The Osceola times., 1883-10-06

real uulleS OF lie, ana makes youth
of twenty, thoughtful, prudent, tenn
perate and industrious? To have re-
sponsibilities cast upon him which
he has sense and feeling enough to
know and recognize as belonging to
himself, and because he cannot see
any one else to whom he can prop
erly refer them. Thus it was with
the boy whom we have in our mind
as we write.
Poor fellow! Few, indeed, are the
sunny recollections of his childhood;
but little, very little of the poetry
of boyhood stored up in memory for
after contemplation in the pauses and
rests in the conflicts and struggles
of manhood. Thrust out Of the fam
lily nest, like young hcdgling, be-
fore he had his feathers on, he lived
among the rocks until he could find
way up. The writer recollects his
face we'll. The last time he saw him,
then a child about six years of age,
white headed, red-faced, silent, and
tears fast falling down his cheeks,
his face and mouth twitching with
suppressed emotions. Even thus
early, he looked like child prema-
turely old, who fully realized the
ghastly fact of a house divided
against itself, and appeared as one
"who silent sees what speech may
not amend" and he can do nothing
but grieve in silence. 1t is rough
school for boy to see discord, dis
sentions, with the poverty and loss
offamily pride which follows divid-
ed house; but the boy who puts on
the armor for battle, even at the age
of ten years, if not too heavily weight
ed, will come out, as Charles says
in this letter, call right In the long
rum" A tragic history accompanied
him at each step in life. A divorce,
the husband and father, like Byron,
voluntary exile and wanderer; now
here, now there, finally disappearing
for years, and at last sinking under
the many burdens of life, which a
broken heart could no longer sustain,
dying among strangers, without a
look or word of tenderness in that
last sad scene in wrecked career.
In the meantime, the boy, Charles,
fighting all these years the battle
which had been too much for a dis
sipated father, at length, by dint of
latent heroism, becoming master of
the situation and rising to the chici-
tainship of a mercantile firm; tender
ly caring for his mother, young
sister and widowed sister with two
children; and far from repining,
thanking God that he is able to do
it; and in all these years, ignorant of
the fate Of his father, and in the let
ter before US, begging his correspon-
dent to tell him il he knows whether
his father be still alive, and to write
him if he knows anything Of his fate,
d" For, though he may have done
wrong, he is my father, and l cannot
help thinking of him."
We know nothing of this boy ex-
cept the forlorn, bleak situation in
which the wreck of his home left
him, the fortitude with which he met
his hard fate, and the fact that he is
now, though not over twenty-six
years of age, on the smooth highway
to business eminence, and the sole
support of his fathers family. Such
a career is that of a HERO; Of one
who, being bred in the rugged school
of adversely, has not been killed off
by dispair, nor changed into a heart
less, selfish misanthrope, devoid of
natural affections. You can read in
his letter, from the care and exact
ness with which he states facts, that
he is scrupulously truthful, which is
the grand conservative principle of
all characters destined to endure tho
wear and tear Of an active business
life. AT the age of ten, the boy had
reached the forks in the road of life,
in the territory Of FREE WILL. Up
on his right hand, appeared road,
rough, steep, llinty and hot, and like
Jordan, plainly hard road to trav-
el. At the entrance of this road, he
saw a fingcr-board, on which was
written the Words" DurY, FREE TO
ALL" To the left was the other
road, smooth, level, shady and pass
ing on as far as the eve could reach