Having formed the resolve recorded at the close of the last chapter, I began immediately to make preparations to carry it into execution; and now once more I resume my pen to recount my further adventures.
I had lived for years past a life of constant uneasiness and anxiety; haunted, as it were, by the spectres of wife and child, pale, weeping, holding out imploring hands, as if calling to me for aid and deliverance. From the moment that I began to prepare for my new journey and search, I felt a lightness, an exhilaration, a relief, as if a great stone had been plucked out of my heart. Now, at last, I had again something to live and to strive for; a shadow perhaps, one so vain and unsubstantial, that ever since the failure of my former searches, it had seemed idle to attempt to pursue it. Yet how much better to pursue even a shadow, if one can but prevail upon himself for the moment to think it real, than to sit still in hopeless and idle vacuity! Man was made to hope and to act.
Before leaving England, I took care to provide myself with passports as a British subject, under the name of captain Archer Moore, by which I was known to my English acquaintances; and with letters also of introduction to the mercantile correspondents of those acquaintances in the principal commercial towns of America. It was in the character of a traveller, curious to investigate American society, that I revisited the country of my birth.
As it was from Boston that I had taken my departure, so I resolved to reland there, and thence to retrace my steps to the scenes of my youth, as the first means towards obtaining, if possible, some clew to the object of my search.
It was now more than twenty years since I had hastily fled from Boston, a panting fugitive, eager to
