What can I say to you?" cried Major Harvey. "How can I thank you enough? but for you I might have gone to the grave mourning for my son. I owe you my child's life."

'And I owe you, Major Harvey," answered the stranger in clear, calm tones, "I owe you a blasted life, and long years of imprisonment, and separation, from those I love the best."

Who are you?" exclaimed Harvey, starting and turning pale. "I don't know your face, but surely your voice is familiar. It cannot be, the sea cannot give up her dead, or I would say you are

Here the stranger interrupted him with "I am David Gordon, from Grey Craigs;" and so saying, Gordon leant back exhausted and faint.

If a thunderbolt had fallen at Harvey's feet he could not have been more astonished; and, brave soldier though he was, when he looked on the man he had so cruelly wronged, and thought how much he owed him, he bent his head on his hand and groaned in bitterness of spirit and shame.

Just then the doctor arrived, and putting his arm through that of his patient, walked him off to his cabin without further talk.

The next day, upon Gordon's appearance on deck, again Major Harvey met him to express as before his thanks for the saving of his son, and at the same time to testify to his bitter regret at the

part he had acted years before, and the injury he had done. "But how comes it," he asked, "that the report got up, Gordon, that you were drowned when the 'Fury' went down ?"

"I alone was saved," he answered.

"I-with the

help of a spar-swam for a few hours, until picked up by an enemy's boat, only to be confined for years in a French prison, the doors of which have just been thrown open, and I am free. My friends know not of my being alive; can you tell me anything of them?"

"Alas, no!" said Harvey sadly; "I have been a wanderer too since that fatal night; but tell me, Gordon, can you forgive me? I cannot forgive myself."

"I have no right to deny forgiveness to a fellow sinner," answered Gordon; " and yet, Major Harvey, I cannot make light of the sorrow and misery you caused; you must seek forgiveness from another, a higher One than me, even the righteous God, whose laws you broke."

"Tell me, Gordon," exclaimed Harvey, "tell me if you knew whose son it was you risked your life to save?"

"I did," was the answer, "for the boy himself had told me a few minutes before; but what of that, Major Harvey, surely you would not have had me visit the father's sins on the head of his unoffending

child; besides, I only did what any one would have done in like circumstances; and had I not struck my arm against part of the rigging when leaping overboard, there would have been no great risk."

"And yet you must have hated me," said the soldier, struck by a nobility of conduct he could not have expected, or even imagined.

"Seven years in a French dungeon subdues man's passions," was the calm reply.

"After all, Gordon," said Harvey, "perhaps you have been a happier man than me. He who is sinned against is more to be envied than the sinner. The scene that moonlight night has never been a day absent from my thoughts, and it has haunted my dreams by night. I would have given all I possessed of this world's wealth to have retraced my steps, or wipe away the memory of that event; and the cry of your uncle has sounded louder in my ears than the din of battle, Dinna quench the only coal I have left, and make my hearth desolate.' And your look too, Gordon, haunted me; you neither sought to escape nor implored pity, but calmly and with dignity submitted to your hard fate."

Long before the ship reached the shores of Old England Gordon had recovered his health and strength, and had been able to join the party of officers on board, where he was hailed as a hero, for Harvey had generously told the tale of his sufferings and

wrongs. No man is more alive to noble conduct than a British officer, and the bearing and tone of Gordon made a deep impression on all the company, especially on Harvey himself. Arthur was his sworn ally, and Mrs. Harvey, the Lilian Arbuthnot of old, loved him as a dear friend, feeling not only that he had saved her son's life, but that he had also, by his example, made her husband a better and a wiser

man.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

"Art thou come with the heart of thy childhood back,
The free, the pure, the kind?

Thus murmured the trees on my homeward tract,
As they played with the mountain wind.

"Hast thou been true to thine early love?
Whispered my native streams;

Doth the spirit reared amidst hill and grove
Still revere its first high dreams?"

-F. HEMANS.

FFIE MARTIN was walking up to the Glen for she heard that her old friend had been

worse. The wind was in her face, freshening her cheeks into a glowing colour, and a rather snell wind it was, though it was in July. The green springy turf of the sea braes was glittering and trembling under the sunshine, for rain had fallen heavily the previous evening. The plash of the waves on the shore, the sparkling of the light on the water, and the red sails of sundry fishing-boats scudding before the breeze made a pretty picture for her eye to rest upon. Then, as she turned her back upon the town, with its noise and clatter, there was the sweet music