CHAPTER XVII.--CONCLUSION.

Four years have passed away since that Thanksgiving dinner, and for the deacon, who, then, did not expect to see another, there seem to be many yet in store. Hale, hearty and happy, he sits in his arm-chair, smoking his accustomed pipe; and when the villagers, who come often to see him, tell him how the old farm-house is improved, and how they should scarcely know it, he always answers:

"Yes, Seth has good taste, and Seth is rich. He could buy Deerwood, if he tried. He built those new houses for the poor down there by the river; he built the factory, too, and gives them all employment. Seth is a blessed boy."

Others, too, there were, besides the deacon, who called Seth Marshall blessed, and never since his return had a voice been raised against him.

After becoming somewhat accustomed to his new position as a free and respected man, his first wish was to modernize the farm-house a little more according to his ideas of taste and comfort. Once he thought to build a splendid mansion near by, but to this suggestion the father said:

"No; I like the old place best. The new house might be handsomer, but it would not be the one where you and I, and all of us were born, and your mother died. Wait till I'm dead, and then do as you please."

And so Seth is waiting, and as he waits he sets out trees and shrubbery, and beautifies a plot of ground, on which he will sometime erect a dwelling as a summer residence for his son, who lives in the city, and calls Mrs. Bartow grandma.

When the first Christmas snows were falling after his father's return, Walter made Jessie his bride, and there now plays at his fireside a chubby, black-eyed boy, whom they call Graham Marshall, and who spends more time in Deerwood than he does in New York. Quite as old as the hoary man in the corner, who sometimes calls him Walter, but oftener Seth, he "rides to Boston" on the deacon's knee, pulls the deacon's beard, wears the deacon's glasses, smokes a stick of candy, and spits in imitation of the deacon, and then falls away to sleep in the deacon's lap,--the two forming a most beautiful picture of old age and infancy together.

At Mr. Graham's house, there is a beautiful six-months' baby, whose hair looks golden in the sunlight, and whose eyes of blue are much like those of Ellen Howland. They call her Nellie, and in all the world there is nothing one-half so precious as this child to the broken, melancholy man, who often comes to see her, and when no one can hear him, whispers sadly:

"Sweet Nellie,--darling Nellie,--little snow drop!" But whether he means the infant in the crib, or the Nellie dead long ago, is difficult to tell.

For eighteen months he toiled inside the prison walls, and then the powerful influence of Mr. Graham, Seth Marshall and Walter combined, procured him a pardon. An humbled and a better man, he would not leave the city. He would rather remain, he said, and live down his disgrace, than have it follow him as it was sure to do. So he stayed, accepting thankfully a situation which Walter procured for him, and Mrs. Bellenger, when she saw that he was really changed, gladly gave him a home with herself, for she was lonely now that Walter was gone.

Old Mrs. Reeves was very much astonished that the Grahams and Marshalls should make so much of one who had been in State prison, and said:

"She was glad that Charlotte had married a Southern planter and gone to Mississippi, as there was no knowing what notions might have entered her brain."

Every summer there is a family gathering of the Grahams and Marshalls with Mrs. Bellenger and Mrs. Bartow at Deerwood, where the deacon seems as young and happy as any of them. And now, where our story opened we will bring it to a close, at the farm-house where the old man sits smoking in the twilight with his son and grandson, and great-grandson around him,--representatives of four generations, with a difference of nearly eighty years between the first and fourth.

_The End_.