A violent headache for two days

[This is a letter I wrote at 11 PM on March 20, 1764, to my friend William Fleming. After finding out my unrequited love, Rebecca Burwell, was marrying Jack Ambler, I came down with a migraine headache, the first of many in my life.]

I will endeavor to answer your letter as circumstantially as the hour of the night, and a violent headache, with which I have been afflicted these two days, will permit.

With regard to the scheme which I proposed to you some time since, I am sorry to tell you it is totally frustrated by Miss R. B’s marriage with Jacquelin Ambler which the people here tell me they daily expect: I say, the people here tell me so, for (can you believe it?) I have been so abominably indolent as not to have seen her since last October, wherefore I cannot affirm that I know it from herself, though am as well satisfied that it is true as if she had told me. Well the lord bless her I say!