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in the first association that comes back upon him, he puts his hands together as a child does when it says its prayers, and raising them towards her breast, bows down his head, and cries.

“My George, my dearest son! Always my favorite, and my favorite still, where have you been these cruel years and years? Grown such a man too, grown such a fine strong man. Grown so like what I knew he must be, if it pleased God he was alive!”

She can ask, and he can answer, nothing connected for a time. All that time the old girl, turned away, leans one arm against the whitened wall, leans her honest forehead upon it, wipes her eyes with her serviceable grey cloak, and quite enjoys herself like the best of old girls as she is.

“Mother,” says the trooper, when they are more composed; “forgive me first of all, for I know my need of it.”

Forgive him! She does it with all her heart and soul. She always has done it. She tells him how she has had it written in her will, these many years, that he was her beloved son George. She has never believed any ill of him, never. If she had died without this happiness—and she is an old woman now, and can’t look to live very long—she would have blessed him with her last breath, if she had had her senses, as her beloved son George.

“Mother, I have been an undutiful trouble to you, and I have my reward; but of late years I have had a kind of a glimmering of a purpose in me, too. When I left home I didn’t care much, mother—I am afraid not a great deal—for leaving; and went away and ’listed, harum-scarum, making believe to think that I cared for nobody, no not I, and that nobody cared for me.”

The trooper has dried his eyes, and put away his handkerchief; but there is an extraordinary contrast between his habitual manner of expressing himself and carrying himself, and the softened tone in which he speaks, interrupted occasionally by a half-stifled sob.

“So I wrote a line home, mother, as you too well know, to say I had ’listed under another name, and I went abroad. Abroad, at one time I thought I would write home next year when I might be better off; and when that year was out, I thought I would write home next year when I might be better off; and when that year was out again, perhaps I didn’t think much about it. So on, from year to year, through a service of ten years, till I began to get older, and to ask myself why should I ever write?”

“I don’t find any fault, child—but not to ease my mind, George? Not a word to your loving mother, who was growing older, too?”

This almost overturns the trooper afresh; but he sets himself up with a great, rough, sounding clearance of his throat.

“Heaven forgive me, mother, but I thought there would be small consolation then in hearing anything about me. There were you, respected and esteemed. There was my brother, as I read in chance north-country papers now and then, rising to be prosperous and famous. There was I, a dragoon, roving, unsettled, not self-made like him, but self-unmade—all my earlier advantages thrown away, all my little learning unlearnt, nothing picked up but what unfitted me for most things that I could think of. What business had ’’I’’ to make myself known? After letting all that time go by me, what good could come of