His very virtues,--his impatient energy and undeniable courage,--his greatest stumbling-blocks, leading him into crimes which a lazy man or a coward would have shrunk from.

Deserted apparently by God and man, he crouched there over the low fire, among his native rocks, and meditated fresh villanies.
He had been transported at eighteen for something, I know not what, which earned transportation in those days, and since then his naturally violent temper, aggravated instead of being broken by penal discipline, had earned him three fresh convictions in the colony.

From the last of these sentences he had escaped, with a cunning and address which had baffled the vigilance of the Sydney police, good as they were, and had arrived home, two years before this time, after twentyone years' absence, at his native village in the moor.
None there knew him, or even guessed who he was.

His brother, a small farmer, who would have taken him to his heart had he recognised him, always regarded him as a suspicious stranger; and what cut him deeper still, his mother, his old, half-blind, palsied mother, whose memory he had in some sort cherished through the horrors of the hulk, the convict-ship, the chaingang, and the bush, knew him not.

Only once, when he was speaking in her presence, she said abruptly,-- "The voice of him is like the voice of my boy that was took away.