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 that was natural enough in
itself, but which was probably owing to the fact that another child of the
first name had really left the institution a few months before Moses took
his leave. This Aaron Stone had been traced, first, as an apprentice to a
tradesman; thence into a regiment of foot in the British army, which
regiment had accompanied the rest of the forces, at the evacuation,
November 25th, 1783.

The Wetmores fancied they were now on the track of their child. He was
traced down to a period within a twelvemonth of that of the search, and