r, grandchild,
cousin, relation of any nearness or remoteness, to expect; for the white
snow covered with a cold mantle scores of mounds in many graveyards
where lay their dead. And they sat this day and thought of all their
kindred who had perished untimely,--all save one.

Whether he lived, or whether he had died,--where he lay buried, if
buried he were,--or where he rioted, if still in the land of the living,
they had no notion. And why should they care?

He had been a strong-willed and wild lad. He had disobeyed the
injunctions of his parents while yet a boy. He had not loved the stiff,
sad Sabbaths, nor the gloomy Saturday nights. He had rebelled against
the austerities of Fast- and Thanksgiving-Days. He had learned to play
at cards and to roll tenpins with the village boys. He had smoked in the
tavern bar-room of evenings. In vain had his father tried to coerce him
into better ways; in vain had his mother used all the persuasions of
a maternal pride and fondness that showed themselves only, of all her
children, to this brave, handsome, and reckless boy. He had gone from
worse to worse, after the first outbreaking from the strict home rules,
until he had become at length a by-word in the village, and anxious
mothers warned their sons against companionship with wicked Samson
Newell,--and this when he was only seventeen years of age.

Perhaps mildness might have worked well with the self-willed boy, but
his father knew nothing but stern command and prompt obedience in family
management; and so the son daily fell away, until came the inevitable
day when his wrong-doing reached a climax and he left his father's roof
forever.

It was on a Thanksgiving-Day, fifteen years ago, that the boy Samson,
then seventeen years old, was brought home drunk and bleeding. He had
passed the previous night at a ball at the tavern, against the express
command of his father, who would have gone to fetch him away, but that
he could not bear to enter upon a scene he thought so wicked, and
especially upon such an errand. When the dance was over, the boy had
lingered at the bar, drinking glass after glass, until he got into a
fight with the bully of the village, whom he thrashed within an inch
of his life, and then he had sat down in a small side-room with a few
choice spirits, with the avowed purpose of getting drunk over his
victory. He had got drunk, "gloriously drunk" his friends at the tavern
styled it, and had been carried in that s