“It was only within the past twelvemonth, when surrounded by poverty, and the victim of an incurable malady, that as I lay restlessly upon my bed, the memory of my cruel conduct toward my innocent brother has pressed heavily upon my mind. Often have I busied my brain with vain conjectures respecting your fate—whether you still lived—and if you had escaped the whirlpool of crime and sin within which the young and unadvised are but too frequently engulfed. When I thought, as I sometimes did, that you might have fallen—my sensations were those of the most acute anguish, for I felt that the sin would all be mine, and that at the judgment day I should be called to the throne of God to hear him pronounce the fearful penalty for the murder of a brother’s soul. “At length, through the illness of my daughter, who was very unexpectedly thrown upon the benevolence of your wife, I obtained from your servant some information concerning the family to whom I owed so much, and discovered in the hand stretched forth to aid my child, the wife of my discarded brother. It would be vain to attempt a description of my emotions as I learned this fact. Joy that you were not forever lost, predominated—and then was added shame, and a consciousness of my own unworthiness to receive the benefits which henceforth you daily conferred upon me, as I felt that you must have recognized me—for I had given to your wife an account of my previous life. Each successive service lavished upon my family by your own, sunk like a weight of lead upon my heart, while as I saw how generously you repaid me for the evil I had committed against you, I longed to cast myself at your feet and supplicate forgiveness. But one thought deterred me. It was the fear that you might deem me actuated by interested motives—by the desire to leave my daughter at my death under the care of her now wealthy uncle. And so, for a time, I set aside the yearning for a reconciliation. But it returned with double force when this, which I know will be my last illness, came upon me, and I felt that I could not die happily without hearing from your lips a pardon for my misdeed.” The weeping Julie had stood by the bedside listening attentively as her father spoke, one hand resting affectionately in her uncle’s, while the other was clasped in that of his wife. Though scarcely six years old when Harry Colman was dismissed from his brother’s house, she had ever retained a vivid recollection of the event. She remembered how passionately she had wept when told by her nurse that she would probably never again behold her favorite, and how indignant she had felt when they said that it was owing to his own naughty conduct he had been sent away—while her ignorance of the fact that her uncle’s name was not the same as her father’s prevented a recognition of him when they again met. * * * * *