"Why, you did not think so badly of me," he said, "as to think that I should forget the woman who was a mother to me.
"Father," he said,
"--For I have found my real father, Mrs. Dickson, as you always said I should, some day--
"It is to this good woman that I owe what I am. But for her, I might now be a laboring man; but it is to her kindness, to her good advice, to her lessons, that I owe everything. It was she who taught me that I should so behave that, if my parents ever found me, they should have no cause to be ashamed of me. She was, indeed, as a mother to me; and this lodge was my home, rather than the work house, inside.
"Ah! And here is Sam!"
Sam Dickson, coming out at this moment, stood in open-mouthed astonishment, at seeing his wife standing with her hand in that of a gentleman.
"Oh, Sam! Who do you think this is?"
Sam made no reply, but stared at Tom, with all his eyes.
"If it warn't that he be drowned and dead, long ago," he said, at last, "I should say it was Will Gale, growed up and got to be a gentleman. I shouldn't ha' knowed him, at first; but when he smiles, I don't think as how I can be far wrong."
"You are right, Sam. I am the boy you and your wife were so kind to, from the time you picked him up, just where we are standing; and whom you last handed over to go aboard a smack, at Yarmouth. She was--as you have heard--run down in the North Sea; but I was saved, in the ship which ran over her, and was taken on it to the East. There--after being wrecked again, and going through lots of adventures--I went to India; enlisted there, and fought through the Afghan war.