"Now, boys, I ask nobody to believe it, but she believed it—to the day of her death. It made her happy to believe it, to think that in some mysterious way she had helped to save me, as mothers never know how or when some word of theirs may save their wandering sons.
"For I was a wanderer still: I staid with her only a month, while my nuggets lasted; then I worked my way back to Australia, and began again in the same way, and yet a new way—new in one thing, at least, that on every Sunday of my life I wrote home to my mother. And when at length I came home, too late for her, alas! it was, I hope, not quite too late for the rest of you. Bad is the best, maybe, but I've tried to do my best."
"Oh, Uncle Dick!"—for he had been as good as a father to some of us—sent us to school and to college, and, what we liked a great deal better, taken us fishing and shooting, and given us all sorts of fun.
"So, boys," said he, smiling at our demonstrations of affection—and yet he liked to be loved, we were sure of that—"you have a sneaking kindness for me, after all. And you don't think me altogether a villain, even though I did take my sister's grapes?"
Note.—It may interest readers to know that this incident is really "founded on fact"—one of those inexplicable facts that one sometimes meets with in real life, which are stranger than anything we authors invent for our "stories."
"I DON'T WANT A SWITCH IN MY 'TOCKING, SANTA CAUS."