Knowing in whose company I have the happiness to be, and highly grateful as I am for the kind reception you have given me, though as yet a perfect stranger, it is fit that I should briefly tell you who and what I am; briefly it needs must be, for one dull scene of industry, one uniform pursuit, comprize the whole history of my unimportant solitary life. If it were the sole purpose of man in this world to make his fortune, I have accomplished that purpose; for in colonial property I am superfluously rich. I was an orphan in my infancy, and have no recollection of my parents; after a scanty education upon charity, I was taken into a merchant’s service, where I performed the menial offices of his counting-house; there however I gained a knowledge of accounts and forms of business. I devoted myself, as I have told you, without avocation of any kind, to the task before me, and was consigned over to the manager of a considerable estate in Jamaica as an under agent, who was not likely to decline any labour, or betray any trust. I did neither one nor the other; they did not spare me, and I did not spare myself. Incessant industry, no taste for pleasure, no incitements to excess, an absolute sequestration from all society, and no diversion of ideas from those, which I employed upon the cane, the mill and the negro, raised me by degrees hardly gained to a capacity of adventuring for myself, and my laborious efforts have succeeded, as I told you, to the fullest extent; I am the sole fabricator of an ample property, for the attainment of which I have, as you see, sacrificed my health, and deprived myself of the ability to enjoy my earnings. One consolation however supports me on reflection, which is that of being conscious, that I am chiefly indebted for my prosperity to the humanity, with which I ever treated those, who were my slaves: I have been the founder of their happiness, and they the instruments, that have raised my fortune. I made their cabins comfortable, their wives and children happy; I contemplated their increase with satisfaction, and can boast of having never purchased or imported a single African, since I have been owner of a single acre. They grew up with me as their common father, they lived and worked for me, I lived to think and act for them. To the whole world of white men I am a stranger; except with one alone I never formed acquaintance: he, and he only, was my friend; from him I learnt the precepts and the policy of humanity to my enslaved fellow creatures: I loved him as my own life; he married and became a widower; I received him in his sorrow, and lodged him in my house; he was a soldier, and a gentleman; my purse would have been his for every use he could have put it to, but his high-born spirit would not stoop to obligations of that sort; he sickened, languished a few days, and expired in my arms. My spirit died with him; every comfort, every joy my nature was capable of feeling, were buried with him in the grave.