I could even hear the voices of future years stealing on the autumnal night breeze, as it moaned through the rough and ill-joined casement where we sat. “Why, John, this is Thanks-giving night! Where can our oldest boy be wandering now? He was just thirty yesterday, and we have not heard from him these six years!—Not since you made your last flitting, John! He was always a good boy, and I’m sure he has written to us! John! you may depend upon it, there must be a letter in the office at St. Louis—St. Louis, was it? or was it Chicago? My memory begins to fail me so! He sent us fifty dollars the last time, when we lived in Wisconsin, away down in the States. It must have been in Chicago; for it was there he wrote before!” “Ah! Mary! Mary! boys forget their mothers and their fathers too, when they are old and feeble! He is getting rich somewhere far over yonder, and little he thinks of us! But there’s little Mary, where can she be? Her husband was just gone to New Orleans with a load of furs when the hunters went down to the bluffs in the fall, and they sent our letter after them—but may-be she never got it!” “Yes, it’s Thanks-giving night, Mary! and if I had loved the graves of my parents as I ought, we should not be here, where our children that are away will never find our own. Well, well! I’m too old to hunt, and if the trapping turns out no better than it did last year, we’ll have our next Thanks-giving, Mary, where there will be no end to it! and sure you have earned the _right_ to be at rest, by your faithfulness, however it may go with me!” While this picture was floating through my mind, I had learned from occasional sentences, that our host was the son of parents of respectability; but his father had foolishly left the agricultural life, which he understood and was pursuing prosperously, for cities and merchandize, for which he had no talent. He died a bankrupt, leaving one son at the age of eight years and a daughter of eighteen. The latter had been affianced, during her father’s prosperity, to the son of a man of wealth; but that wealth had been the result of the closest selfishness in early life. As usual, the native vulgarity of feeling and heartlessness of character which had caused his unwonted and undeserved pecuniary success, remained unchanged in the days of his spurious social elevation. He forbade the further visits of his son the moment the disaster of the parent of his intended wife was known. He forbade it suddenly and without a warning. The consequences were such as are almost too frequent to attract attention. A lovely woman pined a few years over the ill-requited needle, and died “in a decline.” “A young man about town” looked sad for a few months, and then married an heiress to extend the curse of hereditary meanness.