“I have always thought so, father,” I replied; “and on my trial ventured to hint it, as I also did to the turnkeys and jailers; but although none said so directly, I saw very clearly that all considered it as a ridiculous invention—­a clumsy way of accounting for a very plain fact.”

My father now proposed that I should start with him on the following morning, per coach, for Liverpool, from which his farm was distant an easy walk of some six or seven miles.  On the following morning, accordingly, after having duly acknowledged our worthy host’s kindness, we took our seats on the outside of the coach, and were soon whirling it away merrily toward our destination.

During our journey, it gave both my father and I much painful thought how we should break the matter of my unhappy position to my mother.  It would be death to her to learn it.  At first we thought of concealing the circumstances altogether; but the chances of her hearing it from others, or making the discovery herself when she was unprepared for it, through a hundred different means, finally determined us on communicating the unpleasant intelligence ourselves; that is, my father undertook the disagreeable task, meaning, however, to choose time and circumstance, and to allow a day or two to elapse before he alluded to it.

Having arrived at Liverpool, we started on foot for my father’s farm.  Should I attempt it, I would not find it easy to describe what were my feelings at this moment, arising from the prospect of so soon beholding that dear parent, whose image had ever been present to my mind, whose kind tones were ever sounding in my ears like some heart-stirring and well-remembered melody.  They were overpowering.  But when my father, after we had walked for about an hour, raised his stick, and, pointing to a neat farm-steading on the slope of a hill, and on the skirt of a dense mountain forest that rose high behind it, said, “There’s the house, Davie,” I thought I should have sunk on the ground.  I had never felt so agitated, excepting in that unhappy hour when I stood at the bar of the Old Bailey, and heard sentence of transportation awarded against me.  But I compare the feelings on these two occasions only as regards their intensity:  in nature they were very different indeed.  On the former, they were those of excruciating agony; on the latter, those of excessive joy.  As we approached the house, I descried one at the door.  It was a female figure.  It was my mother.  I gasped for breath.  I flew over the ground.  I felt it not beneath my feet.  I would not be restrained by my father, who kept calling to me.  My mother fixed her gaze on me, wondering at my excited manner—­wondering who I could be; all unconscious, as I could perceive by her vacant though earnest look, that I was her son—–­ the darling of her heart.  But a mother’s eye is quick.  Another moment, and a shriek of wild joy and surprise announced that I was recognised; in the next, we were in each other’s arms, wrapt in a speechless agony of bliss!