ing and in his hands, or with whatever he can distinctly recollect
concerning it."--Here are accounts kept for the Company, and yet he does
not know whether they are in existence anywhere.

"For my motives for withholding the several receipts from the knowledge
of the Council or of the Court of Directors, and for taking bonds for
part of these sums, and paying others into the treasury as deposits on
my own account, I have generally accounted in my letter to the Honorable
the Court of Directors of the 22d of May, 1782,--namely, that I either
chose to conceal the first receipts from public curiosity by receiving
bonds for the amount, or possibly acted without any studied design which
my memory at that distance of time could verify, and that I did not
think it worth my care to observe the same means with the rest. It will
not be expected that I should be able to give a more correct explanation
of my intentions after a lapse of three years, having declared at the
time that many particulars had escaped my remembrance; neither shall I
attempt to add more than the clearer affirmation of the facts implied in
that report of them, and such inferences as necessarily or with a strong
probability follow them."

You have heard of that Oriental figure called, in the banian language, a
_painche_, in English, a _screw_. It is a puzzled and studied involution
of a period, framed in order to prevent the discovery of truth and the
detection of fraud; and surely it cannot be better exemplified than in
this sentence: "Neither shall I attempt to add more than the clearer
affirmation of the facts implied in that report of them, and such
inferences as necessarily or with a strong probability follow them."
Observe, that he says, not _facts stated_, but _facts implied in the
report_. And of what was this to be a report? Of things which the
Directors declared they did not understand. And then the inferences
which are to follow these implied facts are to follow them--But how?
_With a strong probability_. If you have a mind to study this Oriental
figure of rhetoric, the _painche_, here it is for you in its most
complete perfection. No rhetorician ever gave an example of any figure
of oratory that can match this.

But let us endeavor to unravel the whole passage. First he states, that,
in May, 1782, he had forgotten his motives for falsifying the Company's
accounts; but he affirms the facts contained in the report, and
afterwards, very rationally,