Excerpt from Prisoners of Fortune: A Tale of the Massachusetts Bay Colony ON this day, the 1oth Of August in the year Of grace 1757, it being my sixtieth birthday and a hot and sticky one - and the flies bothering me so that there was no comfort in dozing in my chair, after my light noon meal Of pork and beans and cheese and meat pie, with a mug of cider and a pipe thereafter, I sat up Of a sudden, to slap and to light my pipe over again; and thereupon formed, on the spur Of the moment, an extraordinary resolution. Now I am fond of cogitating over the curious relation that events of importance in our lives bear to small and even silly ones, and how the lesser may be progenitor of the greater; and so I have Often wondered since how much the biting Of the flies had to do with the formation of this resolution. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.