There seemed at first glance only the elements of joyousness and gayety
in the surroundings at the Pitkin farm. Thanksgiving was come--the
family, healthy, rosy, and noisy, were all under the one roof-tree. There
was energy, youth, intelligence, beauty, a pair of lovers on the eve of
betrothal--just in that misty, golden twilight that precedes the full
sunrise of avowed and accepted love--and yet behind it all was walking
with stealthy step the shadow of a coming sorrow.

"What in the world ails James?" said Diana as she retreated from the door
and surveyed him at a distance from her chamber window. His face was like
a landscape over which a thunder-cloud has drifted, and he walked beside
his father with a peculiar air of proud displeasure and repression.

At that moment the young man was struggling with the bitterest sorrow
that can befall youth--the breaking up of his life-purpose. He had just
come to a decision to sacrifice his hopes of education, his man's
ambition, his love, his home and family, and become a wanderer on the
face of the earth. How this befell requires a sketch of character.

Deacon Silas Pitkin was a fair specimen of a class of men not uncommon in
New England--men too sensitive for the severe physical conditions of New
England life, and therefore both suffering and inflicting suffering. He
was a man of the finest moral traits, of incorruptible probity, of
scrupulous honor, of an exacting conscientiousness, and of a sincere
piety. But he had begun life with nothing; his whole standing in the
world had been gained inch by inch by the most unremitting economy and
self-denial, and he was a man of little capacity for hope, of whom it was
said, in popular phraseology, that he "took things hard." He was never
sanguine of good, always expectant of evil, and seemed to view life like
a sentinel forbidden to sleep and constantly under arms.