A very pleasant piece of intelligence greeted me soon after these incidents; it was nothing less than my removal from the care of my unkind aunt to the roof of my mother. Weary of her widowhood, she had again become a wife. My new parent was a widower with one son; a carpenter by occupation, in the employ of the Duke of Marlborough. Great was my joy when this fact was communicated to my young mind. I hailed it as a deliverance from bondage, and with beaming eyes and cheerful face hurried to bid adieu to my classmates in the day and in the Sunday school--a sad proof of the unfitness of my aunt for her task; since a child properly treated, will love its _home_ too well to quit it without a tear; and if parents and guardians wish to prevent their children from being wanderers and stragglers through the wide world, let me bid them exert the utmost effort to make their home pleasant. Throw a charm round it, make it enchanted ground, cause it to become, in the language of a living poet, “The fairy ring of bliss” and then your children will love it too well to wander. But I was now about to leave Wanstead, and, although delighted to be rid of the surveillance of a cross old relation, there were some things which threw an air of sadness occasionally over my mind. There were many pleasant associations connected with the place; its beautiful park, with herds of timid deer grazing under its tall oaks, upon whose green old heads the sun had shone for centuries; the venerable mansion, seated like a queen amid the sylvan scene; the old parish church, with its gorgeously painted windows, to which I had often walked on the Sabbath with my fellow-scholars in the Sabbath school, and beside whose deep-toned organ I had sat listening to the learned priest; the annual hunt at Easter, in which I had often joined the crew of idle lads that gave chase to the distracted deer; and the pleasant walks, made cheerful by the songs of innumerable birds, in Epping forest, were all to be left--perhaps forever. This thought made me somewhat sad, but it was swallowed up in the joy I felt when my mother appeared to conduct me to Bladen, some sixty miles from London, which was the place of her abode since her marriage.