Very soon after his marriage with the governess, his son went to live with his uncle, Mr. James Preston, of Mobile, a wealthy bachelor, who long before had expressed the intention of having the boy succeed to his business and estate. "Boss Joe" continued in charge of the turpentine plantation, and had built him a house, and removed his wife and aged mother to his new home. On one of my visits to the South, I stopped overnight with him, and was delighted with his model estab lishment. Two hundred as cheerful-looking darkies as ever swung a turpentine axe, were gathered in tents and small shanties around his neat log cabin, and Joe seemed as happy as if he were governor of a province.

His operations had grown to such magnitude, that Preston then ranked among the largest producers of the North Carolina staple, and his "account" had become one of the most valuable on our books. Though we sent "accounts current and duplicates of each "account sales" to his master, our regu lar "returns" were made to Joe; and no one of our correspondents held us to so strict accountability, or so often expressed dissatisfaction with the result of his shipments, as he.

"I thinks a heap of you, Mr. Kirke," he said, at the close of one of his letters about this time; "but the fact am, thar's no friendship in trade, and you did sell that lass pile of truck jess one day too sudden.”

CHAPTER XIV.
XIV.

FRANK.

Two more years rolled away. Frank was nearly sixteen. He had grown up a fine, manly lad, and never for one moment had Kate or I regretted the care we had bestowed on his education and training. He was all we could have wished for in our own son, and in his warm love and cheerful obedience we both found the blessing invoked on us by his dying mother.

His affection for Kate was something more than the common feeling of a child for a parent. With that was blended a sort of half worship, which made him listen to her every word, and hang on her every look, as if she were a being of some higher order than he. They were inseparable. He preferred her society to that of his young companions; and often, when he was a child, seated by her knee, and listening, when she told of his "other mother" in the "beautiful heaven,” have I seen his eye wander to her face, with an expression which plainly said: "My heart knows no Kate was proud of him; and well comely youth; and his straight, closely knit, sinewy frame, dark, deepset eyes, and broad, open forehead, overhung with thick, brown hair, only outshadowed a beautiful mind, an open,

other mother' than you." she might be, for he was a

upright, manly nature, whose firm and steady integrity nothing could shake.

About this time I received a letter from his father, which, as it had an important bearing on the lad's future career, I give to the reader:

"BOSTON, September 20th, 185-.

"DEAR SIR: A recent illness has brought my past life in its true light before me. I see its sin, and I would make all the atonement in my power. I cannot undo the wrong I have done to one who is gone, but I can do my duty to her child. You, I am told, have been a father to him. I would now assume that relation, and make you such recompense for what you have done, as you may require. I am too weak to travel, or, indeed, to leave my house, but I am impatient to see my son. May I not ask you to bring him to me at once? Then I will arrange all things to your satisfaction.

"I need not tell you, after saying what I have, that I should feel greatly gratified to possess once more your confidence and regard. I am sincerely yours,

"JOHN HALLET."

In another hand, was the following postscript:

"MY DEAR Boy: John is sincere. Thee can trust him. He has told me all. He will do the right thing. Come on with the lad as soon as thee can.

Love to Kate.

"Thy old friend,

DAVID."

After conferring with my wife, I sent the following reply

to these communications :

"NEW YORK, September 22d, 185-.

"DAVID OF OLD: Thou man after the Lord's own heart.

I have Hallet's letter, seasoned with your P. S. He is shrewd. He knew that nothing but your old-fashioned hand would draw a reply from me, to any thing written by him.

"I've no faith in sick-bed repentances; and none in John Hallet, sick or well.

"When the devil was sick,

The devil a monk would be;
When the devil got well,

The devil a monk was he.'

"However, as Hallet is capable of cheating his best friend, even the devil, I will take his letter into consideration; but it having taken him sixteen years to make up his mind to do a right action, it may take me as many days to come to a decision on this subject.

"Frank is everything to us; and nothing but the clearest conviction that his ultimate good will be promoted by going to his father, will induce us to consent to it.

"I do not write Hallet. You may give him as much or as little of this letter as you think will be good for him.

"Kate sends love to you and to Alice; and, dear David, with all the regard I felt for you when I wore a short jacket, and sat on the old stool,

"I am your devoted friend,

EDMUND."

Ir was a dingy old sign. It had hung there, in sun and rain, till its letters were faint and its face was furrowed. It had looked down on a generation that had passed away, and seen those who placed it there go out of that doorway, never to return; still it clung to that dingy old warehouse, and still Russell, Rollins & Co. was signed in the dingy old counting room at the head of the stairway. It was known the world over. It was heard of on the cotton fields of Texas, in the canebrakes of Cuba, and amid the rice swamps of Carolina. The Chinaman spoke of it as he sipped his tea and plied his chopsticks in the streets of Canton; and the half-naked negro rattled its gold as he gathered palm oil and the copal gum on the western coast of Africa. Its plain initials, painted in black on a white ground, waved from tall masts over many seas, and its simple "promise to pay," scrawled in a bad hand on a narrow strip of paper, unlocked the vaults of the best bankers in Europe. And yet it was a dingy old sign! Men looked up to it as they passed by, and wondered that a cracked, weatherbeaten board, that would not sell for a dollar, should be counted good for a million."

It was a dingy old warehouse, with narrow, dark, cob