t.

"Mother, can you forgive, receive me? Bid me not go forth--I cannot,
may not leave you."

"Go forth, my son, my son--oh, never, never!" she cried, and clasping
him to her bosom, the quick glad tears fell fast upon his brow. She
released him to gaze again and again upon his face, and fold him closer
to her heart, to read in those sunken features, that faded form, the
tale that he had come back to her heart and to her home, never, never
more to leave her.

In that one moment years of error were forgotten. The mother only felt
she hold her son to her heart, a suffering, yet an altered and a better
man; and he, that he knelt once more beside his mother, forgiven and
beloved.

CHAPTER XII.

CONCLUSION

And now, what can we more say? Will not the Hamilton family, and those
intimately connected with them, indeed be deemed complete? It was our
intention to trace in the first part of our tale the cares, the joys,
the sorrows of parental love, during the years of childhood and earliest
youth; in the second, to mark the _effect_ of those cares, when those on
whom they were so lavishly bestowed attained a period of life in which
it depends more upon themselves than on their parents to frame their own
happiness or misery, as far, at least, as we ourselves can do so. It may
please our Almighty Father to darken our earthly course by the trial of
adversity, and yet that peace founded on religion, which it was Mr. and
Mrs. Hamilton's first care to inculcate, may seldom be disturbed. It
may please Him to bless us with prosperity, but from characters such as
Annie Grahame happiness is a perpetual exile, which no prosperity has
power to recall. We have followed Mr. Hamilton's family from childhood,
we have known them from their earliest years, and now that it has become
their parts to feel those same cares and joys, and perform those
precious but solemn duties which we have watched in Mrs. Hamilton, our
task is done; and we must bid farewell to those we have known and loved
so long; those whom we have seen the happy inmates of one home, o'er
whom--

"The same fond mother bent at night,"

who shared the same joys, the same cares, whose deepest affections were
confined to their parents and each other, are now scattered in different
parts of their native land, distinct members of society, each with his
own individual cares and joys, with new and precious ties to divide that
heart whose whole affection had once been