He called himself George P. Marsh; professed to have been
at sea from a small boy, and to have served his time in the
smuggling trade between Germany and the coasts of France and
England. Thus he accounted for his knowledge of the French language,
which he spoke and read as well as he did English; but his cutter
education would not account for his English, which was far too good to
have been learned in a smuggler; for he wrote an uncommonly handsome
hand, spoke with great correctness, and frequently, when in private
talk with me, quoted from books, and showed a knowledge of the customs
of society, and particularly of the formalities of the various English
courts of law, and of Parliament, which surprised me. Still, he
would give no other account of himself than that he was educated in
a smuggler. A man whom we afterwards fell in with, who had been a
shipmate of George's a few years before, said that he heard at the
boarding-house from which they shipped, that George had been at
college, (probably a naval one, as he knew no Latin or Greek,) where
he learned French and mathematics. He was by no means the man by
nature that Harris was.
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