I have omitted all. mention of the one which emanated from my own
miserable mind. But in these supplementary memoirs, wherein I
pledged myself to extenuate nothing more that I might have to tell
of Raffles, it is only fair that I should make as clean a breast
of my own baseness. It was I, then, and I alone, who outraged
natural sentiment, and trampled the expiring embers of elementary
decency, by proposing and planning the raid upon my own old home.
I would not accuse myself the more vehemently by making excuses at
this point. Yet I feel bound to state that it was already many
years since the place had passed from our possession into that of
an utter alien, against whom I harbored a prejudice which was some
excuse in itself. He had enlarged and altered the dear old place
out of knowledge; nothing had been good enough for him as it stood
in our day. The man was a hunting maniac, and where my dear father
used to grow prize peaches under glass, this vandal was soon
stabling his hothouse thoroughbreds, which took prizes in their
turn at all. the country shows.
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