This appointment I accepted, and held
for thirty years, I trust with credit to myself, and satisfaction to my
superiors. At the end of this period, feeling my health giving way, my
father and mother having both, in the meantime, died, and having all
that time scraped together a competency, I returned to my native land,
and have written these little memoirs in one of the pleasantest little
retirements on the banks of the Tweed.
I have only now to add, that I had frequent opportunities of seeing both
Lindsay and his wife after the establishment of my innocence, and that
no persons would more sincerely rejoice in that event than they did. My
poor mother, whom my father had made aware of my situation soon after my
arrival, and who had borne the intelligence much better than we
expected, it put nearly distracted with joy.
"My puir laddie," she exclaimed, "I aye kent to be innocent. But noo the
world 'll ken it too, and I can die happy."
THE AMATEUR ROBBERY.
If there is anything more than another of which civilisation has reason
to be proud, it is the amelioration that has been effected in punishment
for crimes. Nor is it yet very long since we began to get quit of the
shame of our folly and inhumanity, if we have not traces of these yet,
coming out like sympathetic ink dried by the choler of self-perfection
and a false philosophy, as in such writings as the latter-day pamphlets.
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