he two.

"Madam," said he, "I am glad of the opportunity of giving you and your
family an idea of the difficulties and miseries which beset a large
class of your fellow-beings of whom you seldom have any chance of
knowing anything at all, but of whom you hear all sorts of the most
misleading accounts. Now, I am a poor man. I have suffered the greatest
miseries that poverty can inflict. I am here, suspected of having
committed a crime. It is possible that I may be put to considerable
difficulty and expense in proving my innocence."

"I shouldn't wonder," I interrupted. To this remark he paid no
attention.

"Considering all this," he continued, "you may not suppose, madam, that
as a boy I was brought up most respectably and properly. My mother was a
religious woman, and my father was a boat-builder. I was sent to school,
and my mother has often told me that I was a good scholar. But she died
when I was about sixteen, and I am sure had this not happened I should
never have been even suspected of breaking the laws of my country. Not
long after her death my father appeared to lose interest in his
business, and took to rowing about the river instead of building boats
for other people to row. Very often he went out at night, and I used to
wonder why he should care to be on the water in the darkness, and
sometimes in the rain. One evening at supper he said to me: 'Thomas, you
ought to know how to row in the dark as well as in the daytime. I am
going up the river to-night, and you can come with me.'

"It was about my ordinary bedtime when we took a boat with two pair of
oars, and we pulled up the river about three miles above the city."

"What city?" I asked.

"The city where I was born, sir," he said, "and the name of which I must
be excused from mentioning for reasons connected with my only surviving
parent. There were houses on the river bank, but they were not very near
each other. Some of them had lights in them, but most of them were dark,
as it must have been after eleven o'clock. Before one of them my father
stopped rowing for a moment and looked at it pretty hard. It seemed to
be all dark, but as we pulled on a little I saw a light in the back of
the house.

"My father said nothing, but we kept on, though pulling very easy for a
mile or two, and then we turned and floated down with the tide. 'You
might as well rest, Thomas,' said he, 'for you have worked pretty hard.'

"We floated slowly, for the tide was just