After you had read the narrative, you urged me, on returning it into my possession, to permit its publication during my lifetime.  I granted the justness of the reasons which led you to counsel me thus; but I told you, at the same time, that an obstacle, which I was bound to respect, would prevent me from following your advice.  While my father lived, I could not suffer a manuscript in which he was represented (no matter under what excess of provocation) as separating himself in the bitterest hostility from his own son, to be made public property.  I could not suffer events of which we never afterwards spoke ourselves, to be given to others in the form of a printed narrative which might perhaps fall under his own eye.  You acknowledged, I remember, the justice of these considerations and promised, in case I died before him, to keep back my manuscript from publication as long as my father lived.  In binding yourself to that engagement, however, you stipulated, and I agreed, that I should reconsider your arguments in case I outlived him.  This was my promise, and these were the circumstances under which it was made.  You will allow, I think, that my memory is more accurate than you had imagined it to be.

And now, you write to remind me of my part of our agreement—­forbearing, with your accustomed delicacy, to introduce the subject, until more than six months have elapsed since my father’s death.  You have done well.  I have had time to feel all the consolation afforded to me by the remembrance that, for years past, my life was of some use in sweetening my father’s; that his death has occurred in the ordinary course of Nature; and that I never, to my own knowledge, gave him any cause to repent the full and loving reconciliation which took place between us, as soon as we could speak together freely after my return to home.

Still I am not answering your question:—­Am I now willing to permit the publication of my narrative, provided all names and places mentioned in it remained concealed, and I am known to no one but yourself, Ralph, and Clara, as the writer of my own story?  I reply that I am willing.  In a few days, you will receive the manuscript by a safe hand.  Neither my brother nor my sister object to its being made public on the terms I have mentioned; and I feel no hesitation in accepting the permission thus accorded to me.  I have not glossed over the flightiness of Ralph’s character; but the brotherly kindness and manly generosity which lie beneath it, are as apparent, I hope, in my narrative as they are in fact.  And Clara, dear Clara!—­all that I have said of her is only to be regretted as unworthy of the noblest subject that my pen, or any other pen, can have to write on.