Not long after his return to England, Will paid a visit to Ely workhouse. He was accompanied by the colonel, and the two men walked together up to the gate of the workhouse. He rang at the bell, and a woman opened the door. She curtsied, at seeing two tall, soldier-like gentlemen before her. "Your name is Mrs. Dickson, I think?" the younger said. The woman gave a violent start, and gazed earnestly at him. "It is Will Gale!" she exclaimed, drawing back a step. "They said you were dead, years ago." "No, I am very much alive, Mrs. Dickson; and glad, most glad, to see an old friend again." "Good Lord!" the woman exclaimed, "it is the boy himself, sure enough;" and, for a moment, she seemed as if she would have rushed into his arms; and then she drew back, abashed at his appearance. Tom, however, held out his arms; and the woman fell sobbing into them. "Why, you did not think so badly of me," he said, "as to think that I should forget the woman who was a mother to me. "Father," he said, "--For I have found my real father, Mrs. Dickson, as you always said I should, some day-- "It is to this good woman that I owe what I am. But for her, I might now be a laboring man; but it is to her kindness, to her good advice, to her lessons, that I owe everything. It was she who taught me that I should so behave that, if my parents ever found me, they should have no cause to be ashamed of me. She was, indeed, as a mother to me; and this lodge was my home, rather than the work house, inside. "Ah! And here is Sam!" Sam Dickson, coming out at this moment, stood in open-mouthed astonishment, at seeing his wife standing with her hand in that of a gentleman. "Oh, Sam! Who do you think this is?" Sam made no reply, but stared at Tom, with all his eyes. "If it warn't that he be drowned and dead, long ago," he said, at last, "I should say it was Will Gale, growed up and got to be a gentleman. I shouldn't ha' knowed him, at first; but when he smiles, I don't think as how I can be far wrong." "You are right, Sam. I am the boy you and your wife were so kind to, from the time you picked him up, just where we are standing; and whom you last handed over to go aboard a smack, at Yarmouth. She was--as you have heard--run down in the North Sea; but I was saved, in the ship which ran over her, and was taken on it to the East. There--after being wrecked again, and going through lots of adventures--I went to India; enlisted there, and fought through the Afghan war. "I am a captain, now; and my name is no longer Will Gale, but Tom Ripon, for I have found my real father--this gentleman, Colonel Ripon." "Who feels," Colonel Ripon went on, "how much he and his son owe to your kindness, and that of your good wife, here; and who, as you will find, is not ungrateful. I have just bought an estate, down in Somersetshire; and I mean to install you and your wife in a pretty lodge, at the gates, with enough to live upon, comfortably, to the end of your lives."