But this would be no equivalent to the
loss of character. I leave them, therefore, to the reproof of their own
consciences. If these do not condemn them, there will yet come a day
when the false witness will meet a judge who has not slept over his
slanders. If the reverend Cotton Mather Smith of Shena believed this as
firmly as I do, he would surely never have affirmed that 'I had obtained
my property by fraud and robbery; that in one instance I had defrauded
and robbed a widow and fatherless children of an estate to which I was
executor of ten thousand pounds sterling, by keeping the property and
paying them in money at the nominal rate, when it was worth no more than
forty for one: and that all this could be proved.' Every tittle of it
is fable; there not having existed a single circumstance of my life
to which any part of it can hang. I never was executor but in two
instances, both of which having taken place about the beginning of the
revolution, which withdrew me immediately from all private pursuits,
I never meddled in either executorship. In one of the cases only, were
there a widow and children. She was my sister. She retained and managed
the estate in her own hands, and no part of it was ever in mine. In the
other, I was a coparcener, and only received on a division the equal
portion allotted me.
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