To dissipate the gloom which hung over the whole party, and beguile the half hour they intended to rest in that sweet spot, Mrs Sparks drew out a Philadelphia newspaper which somebody had given her upon the road, and called their attention to the deaths and marriages, that they might see what changes were taking place in a city that still interested them, though they were banished for ever from its borders.  She had hardly opened the paper when her eye glanced on an article which she was too much excited to read.  Amos, wondering at the emotion displayed, gently disengaged the paper, and read:  ’Bank robber—­Sparks not the man.’  His own feelings were as powerfully interested as those of his wife, but his nerves were stronger; and he read out, to an audience whose ears devoured every syllable of the glad tidings, an account of the conviction and execution of a wretch in Albany, and who had confessed, among other daring and heinous crimes, the robbery of the Philadelphia bank, accounting for the disappearance of the property, and exonerating Sparks, whose face he had never seen.  These were tidings of great joy to the weary wayfarers beneath the sycamore; their resolution to return to their native city was formed at once, and before a week had passed, they were slowly journeying to the capital of the State.

Meanwhile, an extraordinary revulsion of feeling had taken place at Philadelphia.  Newspapers and other periodicals which had formerly been loud in condemnation of the locksmith, now blazoned abroad the robber’s confession—­wondered how any man could have been for a moment suspected upon such evidence as was adduced on the trial—­drew pictures of the domestic felicity once enjoyed by the Sparkses, and then painted—­partly from what was known of the reality, and partly from imagination—­their sufferings, privations, and wrongs in the pilgrimage they had performed in fleeing from an unjust but damnatory accusation.  The whole city rang with the story.  Old friends and neighbours, who had been the first to shun them, now became the loud and vehement partisans of the family.  The whole city was anxious to know where they were.  Some reported that they had perished in the woods; others that they had been burned in a prairie, which not a few believed; while another class averred that the locksmith, driven to desperation, had first destroyed his family, and then himself.  All these stories of course created as much excitement as the robbery of the bank had done before, only that this time the tide set the other way; and when the poor locksmith and his family, who had been driven like vagabonds from the city, approached its suburbs, they were met, congratulated, and followed by thousands:  in fact, theirs was almost a triumphal entry.  And as the public always like to have a victim, Sparks was advised on all hands to bring an action against the directors of the bank:  large damages would, they knew, be given, and the banker deserved to suffer for the causeless ruin brought on a poor but industrious family.