ecurring again to the circumstances which had
led to my present unhappy position, and which were always floating
uppermost in my father's mind--

"That scoundrel, Digby," he said, "must have been at the bottom of the
mischief, Davie. It must have been he who put the spoon into your
pocket. What a fiendish contrivance!"

"I have always thought so, father," I replied; "and on my trial ventured
to hint it, as I also did to the turnkeys and jailers; but although none
said so directly, I saw very clearly that all considered it as a
ridiculous invention--a clumsy way of accounting for a very plain fact."

My father now proposed that I should start with him on the following
morning, per coach, for Liverpool, from which his farm was distant an
easy walk of some six or seven miles. On the following morning,
accordingly, after having duly acknowledged our worthy host's kindness,
we took our seats on the outside of the coach, and were soon whirling it
away merrily toward our destination.

During our journey, it gave both my father and I much painful thought
how we should break the matter of my unhappy position to my mother. It
would be death to her to learn it. At first we thought of concealing the
circumstances altogether; but the chances of her hearing it from others,
or making the discovery herself when she was unprepared for it, through
a hundred different means, finally determined us on communicating the
unpleasant intelligence ourselves; that is, my father undertook the
disagreeable task, meaning, however, to choose time and circumstance,
and to allow a day or two to elapse before he alluded to it.

Having arrived at Liverpool, we started on foot for my father's farm.
Should I attempt it, I would not find it easy to describe what were my
feelings at this moment, arising from the prospect of so soon beholding
that dear parent, whose image had ever been present to my mind, whose
kind tones were ever sounding in my ears like some heart-stirring and
well-remembered melody. They were overpowering. But when my father,
after we had walked for about an hour, raised his stick, and, pointing
to a neat farm-steading on the slope of a hill, and on the skirt of a
dense mountain forest that rose high behind it, said, "There's the
house, Davie," I thought I should have sunk on the ground. I had never
felt so agitated, excepting in that unhappy hour when I stood at the bar
of the Old Bailey, and heard sentence of transportation awarded