against
me. But I compare the feelings on these two occasions only as regards
their intensity: in nature they were very different indeed. On the
former, they were those of excruciating agony; on the latter, those of
excessive joy. As we approached the house, I descried one at the door.
It was a female figure. It was my mother. I gasped for breath. I flew
over the ground. I felt it not beneath my feet. I would not be
restrained by my father, who kept calling to me. My mother fixed her
gaze on me, wondering at my excited manner--wondering who I could be;
all unconscious, as I could perceive by her vacant though earnest look,
that I was her son--- the darling of her heart. But a mother's eye is
quick. Another moment, and a shriek of wild joy and surprise announced
that I was recognised; in the next, we were in each other's arms, wrapt
in a speechless agony of bliss!

My father, whom I had left a long way behind, came up to us while we
were locked together in this silent embrace, and stood by us for a few
seconds without speaking a word, then passed quietly into the house,
leaving us to ourselves.

"My son, my son!" exclaimed my mother, so soon as the fulness of her
feelings would allow of utterance, "you have been cruel, cruel to your
mother. But I will not upbraid you. In seeing you again--in clasping you
once more to my bosom--I am repaid a thousandfold for all you have made
me suffer."

With what further passed between us, I need not detain the reader.

The tender expressions of a mother and son meeting under such
circumstances as we met, being the language of nature, the embodiment of
feelings which all ran conceive, there is no occasion for dilating on
them in my particular case. I pass on to other things of more general,
or at least more uncommon interest.

The first day of my arrival at my father's farm was passed entirely
within doors in social communion, and in bringing up that arrear of
interchange in thought and feeling which our separation for so long a
period had created.

On the following day I commenced work with my father; and although I
had done my duty faithfully by both the masters I had served since I
came to New South Wales, I soon found the difference between compulsory
and voluntary labour.

In the former case I certainly wrought diligently, but as certainly not
cheerfully. There was an absence of spirit that quickly gave rise to
listlessness and fatigue, and that left the physical energies