In a moment of peculiar pressure (you know how hard we were sometimes run to obtain white faces to countenance our line-of-battle), a young man named Brown joined our regiment as a volunteer, and, finding the military duty more to his fancy than commerce, in which he had been engaged, remained with us as a cadet.
Let me do my unhappy victim justice: he behaved with such gallantry on every occasion that offered that the first vacant commission was considered as his due.

I was absent for some weeks upon a distant expedition; when I returned I found this young fellow established quite as the friend of the house, and habitual attendant of my wife and daughter.

It was an arrangement which displeased me in many particulars, though no objection could be made to his manners or character.

Yet I might have been reconciled to his familiarity in my family, but for the suggestions of another.

If you read over--what I never dare open--the play of "Othello," you will have some idea of what followed--I mean of my motives; my actions, thank God! were less reprehensible.