in of the Belle Louise, you
know, runnin' to Orleans. He begun by pilotin', an' has gone up as they
do on these boats. He'll take me on as fireman, and for pay give mother
her passage down. Once there, I'll turn an honest penny."

"By carpentering?"

"Yes, I find one always clears the ground faster by keepin' in the same
road. Abe won't go with us. He thinks luck's comin' soon, and he'll wait
for it. That Luck has been a ghost in the house. I for one will breathe
freer to be clear of it."

"And Jane?"

His face showed that I had touched a sore chord.

"Jane will go out as seamstress somewhere. If ever the good day dawns,
I'll come back for her. But my first care is mother."

I left them the next day, with a real reluctance. I had few friends, and
these boys had come near to me in many ways. But years passed, and I
never heard from them again. Mails were uncertain in those days. I wrote
often, but they never received my letters.

But when I returned to the West, after thirty years' absence, this last
spring, one of my chief aims was to find some traces of them. I took
passage for W----, therefore, the largest town in their old county,
finding that a railroad had invaded that region,--passing, by the way,
through the very spot where we opened the mound. Business detained me in
W---- for several days, and at the close of the week, one close, sultry
evening, I was strolling about the dingy streets with the lonesome
feeling which always besets one in a strange place, when I came to a
little foot-bridge over the creek, from which opened a view of the river
below, and the foundries glaring red on either side. It was a lonely
place, though in the midst of a busy town. I stopped, leaning over the
little hand-rail, looking down into the muddy water, and at the silent,
melancholy lights burning dully in its depths and in the air above.
There was a solitary figure on the bridge, which strangely entered into
the quiet and dreariness of the scene, depressing it, giving to its
dingy and unclean shadows a human significance of loss and discomfort.
It was an old man, in a filthy suit of black, who stood smoking a coarse
cigar and looking vacantly down into the creek. His head was bald, a
fringe of uncombed red hair straggling about the pinched and pimpled
face; it shook weakly when he tried to look at me; the light eyes
blinked blindly in the dim light. A weak, tipsy bit of old human flesh,
which once might have made a man; yet