who needed to be taught everything, no one
would think of taking me while my feet were
bare, and my clothes in rags, and my hair all
tangled and rusted with the weather. My
mother was not really poor, I knew; and I
coaxed her into a bargain, with the butcher's
wife, by which a certain quantity of fish was
to be delivered in consideration of a suit of
clothes for me. My own history has nothing
to do, from this time, with that of our hamlet,
as I never lived there again. It is enough to
say that I have found that "where there's a
will there's a way;" that I learned not only
to cook, but to read and write, and a good
deal besides; and that, having been first a
scholar, and then a teacher in the Sunday
School of Dunridge, when Sunday schools
were first heard of there, I married the best
of the teachers, who became master of the
Orphan Asylum.

I had not been married long when I had
occasion to go to the hamlet, one fine August
evening. It was a pleasant walk now by the
causeway. There was a low blossomy hedge
on either hand, over which one looked upon
clover and turnip fields, with the sea beyond,
now all golden and glittering with the sunset.
On the other side, the reapers were busy,
cutting wheat—about the first, I should think,
that had been grown where the marsh had
been. Where the grain had been carried,
the children were driving flocks of geese from
the moor into the stubbles, and dressing
themselves up with poppies and blue corn-flowers.
If they had ventured hither ten years before,
they would have been smeared with slime, and
sick with stench, and would have gathered
nothing better than rushes. The change was
striking enough to me, though I had watched
its progress: much more so was it to another,
who came suddenly upon it.

I was sitting with my mother on the
shingle, just as the pale moon came up over
the headland, and Peter, now a stout lad, was
helping Jos to draw up the boat, after a
successful trip, when, chancing to turn my
head, I saw a sailor, with a bundle over his
shoulder, looking down into the dell from
the further end. He came along, staring
about him like one bewildered; and he stood
still and listened when he heard the creak
and jingle of the harvest waggon.

It was my father; and I think we knew
him before he was sure that he knew us. He
was much aged, but not nearly so much as
my mother, who was, indeed, taken by
strangers for our grandmother. I saw that
my father was shocked. With his children
he was strangely shy at first. He could not
order us about, and knock us about as he
used to do; and I think he was awkward as
to how to speak to us.

I left him sitting beside my mother, and
looking about him in great amazement, and
asking many questions of the lads, while I
cooked his supper. He liked his supper well,
and when he heard that I was going to
Dunridge on foot that night, he was more
puzzled than ever. We told him there was a
short and pleasant way now; he would go
part of the way with me to see it. He was in
the midst of telling me that, during all his
wanderings and adventures, he had never
once set eyes on Bony, when we came in sight
of the harvest fields; as he looked over the
hedge, I gathered him a wild rose, and he put
it in his hat, saying, it was the last thing he
had ever thought of to have a posy from that
place. After we had said good night and
parted, as the town appeared before us in the
moonlight, I heard his whistle so long, that I
am sure he must have gone home much more
slowly than I did. I saw him twice again
before he had to go afloat. He told me that
he had not brought home much money, but
that he had left what he had with Jos (as Jos
was clearly a steady young man), desiring that
it might go to make my mother comfortable,
for he had a strong belief that he should
never see her again. He never did see her
again, for she died the next year. He returned
to us after a few years. He had wounds, and
was too far broken to be a fisherman again,
though he went out with his sons, now and
then, in warm weather. His chief pleasure
was to sit in an arbour in Jos's garden,
smoking his pipe and looking at the sea. He
knew that Jos's tidy wife did not like that
any one should drink spirits in the house, so
he sat chiefly in the arbour, except in very
cold weather. He said he should like no
better than to die among the honeysuckles
there; but he died in his bed, as kindly waited
upon by Jos's wife, as if she had not disliked
some of his ways.

As for our town, whether it is that the
schools have made a great difference in the
course of a generation, or that the peace did
us more good than we knew of at the time,
or whether it really is that the improvement
in the general health has renewed the place,
I cannot say with certainty; but it certainly
is not like the same town that it was when I
was a child. It is a quiet place still, with
no great wealth, or stir of any kind: but
nobody now lives in cellars; and it is a rare
thing to see a beggar. My husband and I
think it is a comfortable and pleasant place to
live in—between the fruitfulness of the land,
and the beauty of the sea. And this is exactly
what Jos says of our old hamlet, and of his
own home in the midst of it.

A MYSTERIOUS CITY.

IN a Dominican convent near the city of
Santa Cruz del Quiché, happened one of the
"Incidents of Travel in Central America,"
which Stephens has so pleasantly recorded.
He there met with an eccentric friar, from
whom he obtained some curious information
respecting the surrounding country. Nothing
roused his curiosity so keenly as the Padre's
assertion, that, four days' journey on the road