as carefully as they kept them before, in token that their
first affection remained to the last unchanged. At the same time they
entreated me, with the most earnest simplicity, to polish their own
homely expressions; and turn them, as they phrased, it, into proper
reading. You may easily imagine that I knew better than to do this; and
you will, I am sure, agree with me that both the letters I send should
be printed as literally as they were copied by my hand.

Having now provided for the continuation of my story to the period of my
return home, I have a word or two to say on the subject of preparing the
autobiography for press. Failing in the resolution, even now, to
look over my manuscript again, I leave the corrections it requires to
others--but on one condition. Let none of the passages in which I
have related events, or described characters, be either softened
or suppressed. I am well aware of the tendency, in some readers,
to denounce truth itself as improbable, unless their own personal
experience has borne witness to it; and it is on this very account that
I am firm in my determination to allow of no cringing beforehand to
anticipated incredulities. What I have written is Truth; and it shall go
into the world as Truth should--entirely uncompromised. Let my style
be corrected as completely as you will; but leave characters and events
which are taken from realities, real as they are.

In regard to the surviving persons with whom this narrative associates
me, I have little to say which it can concern the reader to know. The
man whom I have presented in the preceding pages under the name
of Sherwin is, I believe, still alive, and still residing in
France--whither he retreated soon after the date of the last events