The young gentleman advanced direct towards him, and knelt by the side of his bed. "My father," he said, "give me your blessing!" The Earl turned away his head. "What, oh! what is my blessing worth?" he said; "but be it so. My blessing, the blessing of a father's fondest affection, be upon you. I have none now but you!" "If you would render that blessing of effect," replied Langford, "remember that on your life and health my fate may greatly depend. Be careful, then; cast away from you every thought and every feeling that may injure or agitate you, and strive for life and health, if not for your own sake, for your son's. Now, gentlemen, I am ready." The two justices and the constables accompanied him out of the room. "What think you of it?" asked Sir Thomas Waller, addressing his companion in a whisper as they went. The London magistrate replied by a peculiar contortion of countenance, and then added, "We must make as good a case of it as we can, if it be but to bear ourselves harmless." CHAPTER XXVII. We must now leave that part of the country to which we have so constantly adhered during the preceding portion of this true history, and lead the gentle reader with us along a road which, perhaps, he may never have travelled before, but which, if he ever have, he will doubtless remember at once, from the description we are about to give. Setting off in a line lying north-west from the little village of Moorhurst, and proceeding over the wild heath to which we have so often turned our steps, one road leads, after various turnings and meanderings, of which our ancestors were undoubtedly more fond than ourselves, as the reader already knows, to the county town. But in one of these turnings the road effects an object very different from the usual one, of merely going out of its way, and branches off into a country road, taking the direction of various small and remote towns. Now, from the want of care and neatness with which this branch road was kept at that time, it would in all probability have presented a very much larger proportion of ruts and sand than the larger road from which it was derived, and would have required double the time to travel each individual mile along its course which was required upon its parent road, had it not been for one circumstance. That circumstance was an extraordinary development of a stratum of very-hard stone in that part of the country, which, taking the place of the sand, just a quarter of a mile from the spot where the two roads separated, afforded--or, rather, might have afforded--equal pleasure and admiration to Mr. M'Adam, the geologists, and all the members of the stonoclastic race, if the period we speak of had not been before geologists were discovered, and when Mr. M'Adam was yet unborn.