I am a failure, as a man, a husband and a father. I have endeavored to forge a life here, in New England, in accordance with Godly principles; have built this home and farm with mine own two hands from naught but wilderness, all I survey the product of bent back and sweat soaked brow. Perhaps it was righteous Judgement that sought to humble me when my beloved Katherine was taken from me in the delivery of our only child, Thomasin. Not a day passes that I do not mourn her. Yet, I have managed to persevere: ploughing fields, keeping my singular draft animal tended, fed and shod and all this and more besides trying to be a father and keeping to good Christian practice. 'Twas more than folly to think that prideful fool I could raise a daughter! But still I endured this yoke, attempting as best I were able to mold Thomasin into a pious, obedient, dutiful, and virtuous creature worthy of my name and household. And, foolhardily, I thought I had achieved a measure of success as never did a curt remark escape her lips or was a labour, of which a manifold thereof I have levied upon her as she has grown more able, shirked. It was an invitation to damnation that I did allow myself to be lulled by routine, concerned chiefly with the passage of one day's rising to the next, thinking never farther afield than to the next harvest or the one following thus, as the passage of seasons melted those halcyon days like snowfall. Before my very eyes my girl-child Thomasin did blossom gradually, womanhood coming about her like an unfurling rose, with lengthening of leg and budding swell of bosom such that she was with rapidity unfit for childlike dress and resorting to wearing her mother's gowns retrieved from stowage. And with her femininity dawning, it became plainly evident that I had neglected a critical duty of a father to his daughter: a promise of her hand to a qualified suitor.

Think me not merely overcome by the suddenness of this necessity coming upon me unawares, as the thought had nested somewhere deep within the crenels of my mind since her very birth. The nearest settlement is leagues away, a ride of several days through heavy wood, and I have but the one weary beast of burden to depend upon, making an arduous trek all the more perilous and fraught with delay. And whereupon reaching yon township, I should doubtlessly be reminded that I have had good cause to avoid at any length such a place as that den of iniquity where I know no honest man reside; a place of moneylenders and whores and gamblers and drunks, fie upon them! I would not accept the dowry of those charlatans, fattened by slothful bureaucracy in service to the king's companies and their cozening. Without recourse, I tarry, lamenting as she comes evermore into maturity, that a maiden such as thee lacks a strong and able hand, a proper husband to take in eternal matrimony. It soon became apparent to me that Thomasin herself however, taken up in the natural current of her maturation, had designs other than dawdling as her father's housekeeper and farmhand. When first the nature of the glances she cast upon me entered into my mind, I banished the unthinkable notion. But it gnawed at me, renewed with each unseemly gaze of she in my direction, with increasing impropriety. Erelong it became impossible to labour as I needs must about the farm, oft resorting to abandoning the modesty of my shirt, without her eyes stealing to my form, her cheeks flushing and her breath quickening with obvious infatuation. I knew I should rectify this sinful lechery, but I could not do my fatherly duty. I had only been able to bring myself to raise hand or switch against her in discipline a trifling number of occasions. Worse, yet, with each day's dawning; the progressive development of her body, the narrowing of her waist and widening of hip, it became more and more as though I were standing before an identical likeness of my own dearly departed Kathrine, to whom I was eternally sworn and bound, restored to the earth by Divine resurrection, and leering at me with barely disguised wanton intention. My heart quailed with knowledge that if I dared not to stay mine own hand, sinful congress would surely result. I could do naught else than stand idly aside as she grew increasingly bolder with her eyes, her words, and her gestures as if I were a stone wall before her impetuous advance.

The security of seclusion from her being my last refuge, I connived excuses to separate myself, keeping foul impulses at bay by the greater the distance that could be put between us for as long as capable. I slank into the woods in excess, wasting valuable powder and shot firing the arquebus at phantoms of my own imagining to retain the sham of days long hunts. Lord forgive me as I multiply my sins, committing deception and else to abate the treachery of abominable adultery and incest. Doth I blaspheme to bethink myself burdened with a tribulation the calibre of Job or Abraham?

Retiring nightly to the cottage, after sup she hath prepared for me, sitting in firelight I can but ken her furtive, entreating invitation to unabashed fleshly harlotry