You have done me great honour in the letter your ladyship has been pleased to send me; and it is a high pleasure to me, now all is so happily over, that my poor papers in the least diverted you, and such honourable and worthy persons as your ladyship mentions.  I could wish I might be favoured with such remarks on my conduct, so nakedly set forth (without any imagination that they would ever appear in such an assembly), as may be of use to me in my future life, and thus make me more worthy than it is otherwise possible I can be, of the honour to which I am raised.  Do, dearest lady, favour me so far.  I am prepared to receive blame, and to benefit by it, and cannot expect praise so much from my actions as from my intentions; for indeed, these were always just and honourable:  but why, even for these do I talk of praise, since, being prompted by impulses I could not resist, it can be no merit in me to have been governed by them?

As to the papers following those in your hands, when I say, that they must needs appear impertinent to such judges, after what you know, I dare say, your ladyship will not insist upon them:  yet I will not scruple briefly to mention what they contain.

All my dangers and trials were happily at an end:  so that they only contain the conversations that passed between your ladyship’s generous brother and me; his kind assurances of honourable love to me; my acknowledgments of unworthiness to him; Mrs. Jewkes’s respectful change of behaviour towards me; Mr. B.’s reconciliation to Mr. Williams; his introducing me to the good families in the neighbourhood, and avowing before them his honourable intentions.  A visit from my honest father, who (not knowing what to conclude from my letter to him before I returned to your honoured brother, desiring my papers from him) came in great anxiety of heart to know the worst, doubting I had at last been caught by a stratagem, ending in my ruin.  His joyful surprise to find how happy I was likely to be.  All the hopes given me, answered by the private celebration of our nuptials—­an honour so much above all that my utmost ambition could make me aspire to, and which I never can deserve!  Your ladyship’s arrival, and anger, not knowing I was actually married, but supposing me a vile wicked creature; in which case I should have deserved the worst of usage.  Mr. B.’s angry lessons to me, for daring to interfere; though I thought in the tenderest and most dutiful manner, between your ladyship and himself.  The most acceptable goodness and favour of your ladyship afterwards to me, of which, as becomes me, I shall ever retain the most grateful sense.  My return to this sweet mansion in a manner so different from my quitting it, where I had been so happy for four years, in paying my duty to the best of mistresses, your ladyship’s excellent mother, to whose goodness, in taking me from my poor honest parents, and giving me what education I have, I owe, under God, my happiness.  The joy of good