149.  Then, further in my excuse, my prior engagement, though carefully left unalluded to by both parties, was, in that thin population, and owing to the singular circumstances of it, and to the great talk that there always was about me, perfectly well known to her and all her family.  It was matter of so much notoriety and conversation in the Province, that GENERAL CARLETON (brother of the late Lord Dorchester), who was the Governor when I was there, when he, about fifteen years afterwards, did me the honour, on his return to England, to come and see me at my house in Duke Street, Westminster, asked, before he went away, to see my wife, of whom he had heard so much before her marriage.  So that here was no deception on my part:  but still I ought not to have suffered even the most distant hope to be entertained by a person so innocent, so amiable, for whom I had so much affection, and to whose heart I had no right to give a single twinge.  I ought, from the very first, to have prevented the possibility of her ever feeling pain on my account.  I was young, to be sure; but I was old enough to know what was my duty in this case, and I ought, dismissing my own feelings, to have had the resolution to perform it.

150.  The last parting came; and now came my just punishment!  The time was known to every body, and was irrevocably fixed; for I had to move with a regiment, and the embarkation of a regiment is an epoch in a thinly settled province.  To describe this parting would be too painful even at this distant day, and with this frost of age upon my head.  The kind and virtuous father came forty miles to see me just as I was going on board in the river. His looks and words I have never forgotten.  As the vessel descended, she passed the mouth of that creek which I had so often entered with delight; and though England, and all that England contained, were before me, I lost sight of this creek with an aching heart.

151.  On what trifles turn the great events in the life of man!  If I had received a cool letter from my intended wife; if I had only heard a rumour of any thing from which fickleness in her might have been inferred; if I had found in her any, even the smallest, abatement of affection; if she had but let go any one of the hundred strings by which she held my heart:  if any of these, never would the world have heard of me.  Young as I was; able as I was as a soldier; proud as I was of the admiration and commendations of which I was the object; fond as I was, too, of the command, which, at so early an age, my rare conduct and great natural talents had given me; sanguine as was my mind, and brilliant as were my prospects:  yet I had seen so much of the meannesses, the unjust partialities, the insolent pomposity, the disgusting dissipations of that way of life, that I was weary of it:  I longed, exchanging my fine laced coat for the Yankee farmer’s home-spun, to be where I should never behold the supple crouch of servility, and never hear the hectoring voice of authority, again; and, on the lonely banks of this branch-covered creek, which contained (she out of the question) every thing congenial to my taste and dear to my heart, I, unapplauded, unfeared, unenvied and uncalumniated, should have lived and died.