"At once,—at once," said Walter, who had listened intently to the story, giving vent to an occasional exclamation of surprise. "We will go in the very next steamer. I shall not have a chance to write, but it will be just as well. I wish to see if grandpa or Mr. Graham will recognize you." Mr. Marshall had no objections to testing the recollections of his father, and he readily consented to go, saying to his friends that as New England was his birthplace he intended accompanying his young friend home. "I can write the truth back to them," he thought, "and save myself much annoyance." Thus it was arranged, and the next steamer for New York which left the harbor of San Francisco, bore on its deck the father and his son, both eager and expectant and anxious to be at the end of the voyage. CHAPTER XVI.—THANKSGIVING DAY AT DEERWOOD. The dinner table was nicely arranged in the "best room" of the farm-house, and Jessie Graham, with a happy look on her bright face, flitted in and out, arranging the dishes a little more to her taste, smoothing the snowy cloth, pausing a moment before the fire blazing so cheerfully upon the hearth, and then glancing from the window, across the frozen fields to the hillside where a new grave had been made since the last Thanksgiving Day. "Dear Ellen!" she sighed, "there is no plate for her now,—no chair." Then, as she remembered an absent one, dearer far than Ellen, she thought, "I’ll make believe _he’s_ here," and seeking Mrs. Howland, who was busy with her turkey, she said: "May I put a plate for Walter? It will please him when he hears of it." "Yes, child," was the ready answer, and Jessie was hastening off, when a feeble voice from the kitchen corner where the deacon sat, called her back: "Jessie," the old man said. "Put Seth’s arm-chair next to mine. It is the last Thanksgiving I shall ever see, and I would fancy him with me once more," and as Jessie turned toward the place where the leathern chair stood, she heard the words: "God send him back,—God send him back." "It is the deacon’s wish," she whispered to her father, who, with Mrs. Bellenger, was also spending Thanksgiving at the farm-house, and who looked up surprised, as Jessie dragged from its accustomed post, the ponderous arm-chair, and wheeling it into the other room, placed it to the deacon’s right. The dinner was ready at last, and Mrs. Howland was only waiting for the oysters to boil, before she served them up, when Jessie gave a scream of joy, and dropping the dish of cranberries she held, ran off into the pantry, where, as Aunt Debby affirmed, she hid herself in the closet, though from what she was hiding it were difficult to tell. There was surely nothing appalling in the sight of _Walter_, who, alighting from the village omnibus, now stood upon the threshold, with Captain Murdock. They had stayed all night in the city, where Walter had learned that Mr. Graham, Jessie and his grandmother, had gone to Deerwood to spend Thanksgiving Day.