When Edwards had ended his relation, Harley stood a while looking at him in silence; at last he pressed him in his arms, and when he had given vent to the fulness of his heart by a shower of tears, “Edwards,” said he, “let me hold thee to my bosom, let me imprint the virtue of thy sufferings on my soul. Come, my honoured veteran! let me endeavour to soften the last days of a life, worn out in the service of humanity; call me also thy son, and let me cherish thee as a father.”’ Edwards, from whom the recollection of his own suffering had scarced forced a tear, now blubbered like a boy; he could not speak his gratitude, but by some short exclamations of blessings upon Harley. CHAPTER XXXV. HE MISSES AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE.—AN ADVENTURE CONSEQUENT UPON IT. WHEN they had arrived within a little way of the village they journeyed to, Harley stopped short, and looked steadfastly on the mouldering walls of a ruined house that stood on the road side. “Oh, heavens!” he cried, “what do I see: silent, unroofed, and desolate! Are all thy gay tenants gone? do I hear their hum no more Edwards, look there, look there? the scene of my infant joys, my earliest friendships, laid waste and ruinous! That was the very school where I was boarded when you were at South-hill; ’tis but a twelve-month since I saw it standing, and its benches filled with cherubs: that opposite side of the road was the green on which they sported; see it now ploughed up! I would have given fifty times its value to have saved it from the sacrilege of that plough.” “Dear sir,” replied Edwards, “perhaps they have left it from choice, and may have got another spot as good.” “They cannot,” said Harley, “they cannot; I shall never see the sward covered with its daisies, nor pressed by the dance of the dear innocents: I shall never see that stump decked with the garlands which their little hands had gathered. These two long stones, which now lie at the foot of it, were once the supports of a hut I myself assisted to rear: I have sat on the sods within it, when we had spread our banquet of apples before us, and been more blessed—Oh! Edwards, infinitely more blessed, than ever I shall be again.” Just then a woman passed them on the road, and discovered some signs of wonder at the attitude of Harley, who stood, with his hands folded together, looking with a moistened eye on the fallen pillars of the hut. He was too much entranced in thought to observe her at all, but Edwards, civilly accosting her, desired to know if that had not been the school-house, and how it came into the condition in which they now saw it. “Alack a day!” said she, “it was the school-house indeed; but to be sure, sir, the squire has pulled it down because it stood in the way of his prospects.” “What! how! prospects! pulled down!” cried Harley. “Yes, to be sure, sir; and the green, where the children used to play, he has ploughed up, because, he said, they hurt his fence on the other side of it.”