or instance, in that lower jaw, and as he bent now over
the fire, and his thoughts wandered away to other times and places, the
whole appearance of the man seemed to change and become milder and
kindlier; yet when some slight noise makes him lift his head and look
round, there is the old expression back again, and he looks as reckless
and desperate as ever; what he is is more apparent, and the ghost of
what he might have been has not wholly departed.

I can picture to myself that man scowling behind the bayonet line at
Maida, or rapidly and coolly serving his gun at Trafalgar, helping to
win the dominion of all seas, or taking his trick at the helm through
arctic iceblocks with Parry, or toiling on with steadfast Sturt,
knee-deep in the sand of the middle desert, patiently yet hopelessly
scanning the low quivering line of the north-west horizon.

In fifty situations where energy and courage are required, I can
conceive that man a useful citizen. Yet here he is on the lone moor, on
the winter's night, a reckless, cursing, thrice convicted man. His very
virtues,--his impatient energy and undeniable courage,--his greatest
stumbling-blocks, leading him into crimes which a lazy man or a coward
would have shrunk from. Deserted apparently by God and man, he crouched
there over the low fire, among his native rocks, and meditated fresh
villanies.

He had been transported at eighteen for something, I know not what,
which earned transportation in those days, and since then his naturally
violent temper, aggravated instead of being broken by penal discipline,
had earned him three fresh convictions in the colony. From the last of
these sentences he had escaped, with a cunning and address which had
baffled the vigilance of the Sydney police, good as they were, and had
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,