They knew absolutely nothing of my unhappy history-no
unpleasant rumor even respecting me, had ever penetrated that quiet
quarter of the State. I told them what I pleased of my past career,
from boyhood to the present time, and to them I was only a tolerably
successful doctor, who made money enough to live decently and dress
well, and who was then suffering from overwork and badly in need of
recuperation. This, indeed, was the ostensible reason for my visit
to Ontario. I was somewhat shattered; my old prison trials and
troubles began to tell upon me. I used to think sometimes that I was
a little "out of my head;" I certainly was so whenever I entered
upon one of my matrimonial schemes, and I must have been as mad as a
March hare when I attempted to kidnap Sarah Scheimer's boy. After
all the excitement and suffering of the past few years, I needed
rest, and here I found it.
My cousins were more than well-to-do farmers; they were enormously
rich in lands and money. Just after the war of 1812, their father,
my uncle, and my own father, had come to this, then wild and almost
uninhabited, section of the State to settle. Soon after they arrived
there my father's wife died, and this loss, with the general
loneliness of the region, to say nothing of the fever and ague, soon
drove my father back to Delaware County to his forge for a living,
and to the day of his death he was nothing more than a hard-working,
hand-to-mouth-living, common blacksmith.
But my uncle stayed there, and, as time went on, he bought hundreds
of acres of land for a mere song, which were now immensely valuable,
and had made his children almost the richest people in that region.
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