Your truly affected, Much obliged humble Servant,

  MARY BLANDY.

P.S.—­I beg, for very just reasons to myself and friends, that this letter and papers may soon be returned to me; that is, as soon as you have done with them.  You will oblige me, if you keep a copy of the letter; but the real letter I would have back, and the real papers, as being my own handwriting, and may be of service to me, to my character after my death, and to my family.

There is no occasion of hinting to the judicious reader that in this letter it is plain that Miss Blandy twice solemnly declares her innocence.

But let us now proceed to Miss Blandy’s own relation of an affair which has so much engrossed the attention of the public.

Miss Blandy’s narrative referred to in the foregoing letter:—­

O!  Christian Reader!

My misfortunes have been, and are such, as never woman felt before.  O! let the tears of the wretched move human minds to pity, and give ear to my sad case, here wrote with greatest truth.  It is impossible indeed, in my unhappy circumstances, to recollect half of my misfortunes, so as to place them in a proper light.  Let some generous breast then do that for the miserable, and God will reward goodness towards an unhappy, deceived, ruined woman.  Think what power man has over our sex, when we truly love!  And what woman, let her have what sense she will, can stand the arguments and persuasions men will make use of?  Don’t think that by this I mean, that I ever was, or could have been persuaded to hurt one hair of my poor father’s head.  No; what I mean is Cranstoun’s baseness and art, in making me believe that those powders were innocent, and would make my father love him.  He gave my father some himself more than a year before he died, and said, when he gave it him, that he (Cranstoun) had took several papers of it himself.  I saw nothing of any ill effects from these powders on my father; nor did he complain of any one disorder, more than what he has ever been subject to above these ten years, the gravel and the heartburn; but never complained of the heartburn, except when he had the gravel coming on him; and he never was less afflicted with those disorders than during the last year of his life, in which he never took one medicine from his apothecary, as he made oath in Court.

Mr. Cranstoun, soon after he gave these powders to my father, said to me, do you not see that your father is kinder to me?  I now will venture to tell him, that I cannot get the appeal lodged this Sessions (meaning his affair in Scotland); upon which he went to my father’s study, and told him.  They both came out together in great good humour, and my father said not one word against my waiting another Sessions.