Josephs a larcenist and a corpse.  The law a liar and a felon.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

JOSEPHS has dropped out of our story.  Mr. Hawes has got himself kicked out of our story.  The other prisoners, of whom casual mention has been made, were never in our story, any more than the boy Xury in “Robinson Crusoe.”  There remains to us in the prison Mr. Eden and Robinson, a saint and a thief.

My readers have seen how the saint has saved the thief’s life.  They shall guess awhile how on earth Susan Merton can be affected by that circumstance.  They have seen a set of bipeds acting on the notion that all prisoners are incurable:  they have seen a thief, thus despaired of, driven toward despair, and almost made incurable through being thought so.  Then they have seen this supposed incurable fall into the hands of a Christian that held “it is never too late to mend;” and generally I think that, feebly as my pen has drawn so great a character, they can calculate, by what Mr. Eden has already done, what he will do while I am with Susan and George; what love, what eloquence, what ingenuity he will move to save this wandering sheep, to turn this thief honest and teach him how to be honest yet not starve.

I will ask my reader to bear in mind, that the good and wise priest has no longer his hands tied by a jailer in the interest of the foul fiend.  But then, against all this, is to be set the slippery heart of a thief, a thief almost from his cradle.  Here are great antagonist forces and they will be in daily almost hourly collision for months to come.  In life nothing stands still; all this will work goodward or badward.  I must leave it to work.

CHAPTER XXIX.

MR. EDEN’S health improved so visibly that Susan Merton announced her immediate return to her father.  It was a fixed idea in this young lady’s mind that she and Mrs. Davies had no business in the house of a saint upon earth, as she called Mr. Eden, except as nurses.

The parting of attached friends has always a touch of sadness needless to dwell on at this time.  Enough that these two parted as brother and young sister, and a spiritual adviser and advised, with warm expressions of Christian amity, and an agreement on Susan’s part to write for advice and sympathy whenever needed.

On her arrival at Grassmere Farm there was Mr. Meadows to greet her.  “Well, that is attentive!” cried Susan.  There was also a stranger to her, a Mr. Clinton.

As nothing remarkable occurred this evening, we may as well explain this Mr. Clinton.  He was a speculator, and above all a setter on foot of rotten speculations, and a keeper on foot a little while of lame ones.  No man exceeded him in the art of rose-tinting bad paper or parchment.  He was sanguine and fluent.  His mind had two eyes, an eagle’s and a bat’s; with the first he looked at the “pros,” and with the second at the “cons” of a spec.