ain
twenty dollars at as cheap a rate as possible----"

"Hold!" I interrupted. "In the name of Heaven, my good woman, in what year
did this occur?"

Marble looked at me in astonishment, though he clearly had glimpses of the
object of my question.

"It was in the month of June, 17--. For thirty long, long years, I
supposed my child had actually died; and then the mere force of conscience
told me the truth. The wretched woman could not carry the secret with her
into the grave, and she sent for me to hear the sad revelation."

"Which was to say that she left the child in a basket, on a tombstone,
in a marble-worker's yard, in town; in the yard of a man whose name was
Durfee?" I said, as rapidly as I could speak.

"She did, indeed! though it is a marvel to me that a stranger should know
this. What will be God's pleasure next?"

Marble groaned. He hid his face in his hands, while the poor woman looked
from one of us to the other, in bewildered expectation of what was to
follow. I could not leave her long in doubt; but, preparing her for what
was to follow, by little and little I gave her to understand that the man
she saw before her was her son. After half a century of separation, the
mother and child had thus been thrown together by the agency of an
inscrutable Providence! The reader will readily anticipate the character
of the explanations that succeeded. Of the truth of the circumstances
there could not be a shadow of doubt, when everything was related and
compared. Mrs. Wetmore had ascertained from her unfaithful nurse the
history of her child as far as the alms-house; but thirty years had left a
gap in the information she received, and it was impossible for her to
obtain the name under which he had left that institution. The Revolution
was just over when she made her application, and it was thought that some
of the books had been taken away by a refugee. Still, there were a plenty
of persons to supply traditions and conjecture; and so anxious were she
and her husband to trace these groundless reports to their confirmation or
refutation, that much money and time were thrown away in the fruitless
attempts. At length, one of the old attendants of the children's
department was discovered, who professed to know the whole history of the
child brought from the stone-cutter's yard. This woman doubtless was
honest, but her memory had deceived her. She said that the boy had been
called Stone, instead of Marble; a mistake th