smock-frocks of the front
row; from every cottage of the suburb, some individuals join the stream,
which rolls on increasing through the streets till it reaches the
castle. The ancient moat teems with idlers, and the hill opposite,
usually the quiet domain of a score or two of peaceful sheep, partakes
of the surrounding agitation.

The voice of the multitude which surrounds the court-house, sounds like
the murmur of the sea, till suddenly it is raised to a sort of shout.
John West, the terror of the surrounding country, the sheep-stealer and
burglar, had been found guilty.

"What is the sentence?" is asked by a hundred voices.

The answer is "Transportation for Life."

But there was one standing aloof on the hill, whose inquiring eye
wandered over the crowd with indescribable anguish, whose pallid cheek
grew more and more ghastly at every denunciation of the culprit, and
who, when at last the sentence was pronounced, fell insensible upon the
green-sward. It was the burglar's son.

When the boy recovered from his swoon, it was late in the afternoon; he
was alone; the faint tinkling of the sheep-bell had again replaced the
sound of the human chorus of expectation, and dread, and jesting; all
was peaceful, he could not understand why he lay there, feeling so weak
and sick. He raised himself tremulously and looked around, the turf was
cut and spoiled by the trampling of many feet. All his life of the last
few months floated before his memory, his residence in his father's
hovel with ruffianly comrades, the desperate schemes he heard as he
pretended to sleep on his lowly bed, their expeditions at night, masked
and armed, their hasty returns, the news of his father's capture, his
own removal to the house of some female in the town, the court, the
trial, the condemnation.

The father had been a harsh and brutal parent, but he had not positively
ill-used his boy. Of the great and merciful Father of the fatherless the
child knew nothing. He deemed himself alone in the world. Yet grief was
not his pervading feeling, nor the shame of being known as the son of a
transport. It was revenge which burned within him. He thought of the
crowd which had come to feast upon his father's agony; he longed to tear
them to pieces, and he plucked savagely a handful of the grass on which
he leant. Oh, that he were a man! that he could punish them
all--all--the spectators first, the constables, the judge, the jury, the
witnesses--one of the