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 state home.

Oh, the bitterness of the misery of that Thanksgiving-Day to Jacob Newell!  He may live a hundred years and never know such another.

The next day Samson awoke from a wretched stupor to find himself weak, nervous, and suffering from a blinding headache.  In this condition his father forced him to the barn, and there, with a heavy raw-hide, flogged him without mercy.  That night Samson Newell disappeared, and was thenceforward seen no more in the village.

The same night one of the village stores was entered, the door of an ancient safe wrenched open, and something over a hundred dollars in specie taken therefrom.  So that on Samson Newell’s head rested the crime of filial disobedience, and the suspicion, amounting, with nearly all, to a certainty, that he had added burglary to his other wrong-doing.

His name was published in the papers throughout the county, together with a personal description and the offer of a reward for his arrest and return.  But as he was never brought back nor heard of more, the matter gradually died away and was forgotten by most in the village; the more so as, from respect and pity for Jacob Newell, it was scarce ever mentioned, except privately.

Eight years elapsed from the time of his flight and supposed crime, when the fellow he had thrashed at the tavern was arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced to death for a murder committed in a midnight tavern-brawl.  In a confession that he made he exonerated Samson Newell from any participation in or knowledge of the burglary for which his reputation had so long suffered, stating in what manner he had himself committed the deed.  So the memory of the erring son of Jacob Newell was relieved from the great shadow that had darkened it.  Still he was never mentioned by father or mother; and seven years more rolled wearily on, till they sit, to-day, alone and childless, by the flickering November fire.

Sore trouble had fallen on them since their youngest son had disappeared.  One by one, the elder children had passed away, each winter’s snow for five years covered a fresh grave, till the new afflictions that were in store for them scarcely seemed to affect them otherwise than by cutting yet deeper into the sunken cheeks the deep lines of sorrow and regret.