against harvest time.  As that season approached, the village butcher passed from house to house to slaughter the animal, cure its flesh, or make sausage meat of it, spending, sometimes, several days at each house.  This season brought Jacob Astor an abundance of work, and enabled him to provide liberally for the simple wants of his family; but during the rest of the year it was with difficulty that he could make bread for them.  Yet Jacob took his hard lot cheerfully.  He was merry over his misfortunes, and sought to forget them in the society of companions who gathered at the village beer-house.  His wife’s remonstrances against such a course of life were sometimes so energetic that the house became any thing but a pleasant place for the children.

Here John Jacob grew up to boyhood.  His brothers left home to earn their livelihood elsewhere, as soon as they were old enough to do so, and he alone remained under the paternal roof.  His father destined him for his own calling, but the boy shrank from it with disgust.  To crown his misfortunes, his mother died, and his father married again, and this time a woman who looked with no favor upon the son.  The newly-married pair quarreled continually, and the boy was glad to escape occasionally to the house of a schoolmate, where he passed the night in a garret or outhouse.  By daylight he was back at his father’s slaughter-house, to assist in carrying out the meat.  He was poorly clad and badly fed, and his father’s bad reputation wounded him so keenly that he shrank from playing with other boys, and led a life of comparative isolation.

Fortunately for him, he had a teacher, Valentine Jeune by name, the son of French Protestants, who was better fitted for his position than the majority of the more liberally-patronized Catholic instructors.  He was well taught by Valentine Jeune in the rudiments of a plain education, and the tutor and the Protestant minister of the village together succeeded so well in his religious instruction that at the age of fourteen he was confirmed.  Confirmation is the decisive point in the career of the German youth.  Until then he is only a child.  Afterward he is regarded as on the threshold of manhood, and is given to understand that the time has come for him to make choice of a career in life.

To the German peasant two courses only lie open, to learn a trade or go out to service.  John Jacob was resolved not to do the latter, and he was in no condition to adopt the former.  He was already familiar with his father’s trade, but he shrank from it with disgust, and he could not hope to obtain money enough to pay for his tuition as an apprentice in any other calling.  No workman in the village would receive him as an apprentice for less than fifty dollars, and fifty dollars were then further beyond his reach than as many millions in after years.  The harvest was approaching, and Jacob Astor, seeing an unusual amount of work in store for him at that season, decided the matter for his son by informing him that he must prepare to settle down as his assistant.  He obeyed, but discontentedly, and with a determination to abandon his home at the earliest practicable moment.