ld house, and were shown into a little tumble-down
old room, with a tumble-down old bed in it, and a tumble-down box for a
chair, and a small tumble-down table, and right in the middle of the
floor stood a little woman that was more tumble-down than all. It was
the Dean's poor mother. She stood beside a tub in which she had been
washing clothes, and she held a scrap of paper in both her hands, which,
bony and hard with work, work, work, and scrub, scrub, scrub, were
trembling violently, while she tried to puzzle out the contents of the
Dean's letter (for this it was), that she held up before a face the deep
wrinkles on which told of many sorrows and much suffering. The letter
had arrived only a few minutes before we did, and she had only just made
out that it was from the Dean, and we could see that this had started
great tears rolling down her cheeks.

[Illustration: The Dean's Mother.]

"But there was no use to puzzle more now. There was her darling,
bright-haired boy, whom she 'always felt sure,' she said, 'would come
back again,'--never losing hope; and now you can imagine how she was not
long in recognizing him, and how she greeted him, and cried over him,
and called him pretty names, and all that,--or, rather, I mean to say,
you can't imagine it at all, for I never saw the like of it. It seemed
to me as if she would never let him go out of her arms again, for fear
she should lose him; and, seeing how matters stood, I went outside,
where after a while the Dean joined me, and having some money in our
pockets, that we had earned on board the _Rob Roy_ and the American
packet-ship, we went right off and bought the best supper we could get,
and had it brought into the tumble-down room and spread out upon the
tumble-down table; and never was any poor woman so glad in all the world
as the Dean's mother, and never were any two boys so happy as the Dean
and I. The Dean's mother would sometimes laugh for joy, and sometimes
cry for the same excellent reason; and, when neither of these would do,
nor both together even, she would fly at the Dean with open arms, and
hug and kiss him until she was quite exhausted, and temporarily quieted
down. Meanwhile the Dean, besides eating his supper, was trying to tell
his mother what he had been doing all the time,--to neither of which
purposes were these maternal interruptions peculiarly favorable.

"So now you see we were at home at last, safe in body and thankful in
spirit. Transport