Marble looked at me in astonishment, though he clearly had glimpses of the object of my question.

“It was in the month of June, 17—.  For thirty long, long years, I supposed my child had actually died; and then the mere force of conscience told me the truth.  The wretched woman could not carry the secret with her into the grave, and she sent for me to hear the sad revelation.”

“Which was to say that she left the child in a basket, on a tombstone, in a marble-worker’s yard, in town; in the yard of a man whose name was Durfee?” I said, as rapidly as I could speak.

“She did, indeed! though it is a marvel to me that a stranger should know this.  What will be God’s pleasure next?”

Marble groaned.  He hid his face in his hands, while the poor woman looked from one of us to the other, in bewildered expectation of what was to follow.  I could not leave her long in doubt; but, preparing her for what was to follow, by little and little I gave her to understand that the man she saw before her was her son.  After half a century of separation, the mother and child had thus been thrown together by the agency of an inscrutable Providence!  The reader will readily anticipate the character of the explanations that succeeded.  Of the truth of the circumstances there could not be a shadow of doubt, when everything was related and compared.  Mrs. Wetmore had ascertained from her unfaithful nurse the history of her child as far as the alms-house; but thirty years had left a gap in the information she received, and it was impossible for her to obtain the name under which he had left that institution.  The Revolution was just over when she made her application, and it was thought that some of the books had been taken away by a refugee.  Still, there were a plenty of persons to supply traditions and conjecture; and so anxious were she and her husband to trace these groundless reports to their confirmation or refutation, that much money and time were thrown away in the fruitless attempts.  At length, one of the old attendants of the children’s department was discovered, who professed to know the whole history of the child brought from the stone-cutter’s yard.  This woman doubtless was honest, but her memory had deceived her.  She said that the boy had been called Stone, instead of Marble; a mistake that was natural enough in itself, but which was probably owing to the fact that another child of the first name had really left the institution a few months before Moses took his leave.  This Aaron Stone had been traced, first, as an apprentice to a tradesman; thence into a regiment of foot in the British army, which regiment had accompanied the rest of the forces, at the evacuation, November 25th, 1783.