While these things, and such as these, are the ends and designs of the whole book, I think I need not say one word more as an apology for any part of the rest--no, nor for the whole. If discouraging everything that is evil, and encouraging everything that is virtuous and good--I say, if these appear to be the whole scope and design of the publishing this story, no objection can lie against it; neither is it of the least moment to inquire whether the Colonel hath told his own story true or not; if he has made it a History or a Parable, it will be equally useful, and capable of doing good; and in that it recommends itself without any introduction.--Your humble servant,
Seeing my life has been such a chequer-work of nature, and that I am able now to look back upon it from a safer distance than is ordinarily the fate of the clan to which I once belonged, I think my history may find a place in the world as well as some who I see are every day read with pleasure, though they have in them nothing so diverting or instructing as I believe mine will appear to be.
My original may be as high as anybody's for aught I know, for my mother kept very good company; but that part belongs to her story more than to mine. All I know of it is by oral tradition, thus: My nurse told me my mother was a gentlewoman, that my father was a man of quality, and she (my nurse) had a good piece of money given her to take me off his hands, and deliver him and my mother from the importunities that usually attend the misfortune of having a child to keep that should not be seen or heard of.
My father, it seems, gave my nurse something more than was agreed for, at my mother's request, upon her solemn promise that she would use me well and let me be put to school; and charged her, that if I lived to come to any bigness, capable to understand the meaning of it, she should always take care to bid me remember that I was a gentleman; and this, he said, was all the education he would desire of her for me; for he did not doubt, he said, but that, some time or other, the very hint would inspire me with thoughts suitable to my birth, and that I would certainly act like a gentleman, if I believed myself to be so.