General Boswell is pretty nearly a poor man, now.

The railroad that was going to build up Hawkeye made short work of him, along with the rest.

He isn't so opposed to a son-in-law without a fortune, now." "Without a fortune, indeed! Why that Tennessee Land--" "Never mind the Tennessee Land, Colonel.

I am done with that, forever and forever--" "Why no! You can't mean to say--" "My father, away back yonder, years ago, bought it for a blessing for his children, and--" "Indeed he did! Si Hawkins said to me--" "It proved a curse to him as long as he lived, and never a curse like it was inflicted upon any man's heirs--" "I'm bound to say there's more or less truth--" "It began to curse me when I was a baby, and it has cursed every hour of my life to this day--" "Lord, lord, but it's so! Time and again my wife--" "I depended on it all through my boyhood and never tried to do an honest stroke of work for my living--" "Right again--but then you--" "I have chased it years and years as children chase butterflies.

We might all have been prosperous, now; we might all have been happy, all these heart-breaking years, if we had accepted our poverty at first and gone contentedly to work and built up our own wealth by our own toil and sweat--" "It's so, it's so; bless my soul, how often I've told Si Hawkins--" "Instead of that, we have suffered more than the damned themselves suffer! I loved my father, and I honor his memory and recognize his good intentions; but I grieve for his mistaken ideas of conferring happiness upon his children.