The commercial panic had sorely afflicted a special local manufacture in which a large number of men and women had been employed at Severntown. As Arthur was returning home, on the day following that evening when we saw him at work in the fields, he met a number of operatives thrown out of work, who with no chance of the factory being re-opened, had set out “on tramp.” Arthur questioned them, and found that on the next morning nearly a hundred families were going to leave by train for Liverpool on their way to Australia. Subscriptions had been entered into to promote a scheme of emigration started by the operatives themselves, and this first exodus would take place the next morning. Few of us but will remember, at some period of life, standing in a railway station, and watching the departure of a train containing some one the taking leave of whom excited all those human sensibilities which find vent in “The silent pressure of the hand Which friends too well can understand.” We have seen to the luggage, found out the best seat for our friend, advised him to keep clear of the draft, begged of him to write at an early day, and done a variety of other trivial things by way of keeping the little time occupied, and smothering as much as possible the sorrows of parting. And then, when the squeezing of the hand was over, and the engine had shrieked the signal of departure, and the train had moved off, and grown less and less until it was out of sight, we have stood gazing at the long lines of rails over which it had disappeared, with thoughts and regrets too deep for words. Let us not deny such touches of nature. The most querulous, petulant, hard-hearted of mortals have experienced these emotions, and with something of the fear that the future might sever those ties of friendship, the danger of the breaking of which Bulwer Lytton describes so forcibly when he says: “The true sadness is not in the pain of parting--it is in the when and the how you are to meet again with the face about to vanish from your view; from the passionate farewell to the woman who has your heart in her keeping, to the cordial good-bye exchanged with pleasant companions at a watering-place, a country-house, or the close of a festive day’s blithe and careless excursion--a chord, stronger or weaker, is snapped asunder in every parting, and Time’s busy fingers are not practised in re-splicing broken ties. Meet again you may: will it be in the same way? with the same sympathies? with the same sentiments? Will the souls, hurrying on in diverse paths, unite once more, as if the interval had been a dream? Rarely, rarely.” Here was Arthur’s inspiration; he read the simple thoughts and the attendant quotation in a newspaper. The parting with Lionel Hammerton had prepared him for it, and all of a sudden he said to himself, “This shall be my great picture, and I will call it ‘Seeking New Homes.’”