h. To my
inquiries concerning you, Gertrude, Stephen, who had no longer any
motives for concealing the truth, declared his inability to acquaint me
with any particulars of a later period than the time of your residence
with Trueman Flint. He knew that the lamplighter had taken you to his
home, and was accidentally made aware, a few months later, of your
continuance in that place of refuge from the old man's being such a fool
as to call upon his mother and voluntarily make compensation for the
injury done to her windows in your outburst of childish revenge.

"I could learn nothing more; but it was enough to inspire all my
energies to recover my child. I hastened to Boston, had no difficulty in
tracing your benefactor, and, though he had been long dead, found many a
truthful witness to his well-known virtues. Nor, when I asked for his
adopted child, did I find her forgotten in the quarter of the city where
she had passed her childhood. More than one grateful voice was ready to
respond to my questioning, and to proclaim the cause they had to
remember the girl who, having experienced the trials of poverty, made it
both her duty and her pleasure of prosperity to administer to the wants
of a neighbourhood whose sufferings she had aforetime both witnessed and
shared. But, alas! to complete the sum of sad vicissitudes with which my
unhappy destiny was already crowded, at the moment when I was assured
of my daughter's safety, and my ears were greeted with the sweet praises
that accompanied the mention of her name, there fell upon me like a
thunderbolt the startling words, 'She is now the adopted child of sweet
Emily Graham, the blind girl.'

"Oh, strange coincidence! Oh, righteous retribution! which, at the very
moment when I was picturing to myself the consummation of my cherished
hopes, crushed me once more beneath the iron hand of a destiny that
would not be cheated of its victim! My child, my only child, bound by
the gratitude and love of years to one in whose face I scarcely dared to
look, lest my soul should be withered by the expression of condemnation
which the consciousness of my presence would inspire!

"The seas and lands which had hitherto divided us seemed not, to my
tortured fancy, so insurmountable a barrier between myself and my
long-lost daughter as the dreadful reflection that the only earthly
being whose love I had hoped in time to win had been reared from her
infancy in a household where my name was a thing