and-thirty years,--there is an inn with a little green and trees
before it; and by the trees there is an open carriage. It is our
carriage. Yes, there are Prince and Blucher, the horses; and my
parents in the carriage. Oh! how I had been counting the days until
this one came! Oh! how happy had I been to see them yesterday! But
there was that fourpence. All the journey down the toast had choked
me, and the coffee poisoned me.

I was in such a state of remorse about the fourpence, that I forgot
the maternal joy and caresses, the tender paternal voice. I pulled out
the twenty-four shillings and eightpence with a trembling hand.

"Here's your money," I gasp out, "which Mr. P---- owes you, all but
fourpence. I owed three-and-sixpence to Hawker out of my money for a
pencil-case, and I had none left, and I took fourpence of yours, and
had some coffee at a shop."

I suppose I must have been choking whilst uttering this confession.

"My dear boy," says the governor, "why didn't you go and breakfast at
the hotel?"

"He must be starved," says my mother.

I had confessed; I had been a prodigal; I had been taken back to my
parents' arms again. It was not a very great crime as yet, or a very
long career of prodigality; but don't we know that a boy who takes a
pin which is not his own, will take a thousand pounds when occasion
serves, brings his parents' grey heads with sorrow to the grave, and
carry his own to the gallows? Witness the career of Dick Idle, upon
whom our friend Mr. Sala has been discoursing. Dick only began by
playing pitch-and-toss on a tombstone: playing fair, for what we know:
and even for that sin he was promptly caned by the beadle. The bamboo
was ineffectual to cane that reprobate's bad courses out of him. From
pitch-and-toss he proceeded to manslaughter if necessary: to highway
robbery; to Tyburn and the rope there. Ah! Heaven be thanked, my
parents' heads are still above the grass, and mine still out of the
noose.

As I look up from my desk, I see Tunbridge Wells Common and the rocks,
the strange familiar place which I remember forty years ago. Boys
saunter over the green with stumps and cricket-bats. Other boys gallop
by on the riding-master's hacks. I protest it is "Cramp, Riding
Master," as it used to be in the reign of George IV., and that Centaur
Cramp must be at least a hundred years old. Yonder comes a footman
with a bundle of novels from the library. Are they as good as _our_
novels? Oh! how de