service, and whose
back was scarred with the lash, could never be received among the gently
nurtured. Let him lay claim to his name and rights, what then? He was a
convicted felon, and his name and rights had been taken from him by the
law. Let him go and tell Maurice Frere that he was his lost cousin. He
would be laughed at. Let him proclaim aloud his birth and innocence, and
the convict-sheds would grin, and the convict overseer set him to
harder labour. Let him even, by dint of reiteration, get his wild story
believed, what would happen? If it was heard in England--after the
lapse of years, perhaps--that a convict in the chain-gang in Macquarie
Harbour--a man held to be a murderer, and whose convict career was
one long record of mutiny and punishment--claimed to be the heir to an
English fortune, and to own the right to dispossess staid and worthy
English folk of their rank and station, with what feeling would the
announcement be received? Certainly not with a desire to redeem this
ruffian from his bonds and place him in the honoured seat of his dead
father. Such intelligence would be regarded as a calamity, an unhappy
blot upon a fair reputation, a disgrace to an honoured and unsullied
name. Let him succeed, let him return again to the mother who had by
this time become reconciled, in a measure, to his loss; he would, at the
best, be to her a living shame, scarcely less degrading than that which
she had dreaded.

But success was almost impossible. He did not dare to retrace his steps
through the hideous labyrinth into which he had plunged. Was he to show
his scarred shoulders as a proof that he was a gentleman and an innocent
man? Was he to relate the nameless infamies of Macquarie Harbour as a
proof that he was entitled to receive the hospitalities of the generous,
and to sit, a respected guest, at the tables of men of refinement? Was
he to quote the horrible slang of the prison-ship, and retail the filthy
jests of the chain-gang and the hulks, as a proof that he was a fit
companion for pure-minded women and innocent children? Suppose even
that he could conceal the name of the real criminal, and show himself
guiltless of the crime for which he had been condemned, all the wealth
in the world could not buy back that blissful ignorance of evil which
had once been his. All the wealth in the world could not purchase the
self-respect which had been cut out of him by the lash, or banish from
his brain the memory of his d