One difficulty, however, still remains:—­How are the pages which I am about to send you to be concluded?  In the novel-reading sense of the word, my story has no real conclusion.  The repose that comes to all of us after trouble—­to me, a repose in life:  to others, how often a repose only in the grave!—­is the end which must close this autobiography:  an end, calm, natural, and uneventful; yet not, perhaps, devoid of all lesson and value.  Is it fit that I should set myself, for the sake of effect, to make a conclusion, and terminate by fiction what has begun, and thus far, has proceeded in truth?  In the interests of Art, as well as in the interests of Reality, surely not!

Whatever remains to be related after the last entry in my journal, will be found expressed in the simplest, and therefore, the best form, by the letters from William and Mary Penhale, which I send you with this.  When I revisited Cornwall, to see the good miner and his wife, I found, in the course of the inquiries which I made as to the past, that they still preserved the letters they had written about me, while I lay ill at Treen.  I asked permission to take copies of these two documents, as containing materials, which I could but ill supply from my own resources, for filling up a gap in my story.  They at once consented; telling me that they had always kept each other’s letters after marriage, as carefully as they kept them before, in token that their first affection remained to the last unchanged.  At the same time they entreated me, with the most earnest simplicity, to polish their own homely expressions; and turn them, as they phrased, it, into proper reading.  You may easily imagine that I knew better than to do this; and you will, I am sure, agree with me that both the letters I send should be printed as literally as they were copied by my hand.

Having now provided for the continuation of my story to the period of my return home, I have a word or two to say on the subject of preparing the autobiography for press.  Failing in the resolution, even now, to look over my manuscript again, I leave the corrections it requires to others—­but on one condition.  Let none of the passages in which I have related events, or described characters, be either softened or suppressed.  I am well aware of the tendency, in some readers, to denounce truth itself as improbable, unless their own personal experience has borne witness to it; and it is on this very account that I am firm in my determination to allow of no cringing beforehand to anticipated incredulities.  What I have written is Truth; and it shall go into the world as Truth should—­entirely uncompromised.  Let my style be corrected as completely as you will; but leave characters and events which are taken from realities, real as they are.