But, ah! who
is yon that I see approaching furiously, his stern face blackened
with horrid despair! My hour is at hand. Almighty God, what is
this that I am about to do! The hour of repentance is past, and
now my fate is inevitable. Amen, for ever! I will now seal up my
little book, and conceal it; and cursed be he who trieth to alter or
amend.
END OF THE MEMOIR
WHAT can this work be? Sure, you will say, it must be an
allegory; or (as the writer calls it) a religious PARABLE,
showing the dreadful danger of self-righteousness? I cannot tell.
Attend to the sequel: which is a thing so extraordinary, so
unprecedented, and so far out of the common course of human
events that, if there were not hundreds of living witnesses to attest
the truth of it, I would not bid any rational being believe it.
In the first place, take the following extract from an authentic
letter, published in Blackwood's Magazine for August, 1823.
"On the top of a wild height called Cowan's-Croft, where the
lands of three proprietors meet all at one point, there has been for
long and many years the grave of a suicide marked out by a stone
standing at the head and another at the feet.
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