While the scenes of disorder and tumult we last described, and the similar ones that followed, were being enacted among the belligerent parties of this misgoverned town, the dutiful and sorrowing Woodburn was continuing his attendance on his sick mother, from whose bedside no call of business or of pleasure was suffered for a single hour to lure him. And well might he have done so, aside even from the dictates of filial duty; for she was a woman not only of unaffected piety, but of education and intellect; and to her he had been mainly indebted for all that was good and elevated in his character. She had emigrated with her husband to this town, at an early period of its settlement from the vicinity of Boston, where the latter had become so much straitened in his pecuniary circumstances, in consequence of being surety for an improvident and luckless brother, that he was induced, with the hope of bettering his fortunes, to gather up the poor remnant of his property, and, with it, remove to the New Hampshire Grant's, at that time the Eldorado most in vogue among those seeking new countries. Here, having purchased one of the best tracts of land in the place, he commenced the slow and laborious process of clearing up a new farm. And this Herculean task, which may well be considered the work of a man's life, he had, after years of incessant toil and privation, nearly succeeded in accomplishing, and begun to catch glimpses of easier and brighter days; when he was taken away by disease, leaving his property to his wife and son, an only child, then drawing towards manhood. And nobly had that son discharged the double duty which now devolved upon him,--that of becoming the stay and comforter of his widowed mother, and the sole manager of the farm, their only dependence. For, while discharging his filial duties in such a manner as to gain him the reputation of being a pattern of a son, he not only kept good, but, by his industry and enterprise, even improved, the property to which he had thus succeeded. And he was fast surmounting the difficulties of his situation, and making hopeful advances towards a competence, when, in an evil hour, his flourishing little establishment attracted the coveting eye of the unconscionable Peters, who, owning an adjoining farm, which would be rendered much more salable by being united with Woodburn's, undertook, at first, to wheedle the young man into a sale, or rather an exchange of his valuable farm for another, or wild lands, at false valuations and of doubtful titles. But, finding himself wholly mistaken in the character of the person whom he thus endeavored to overreach, and consequently failing in his attempt, he next began to think of the quibbles of the law, as the means of accomplishing his purpose. And having discovered some slight irregularity in Woodburn's deed, to begin upon, he then resorted to a trick quite fashionable among the corrupt speculators of