Long and anxiously did the poor affectionate wife wait the return of the father of her little brood, and often in the train of her flattering imagination start as some stranger entered her cabin, with the exclamation, 'I thought it was Capting Jopling!' In her leisure moments, too, she was in the habit of fixing her ardent and steady gaze on the point of rocks behind which she had seen him depart. In all the torture of delay, not a reproachful exclamation was ever uttered by the sufferer. A sigh hastily drawn, and a rudely-constructed prayer, evinced the emotion she deeply felt. The fond woman could perceive, as her children increased in growth, strong resemblances of their father developed in every lineament. But the likeness in 'the baby' was absolutely wonderful. 'If,' said she, 'little Joe was grown, and daddy war here present, they would never know themselves apart.' It was on one of those mild and sunny days of rest, in the Indian Summer of autumn, that the wanderer returned. The careful mother was surrounded with her children, and was, at the moment he entered the cabin, giving the last touches to the flaxen locks of the youngest child. 'You had as well give my hair a little combing, Patsy,' was the calm salutation of our hero. 'Capting Joseph Jopling!' exclaimed the half-frantic wife, 'ar it you at last!' She smoothed down the folds of her garments as she arose, and, with a smile of welcome, as she gave her hand, said, 'Howdy, Joseph?' On a close and more deliberate scrutiny of his person, Patsy seemed to think, with her husband, that his hair needed the comb. His locks were matted together like the wool on the forehead of a buffalo; not a comb or an intrusive pair of scissors had interrupted the wild luxuriance of its growth, in a period of more than three years. When his hat had given way to the irritation of cane-brakes and green briars, and the peltings of the storms of summer and winter, he had cultivated the covering with which nature had bountifully provided his cranium. By occasional cropping of his locks with his butcher-knife, as they grew out so as to obstruct his vision, he left his upper-works with a singular aspect; and when the growth of three years' beard is considered, with the bears' oil glistening on its uncombed surface, it is not strange that his charitable wife should give him some ironical compliments, such as these: 'Jopling, you're a beauty! Sally, bring the soap. Joseph, you are a picture! The poor baby don't know its daddy; did he think daddy was a painter? Get your daddy's razor out of mammy's box; put on the tea-kettle, Sally, and heat some water, while I make up a pone of bread. Josey, did you cook for yourself all this time?' and as she bustled about, she began to sing a long-neglected air, to which she had trod a measure in the joyous days of early youth, in the Piny Woods of Buncombe.