d, looking fiercely at
the Ensign. "Six hundred pounds he owes me: how was he to pay you? But
he told me to take charge of this boy, if I found him; and found him I
have, and WILL take charge of him, if you will hand him over."

"Send our Tom!" cried Billings. And when that youth appeared, scowling,
and yet trembling, and prepared, as it seemed, for another castigation,
his father, to his surprise, asked him if he was willing to go along
with those gentlemen, or whether he would be a good lad and stay with
him.

Mr. Tom replied immediately, "I won't be a good lad, and I'd rather go
to ---- than stay with you!"

"Will you leave your brothers and sisters?" said Billings, looking very
dismal.

"Hang my brothers and sisters--I hate 'em; and, besides, I haven't got
any!"

"But you had a good mother, hadn't you, Tom?"

Tom paused for a moment.

"Mother's gone," said he, "and you flog me, and I'll go with these men."

"Well, then, go thy ways," said Billings, starting up in a passion: "go
thy ways for a graceless reprobate; and if this gentleman will take you,
he may do so."

After some further parley, the conversation ended, and the next morning
Mr. Wood's party consisted of three: a little boy being mounted upon the
bay horse, in addition to the Ensign or himself; and the whole company
went journeying towards Bristol.

*****

We have said that Mrs. Hayes had, on a sudden, taken a fit of maternal
affection, and was bent upon being restored to her child; and that
benign destiny which watched over the life of this lucky lady instantly
set about gratifying her wish, and, without cost to herself of
coach-hire or saddle-horse, sent the young gentleman very quickly to her
arms. The village in which the Hayeses dwelt was but a very few miles
out of the road from Bristol; whither, on the benevolent mission above,
hinted at, our party of worthies were bound: and coming, towards the
afternoon, in sight of the house of that very Justice Ballance who had
been so nearly the ruin of Ensign Macshane, that officer narrated, for
the hundredth time, and with much glee, the circumstances which had
then befallen him, and the manner in which Mrs. Hayes the elder had come
forward to his rescue.

"Suppose we go and see the old girl?" suggested Mr. Wood. "No harm can
come to us now." And his comrade always assenting, they wound their
way towards the village, and reached it as the evening came on. In the
public-ho