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“Behold, for peace I had great bitterness, but thou hast in love to my soul delivered it from the pit of corruption: for thou hast cast all my sins behind thy back.”–Isaiah.

A portly elderly gentleman, with one hand in his breeches pocket, and the fingers of the other drumming a disconsolate rub-a-dub upon the window glass of an elegant mansion near Boston Common, is the personage I wish to call your attention to, friend reader, for the space of a few moments. The facts of my story are commonplace, and thereby the more probable. The names of the dramatis personae I shall introduce, will be the only part of my subject imaginary. Therefore, the above-described old gentleman, whom we found and left drumming his rub-a-dub upon the window panes, we shall call Mr. Joel Newschool. To elucidate the matter more clearly, I would beg leave to say, that Mr. Joel Newschool, though now a wealthy and retired merchant, with all the “pomp and circumstance” of fortune around him, could–if he chose–well recollect the day when his little feet were shoeless, red and frost-bitten, as he plodded through the wheat and rye stubble of a Massachusetts farmer, for whom he acted in early life the trifling character of a “cow boy.”

Yes, Joel could remember this if he chose; but to the vain heart of a proud millionaire, such reflections seldom come to the surface. Like hundreds of other instances in the history of our countrymen, by a prolonged life of enterprise and good luck, Joel Newschool found himself, at the age of four-and-sixty, a very wealthy, if not a happy man. With his growing wealth, grew up around him a large family. Having served an apprenticeship to farming, he allowed but a brief space to elapse between his freedom suit and portion, and his wedding-day. Joel and his young and fresh country spouse, with light hearts and lighter purses, came to Boston, settled, and thus we find them old and wealthy. In the heart and manners of Mrs. Newschool, fortune made but slight alteration; but the accumulation of dollars and exalted privileges that follow wealth, had wrought many changes in the heart and feelings of her husband.

The wear of time, which is supposed to dim the eye, seemed to improve the ocular views of Joel Newschool amazingly, for he had been enabled in his late years to see that a vast difference of caste existed between those that tilled the soil, wielded the sledge hammer, or drove the jack-plane, and those that were merely the idle spectators of such operations. He no longer groped in the darkness of men who believed in such fallacies as that wealth gave man no superiority over honest poverty! In short, Mr. Newschool had kept pace with all the fine notions and ostentatious feelings so peculiar to the mushroom aristocracy of the nineteenth century. He gloried in his pride, and yet felt little or none of that happiness that the bare-footed, merry cow boy enjoyed in the stubble field. But such is man.

With all his comfortable appurtenances wealth could buy and station claim, the retired merchant was not a happy man. Though his expensive carriage and liveried driver were seen to roll him regularly to the majestic church upon the Sabbath: though he was a patient listener to the massive organ’s spiritual strains and the surpliced minister’s devout incantations: though he defrauded no man, defamed not his neighbor, was seeming virtuous and happy, there was at his heart a pang that turned to lees the essence of his life.

Joel Newschool had seen his two sons and three daughters, men and women around him; they all married and left his roof for their own. One, a favorite child, a daughter, a fine, well-grown girl, upon whom the father’s heart had set its fondest seal–she it was that the hand of Providence ordained to humble the proud heart of the sordid millionaire. Cecelia Newschool, actuated by the noblest impulses of nature, had for her husband sought “a man, not a money chest,” and this circumstance had made Cecelia a severed member of the Newschool family, who could not, in the refined delicacy of their senses, tolerate such palpable condescension as to acknowledge a tie that bound them to the wife of a poor artizan, whatever might be his talents or integrity as a man.