ppeared. I am particular in repeating the date because it marks the
time of the last information I have to give, in connection with the
disgraceful circumstances which I have here forced myself to relate. Of
the child mentioned in the advertisement, I never heard anything, from
that time to this. I do not even know when it was born. I only know
that its guilty mother left her home in the December of 1827. Whether it
lived after the date of the advertisement, or whether it died, I never
discovered, and never wished to discover. I have kept myself retired
since the days of my humiliation, hiding my sorrow in my own heart, and
neither asking questions nor answering them."

At this place Mat once more suspended the perusal of the letter. He had
now read on for an unusually long time with unflagging attention, and
with the same stern sadness always in his face, except when the name
of Arthur Carr occurred in the course of the narrative. Almost on every
occasion, when the finger by which he guided himself along the close
lines of the letter, came to those words, it trembled a little, and the
dangerous look grew ever brighter and brighter in his eyes. It was in
them now, as he dropped the letter on his knee, and, turning round, took
from the wall behind him, against which it leaned, a certain leather
bag, already alluded to, as part of the personal property that he
brought with him on installing himself in Kirk Street. He opened it,
took out a feather fan, and an Indian tobacco-pouch of scarlet cloth;
and then began to search in the bottom of the bag, from which, at
length, he drew forth a letter. It was torn in several places, the ink
of the writing in it was faded, and the paper was disfigured by stains
of grease, tobacco, and dirt generally. The direction was in such a
condition, that the word "Brazils," at the end, was alone legible.
Inside, it was not in a much better state. The date at the top, however,
still remained tolerably easy to distinguish: it was "December 20th,
1827."

Mat looked first at this, and then at the paragraph he had just been
reading, in Joanna Grice's narrative. After that, he began to count on
his fingers, clumsily enough--beginning with the year 1828 as Number
One, and ending with the current year, 1851, as Number Twenty-three.
"Twenty-three," he repeated aloud to himself, "twenty-three years: I
shall remember that."

He looked down a little vacantly, the next moment, at the old torn
letter a