arrived home, two years before this time, after twentyone years'
absence, at his native village in the moor.

None there knew him, or even guessed who he was. His brother, a small
farmer, who would have taken him to his heart had he recognised him,
always regarded him as a suspicious stranger; and what cut him deeper
still, his mother, his old, half-blind, palsied mother, whose memory he
had in some sort cherished through the horrors of the hulk, the
convict-ship, the chaingang, and the bush, knew him not. Only once,
when he was speaking in her presence, she said abruptly,--

"The voice of him is like the voice of my boy that was took away. But
he was smooth-faced, like a girl, and ye're a dark, wrinkled man.
'Sides, he died years agone, over the water."

But the old lady grew thoughtful and silent from that day, and three
weeks after she was carried up to her grave,--


"By the little grey church on the windy hill."


At the funeral, William Lee, the man whom I have been describing,
pushed quietly through the little crowd, and as they threw the first
earth on the coffin, stood looking over the shoulder of his brother,
who was unconscious of his existence.

Like many men who have been much in great solitudes, and have gone days
and weeks sometimes without meeting a fellow-creature, he had acquired
the habit of thinking aloud, and if anyone had been listening they