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284 Miles Mannering, I should make out my explanation with half the tremor which must now attend it."

"I have this instant received your letter—your most welcome letter!—Thanks, my dearest friend, for your sympathy and your counsels—I can only repay them with unbounded confidence.

"You ask me, what Brown is by origin, that his descent should be so unpleasing to my father. His story is shortly told. He is of Scottish extraction, but, being left an orphan, his education was undertaken by a family of relations settled in Holland. He was bred to commerce, and sent very early to one of our settlements in the East, where his guardian had a correspondent—But this correspondent was dead when he arrived in India, and he had no other resource than to offer himself as