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left for execution. > > Then, when it was too late, this man of pitiless honour thought himself at last justified in leaning to the side of mercy, and employed his utmost interest, in every direction, to obtain a mitigation of the sentence to transportation for life. The application failed; even a reprieve of a few days was denied. At the appointed time, my father died on the scaffold by the hangman’s hand. > > Have you suspected, while reading this part of my letter, who the highborn gentleman was whose evidence hung him? If you have not, I will tell you. That gentleman was your father . You will now wonder no longer how I could have inherited the right to be his enemy, and the enemy of all who are of his blood. > > The shock of her husband’s horrible death deprived my mother of reason. She lived a few months after his execution; but never recovered her faculties. I was their only child; and was left penniless to begin life as the son of a father who had been hanged, and of a mother who had died in a public madhouse. > > More of myself tomorrow⁠—my letter will be a long one: I must pause often over it, as I pause today. > > Well: I started in life with the hangman’s mark on me⁠—with the parent’s shame for the son’s reputation. Wherever I went, whatever friends I kept, whatever acquaintances I made⁠—people knew how my father had died: and showed that they knew it. Not so much by shunning or staring at me (vile as human nature is, there were not many