bullock, against the time of harvest; and as that joyful season approached, the village butcher went the round of the neighborhood, stopping a day or two at each house to kill the animals and convert their flesh into bacon, sausages, or salt beef.  During this happy time, Jacob Astor, a merry dog, always welcome where pleasure and hilarity were going forward, had enough to drink, and his family had enough to eat.  But the merry time lasted only six weeks.  Then set in the season of scarcity, which was only relieved when there was a festival of the church, a wedding, a christening, or a birthday in some family of the village rich enough to provide an animal for Jacob’s knife.  The wife of this idle and improvident butcher was such a wife as such men usually contrive to pick up,—­industrious, saving, and capable; the mainstay of his house.  Often she remonstrated with her wasteful and beer-loving husband; the domestic sky was often overcast, and the children were glad to fly from the noise and dust of the tempest.

This roistering village butcher and his worthy, much-enduring wife were the parents of our millionaire.  They had four sons:  George Peter Astor, born in 1752; Henry Astor, born in 1754; John Melchior Astor, born in 1759; and John Jacob Astor, born July 17, 1763.  Each of these sons made haste to fly from the privations and contentions of their home as soon as they were old enough; and, what is more remarkable, each of them had a cast of character precisely the opposite of their thriftless father.  They were all saving, industrious, temperate, and enterprising, and all of them became prosperous men at an early period of their career.  They were all duly instructed in their father’s trade; each in turn carried about the streets of Waldorf the basket of meat, and accompanied the father in his harvest slaughtering tours.  Jovial Jacob, we are told, gloried in being a butcher, but three of his sons, much to his disgust, manifested a repugnance to it, which was one of the causes of their flight from the parental nest.  The eldest, who was the first to go, made his way to London, where an uncle was established in business as a maker of musical instruments.  Astor and Broadwood was the name of the firm, a house that still exists under the title of Broadwood and Co., one of the most noted makers of pianos in England.  In his uncle’s manufactory George Astor served an apprenticeship, and became at length a partner in the firm.  Henry Astor went next.  He alone of his father’s sons took to his father’s trade.  It used to be thrown in his teeth, when he was a thriving butcher in the city of New York, that he had come over to America as a private in the Hessian army.  This may only have been the groundless taunt of an envious rival.  It is certain, however, that he was a butcher in New York when it was a British post during the revolutionary war, and, remaining after the evacuation, made a large fortune in his business.  The third son, John Melchior Astor, found employment in Germany, and arrived, at length, at the profitable post of steward to a nobleman’s estate.