So the old couple sat alone before the sitting-room fire.  It was not often used, this room,—­scarcely ever now, except upon Sunday, or on those two grave holidays that the Newells kept,—­Thanksgiving- and Fast-Day.  This was Thanksgiving-Day.  The snow without was falling thick and fast.  It came in great eddies and white whirls, obscuring the prospect from the windows and scudding madly around the corners.  It lay in great drifts against the fences, and one large pile before the middle front-window had gathered volume till it reached half up the second row of panes; for it had snowed all night and half the day before.  The roads were so blocked by it that they would have been rendered impassable but for the sturdy efforts of the farmers’ boys, who drove teams of four and five yokes of oxen through the drifts with heavily laden sleds, breaking out the ways.  The sidewalks in the little village were shovelled and swept clean as fast as the snow fell; for, though all business was suspended, according to the suggestion in the Governor’s proclamation, and in conformity to old usage, still they liked to keep the paths open on Thanksgiving-Day,—­the paths and the roads; for nearly half the families in the place expected sons and daughters from far away to arrive on the train which should have been at the railroad-station on the previous evening, but had been kept back by the snow.

But Jacob and Ruth Newell had neither son nor daughter, 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.