expected from years of observation and experience. The strictness with
which I endeavoured to remark what passed in the mind of one man, and
the variety of conjectures into which I was led, appeared, as it were,
to render me a competent adept in the different modes in which the
human intellect displays its secret workings. I no longer said to
myself, as I had done in the beginning, "I will ask Mr. Falkland whether
he were the murderer." On the contrary, after having carefully examined
the different kinds of evidence of which the subject was susceptible,
and recollecting all that had already passed upon the subject, it was
not without considerable pain, that I felt myself unable to discover any
way in which I could be perfectly and unalterably satisfied of my
patron's innocence. As to his guilt, I could scarcely bring myself to
doubt that in some way or other, sooner or later, I should arrive at the
knowledge of that, if it really existed. But I could not endure to
think, almost for a moment, of that side of the alternative as true; and
with all my ungovernable suspicion arising from the mysteriousness of
the circumstances, and all the delight which a young and unfledged mind
receives from ideas that give scope to all that imagination can picture
of terrible or sublime, I could not yet bring myself to consider Mr.
Falkland's guilt as a supposition attended with the remotest
probability.

I hope the reader will forgive me for dwelling thus long on preliminary
circumstances. I shall come soon enough to the story of my own misery. I
have already said, that one of the motives which induced me to the
penning of this narrative, was to console myself in my insupportable
distress. I derive a melancholy pleasure from dwelling upon the
circumstances which imperceptibly paved the way to my ruin. While I
recollect or describe past scenes, which occurred in a more favourable
period of my life, my attention is called off for a short interval, from