After some months, Mr. Jackson himself, in the warmth of his zeal, undertook a journey to Ireland; but returned, without having been able to discover any clue to the business. Advertisements were next resorted to, but no one claimed Edmund. The letter had said, that "those it concerned most were," in the nurse's phraseology, "not to the fore." Whether death, or absence from the kingdom was meant, it was impossible to say. The harvest season of the next year came and went, but the wandering knight of the reaping-hook was heard of no more; and Mrs. Montgomery, while her better judgment condemned the feeling, could not conceal from herself, that she experienced a sensation of reprieve, on finding that she was not immediately to be called upon to resign her little charge. Poor Edmund had now become to her a kind of sacred pledge; every thought and feeling that regarded him, was associated with the memory of her dear departed child, who had taken so benevolent a delight in protecting and cherishing the helpless being she had rescued from misery, and almost certain death. Could the mourning mother then leave undone any thing that that dear child, had she lived, would have done? The absolute seclusion too, in which grief for the loss of her daughter, induced Mrs. Montgomery to live, gave all that concerned this object, of an interest thus connected with the feelings of the time, an importance in her eyes, which, under any other circumstances, would scarcely, perhaps, have been natural. Gradually, however, the prospect of discovering who Edmund's parents were, faded almost entirely away; but the conviction that they must be noble was, from the period of the receipt of the nurse's packet, firmly fixed on the mind, both of his benefactress and of Mr. Jackson. The style, indeed, of the letter itself, left no doubt of the veracity of the writer; while the manners of him who had been the bearer of the strange epistle, the conversation of the man and woman on the Keswick road, nay, the very state in which the poor child was first found--were all corroborating evidences. CHAPTER XX. "Thy fame, like the growing tree of the vale, Shall arise in its season, and thy deeds Shine like those of thy fathers. But go not Yet to the bloody strife; for thy young arm scarce can draw the heavy sword of Artho, Or lift Temora's spear." "The blue arms of the lovely boy Invest him, as grey clouds the rising sun." Lord L. remembered, and even experienced, something of a consolatory feeling, in faithfully performing the promise which, within the first happy year of his marriage, he had made to his beloved wife, and which had seemed to give her so much pleasure: we mean that which respected placing and advancing Edmund in the navy. His lordship accordingly wrote from abroad to his friend, Lord Fitz Ullin, and Edmund, at the age of twelve, was received into the naval college at Portsmouth.