nd
think it a blessed good bargain. Well? So he says--?"

"So he says," resumed the convict I had recognized,--"it was all
said and done in half a minute, behind a pile of timber in the
Dock-yard,--'You're a going to be discharged?' Yes, I was. Would I find
out that boy that had fed him and kep his secret, and give him them two
one pound notes? Yes, I would. And I did."

"More fool you," growled the other. "I'd have spent 'em on a Man, in
wittles and drink. He must have been a green one. Mean to say he knowed
nothing of you?"

"Not a ha'porth. Different gangs and different ships. He was tried again
for prison breaking, and got made a Lifer."

"And was that--Honor!--the only time you worked out, in this part of the
country?"

"The only time."

"What might have been your opinion of the place?"

"A most beastly place. Mudbank, mist, swamp, and work; work, swamp,
mist, and mudbank."

They both execrated the place in very strong language, and gradually
growled themselves out, and had nothing left to say.

After overhearing this dialogue, I should assuredly have got down and
been left in the solitude and darkness of the highway, but for feeling
certain that the man had no suspicion of my identity. Indeed, I was not
only so changed in the course of nature, but so differently dressed and
so differently circumstanced, that it was not at all likely he could
have known me without accidental help. Still, the coincidence of our
being together on the coach, was sufficiently strange to fill me with a
dread that some other coincidence might at any moment connect me, in his
hearing, with my name. For this reason, I resolved to alight as soon as
we touched the town, and put myself out of his hearing. This device I
executed successfully. My little portmanteau was in the boot under my
feet; I had but to turn a hinge to get it out; I threw it down before
me, got down after it, and was left at the first lamp on the first
stones of the town pavement. As to the convicts, they went their way
with the coach, and I knew at what point they would be spirited off to
the river. In my fancy, I saw the boat with its convict crew waiting for
them at the slime-washed stairs,--again heard the gruff "Give way, you!"
like and order to dogs,--again saw the wicked Noah's Ark lying out on
the black water.

I could not have said what I was afraid of, for my fear was altogether
undefined and vague, but there was great fear upon me. As I walked on to