desire to be regarded as being admired by
the women: a very despicable species of vanity, but frequently greatly
mischievous, notwithstanding. You do not, indeed, actually, in so many
words, promise to marry; but the general tenor of your language and
deportment has that meaning; you know that your meaning is so
understood; and if you have not such meaning; if you be fixed by some
previous engagement with, or greater liking for, another; if you know
you are here sowing the seeds of disappointment; and if you, keeping
your previous engagement or greater liking a secret, persevere, in spite
of the admonitions of conscience, you are guilty of deliberate
deception, injustice and cruelty: you make to God an ungrateful return
for those endowments which have enabled you to achieve this inglorious
and unmanly triumph; and if, as is frequently the case, you _glory_ in
such triumph, you may have person, riches, talents to excite envy; but
every just and humane man will abhor your heart.

141. There are, however, certain cases in which you deceive, or nearly
deceive, _yourself_; cases in which you are, by degrees and by
circumstances, deluded into something very nearly resembling sincere
love for a second object, the first still, however, maintaining her
ground in your heart; cases in which you are not actuated by vanity, in
which you are not guilty of injustice and cruelty; but cases in which
you, nevertheless, _do wrong_: and as I once did a wrong of this sort
myself, I will here give a history of it, as a warning to every young
man who shall read this little book; that being the best and, indeed,
the only atonement, that I can make, or ever could have made, for this
only _serious sin_ that I ever committed against the female sex.

142. The Province of New Brunswick, in North America, in which I passed
my years from the age of eighteen to that of twenty-six, consists, in
general, of heaps of rocks, in the interstices of which grow the pine,
the spruce, and various sorts of fir trees, or, where the woods have
been burnt down, the bushes of the raspberry or those of the
huckleberry. The province is cut asunder lengthwise, by a great river,
called the St. John, about two hundred miles in length, and, at half way
from the mouth, full a mile wide. Into this main river run innumerable
smaller rivers, there called CREEKS. On the sides of these creeks the
land is, in places, clear of rocks; it is, in these places, generally
good and p