of the son she loved in spite of his errors, he had not ever yet felt the pangs of deep regret as they came preluding amendment.  A terrible influx of feelings, which had been accumulating almost unknown to him during months and months—­for his father had been dead only for a year and a half—­pushed up against all the strainings of a wild natural temperament, and seemed ready to choke him, depriving him of utterance, and making him appear the very coward he had been depicting so sharply an hour before.  A deep gloom fell over him; nor was this rendered less inspissated by the recollection that came quick as lightning, that he was the only one known to the mistress of the inn.  And now, worse and worse—­for the same power that sent him that conviction threw a suspicion over his mind which made him strike his forehead with an energy alarming to his companions—­no other—­“O, merciful God!” he muttered—­than that the man he had robbed was his maternal uncle; the only man among the friends of either his father or his mother who had shown any sympathy to the bereaved family, who had fed them and kept them from starvation, and by whom he had been himself nourished.  He had no power to speak this:  it was one of those thoughts that scathe the nerves that serve the tongue, and which flit and burn, and will not ameliorate their fierceness by the common means given to man in mercy.  It now appeared to him as something miraculous why he did not recognise him; but the occasion was one of hurry and confusion, and so completely oblivious had he been in the agony which came on him in an instant, that he even thought that at the very moment he knew him, looking darkly, as he did, through the handkerchief over his eyes.  In his despair, he meditated hurrying to Leith, and with the five pounds getting a passage over the sea somewhere, it signified nothing where, if away from the scene of his crime and ingratitude; and this resolution was confirmed by the additional thought that Mr. Henderson, however good and generous, was a stern man—­so stern, that he had ten years before given up a beloved son into the hands of justice for stealing; yea, stern ex corde as Cato, if generous ex crumena as Codrus.

This resolution for a time brought back his love of freedom and adventure.  He would go to Hudson’s Bay, and shoot bears or set traps for wild silver-foxes, that would bring him gold; or to Buenos Ayres, and catch the wild horse with the lasso; or to Lima, and become a soldier of fortune, and slay men with the sword.  The gleam of wild hope was shortlived—­his triumph over his present ill a temporary hallucination.  The laurel is the only tree which burns and crackles when green.  The intention fled, as once more the thought of his mother came, with that vigour which was only of half an hour’s birth, and begotten by young conscience on old neglect.  They had been trailing their legs along till they came to Inverleith Row, where he behoved to have left his companions,