38 THE TWO APPRENTICES.

he and his wife accordingly came up, two weeks be-
fore the time of her departure, to provide for her
comforts on the voyage, and to take leave of her for
ever. She sailed at the beginning of August ; and
the convict ship in which was her husband at the end
of the same month.

Their careers seemed thus brought to an end in
this hemisphere ; and therefore leaving them, the one
with his weaknesses and his misdeeds, the other expi-
ating the errors of her youth by a life of patience and
duty, we will turn more particularly to the son, who
will henceforth be one of the principal heroes of our
little story.

 

CHAPTER III.
THE TWO APPRENTICES,

Tue youth, like his father, was called Louis, with
the additional Christian name of William, which his
mother had given to him in love and grateful remem-
brance of her brother-in-law Mr. Osborne ; and now
his good uncle and aunt, anxious to remove from him
any infamy connected with his father’s misconduct,
‘transposed and slightly altered his names, and called
him Edward Lewis Williams. Edward Williams
‘was therefore only an ordinary young apprentice—it
was given out that he was an orphan—with whose
history the world had nothing to do; and though
Mr. Isaacs and the whole household soon saw that he
was not treated like an ordinary apprentice, the world
did not readily conjecture that he was the son of the
convict Edwards.

“2,
.

“Let Williams come into the parlour,” said Mr.