e has brought to his feet, I cannot but recall that sorrowful
evening in the gardener's cottage, when a son was restored but to be torn
away. The sisters came in from their day's work,--both well-favoured
lasses, with John's eyes and hair,--and cooked the simple meal of broth
and porridge, and the fowl they had kept so long against the captain's
home-coming. He carved with many a light word that cost him dear. Did
Janet reca' the simmer nights they had supped here, wi' the bumclocks
bizzin' ower the candles? And was Nancy, the cow, still i' the byre?
And did the bees still give the same bonnie hiney, and were the red
apples still in the far orchard? Ay, Meg had thocht o' him that autumn,
and ran to fetch them with her apron to her face, to come back smiling
through her tears. So it went; and often a lump would rise in my throat
that I could not eat, famished as I was, and the mother and sisters
scarce touched a morsel of the feast.

The one never failing test of a son, my dears, lies in his treatment of
his mother, and from that hour forth I had not a doubt of John Paul. He
was a man who had seen the world and become, in more than one meaning of
the word, a gentleman. Whatever foibles he may have had, he brought no
conscious airs and graces to this lowly place, but was again the humble
gardener's boy.

But time pressed, as it ever does. The hour came for us to leave, John
Paul firmly refusing to remain the night in a house that belonged to Mr.
Craik. Of the tenderness, nay, of the pity and cruelty of that parting,
I have no power to write. We knelt with bowed heads while the mother
prayed for the son, expatriated, whom she never hoped to see again on
this earth. She gave us bannocks of her own baking, and her last words
were to implore me always to be a friend to John Paul.

Then we went out into the night and walked all the way to Dumfries in
silence.

We lay that night at the sign of the "Twa Naigs," where Bonnie Prince
Charlie had rested in the Mars year(1715). Before I went to bed I called
for pen and paper, and by the light of a tallow dip sat down to compose a
letter to my grandfather, telling him that I was alive and well, and
recounting as much of my adventures as I could. I said that I was going
to London, where I would see Mr. Dix, and would take passage thence for
America. I prayed that he had been able to bear up against the ordeal of
my disappearance. I dwelt upon the obligations I was under to John Paul