But let us endeavor to unravel the whole passage. First he states, that, in May, 1782, he had forgotten his motives for falsifying the Company's accounts; but he affirms the facts contained in the report, and afterwards, very rationally, draws such inferences as necessarily or with a strong probability follow them. And if I understand it at all, which God knows I no more pretend to do than Don Quixote did those sentences of lovers in romance-writers of which he said it made him run mad to attempt to discover the meaning, the inference is, "Why do you call upon me for accounts now, three years after the time when I could not give you them? I cannot give them you. And as to the papers relating to them, I do not know whether they exist; and if they do, perhaps you may learn something from them, perhaps you may not: I will write to Mr. Larkins for those papers, if you please." Now, comparing this with his other accounts, you will see what a monstrous scheme he has laid of fraud and concealment to cover his peculation. He tells them,--"I have said that the three first sums of the account were paid into the Company's treasury without passing through my hands. The second of these was forced into notice by its destination and application to the expense of a detachment which was formed and employed against Mahdajee Sindia, under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel Camac, as I particularly apprised the Court of Directors in my letter of the 29th December [November?], 1780." He does not yet tell the Directors from whom he received it: we have found it out by other collateral means.--"The other two were certainly not intended, when I received them, to be made public, though intended for public service, and actually applied to it. The exigencies of government were at that time my own, and every pressure upon it rested with its full weight upon my mind. Wherever I could find allowable means of relieving those wants, I eagerly seized them."--Allowable means of receiving bribes! for such I shall prove them to be in the particular instances.--"But neither could it occur to me as necessary to state on our Proceedings every little aid that I could thus procure; nor do I know how I could have stated it without appearing to court favor by an ostentation which I disdained, nor without the chance of exciting the jealousy of my colleagues by the constructive assertion of a separate and unparticipated merit, derived from the influence of my station, to which they might have had an equal claim."