My wife has left me.  As we lived together without love, we parted without regret.

Now, Charles, I am to bid you a long, perhaps a last farewell.  Where I shall roam in future, I neither know nor care.  I shall go where the name of Sanford is unknown, and his person and sorrows unnoticed.

In this happy clime I have nothing to induce my stay.  I have not money to support me with my profligate companions, nor have I any relish, at present, for their society.  By the virtuous part of the community I am shunned as the pest and bane of social enjoyment.  In short, I am debarred from every kind of happiness.  If I look back, I recoil with horror from the black catalogue of vices which have stained my past life, and reduced me to indigence and contempt.  If I look forward, I shudder at the prospects which my foreboding mind presents to view both in this and a coming world.  This is a deplorable, yet just, picture of myself.  How totally the reverse of what I once appeared!

Let it warn you, my friend, to shun the dangerous paths which I have trodden, that you may never be involved in the hopeless ignominy and wretchedness of

PETER SANFORD.

LETTER LXXIII.

TO MISS JULIA GRANBY.

BOSTON.

A melancholy tale have you unfolded, my dear Julia; and tragic indeed is the concluding scene.

Is she then gone? gone in this most distressing manner?  Have I lost my once-loved friend? lost her in a way which I could never have conceived to be possible?

Our days of childhood were spent together in the same pursuits, in the same amusements.  Our riper years increased our mutual affection, and maturer judgment most firmly cemented our friendship.  Can I, then, calmly resign her to so severe a fate?  Can I bear the idea of her being lost to honor, to fame, and to life?  No; she shall still live in the heart of her faithful Lucy, whose experience of her numerous virtues and engaging qualities has imprinted her image too deeply on the memory to be obliterated.  However she may have erred, her sincere repentance is sufficient to restore her to charity.

Your letter gave me the first information of this awful event.  I had taken a short excursion into the country, where I had not seen the papers, or, if I had, paid little or no attention to them.  By your directions I found the distressing narrative of her exit.  The poignancy of my grief, and the unavailing lamentations which the intelligence excited, need no delineation.  To scenes of this nature you have been habituated in the mansion of sorrow where you reside.

How sincerely I sympathize with the bereaved parent of the dear, deceased Eliza, I can feel, but have not power to express.  Let it be her consolation that her child is at rest.  The resolution which carried this deluded wanderer thus far from her friends, and supported her through her various trials, is astonishing.  Happy would it have been had she exerted an equal degree of fortitude in repelling the first attacks upon her virtue.  But she is no more, and Heaven forbid that I should accuse or reproach her.