After the lapse of five miserable years, let us introduce him and his family once more to the reader.
Five years! What a work has been done in that time! Not in a pleasant home, surrounded with every comfort, as we last saw them, will they be found.

Alas, no! It was late in the year.

Frost had already done its work upon the embrowned forests, and leaf by leaf the withered foliage had dropped away or been swept in clouds before the autumnal winds.

Feebler and feebler grew, daily, the sun's planting rays, colder the air, and more cheerless the aspect of nature.
One evening,--it was late in November, and the day had been damp and cold,--a woman, whose thin care-worn face and slender form marked her as an invalid, or one whose spirits had been broken by trouble, was busying herself in the preparation of supper.

A girl, between twelve and thirteen years of age, was trying to amuse a child two years old, who, from some cause, was in a fretful humour; and a little girl in her seventh year was occupied with a book, in which she was spelling out a lesson that had been given by her mother.