tarted on my travels to see the world. The world was New
York City, and there was a little World's Fair there. It had just been
opened where the great reservoir afterward was, and where the sumptuous
public library is now being built--Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street.
I arrived in New York with two or three dollars in pocket change and a
ten-dollar bank-bill concealed in the lining of my coat. I got work at
villainous wages in the establishment of John A. Gray and Green in Cliff
Street, and I found board in a sufficiently villainous mechanics'
boarding-house in Duane Street. The firm paid my wages in wildcat money
at its face value, and my week's wage merely sufficed to pay board and
lodging. By and by I went to Philadelphia and worked there some months
as a "sub" on the "Inquirer" and the "Public Ledger." Finally I made a
flying trip to Washington to see the sights there, and in 1854 I went
back to the Mississippi Valley, sitting upright in the smoking-car two
or three days and nights. When I reached St. Louis I was exhausted. I
went to bed on board a steamboat that was bound for Muscatine. I fell
asleep at once, with my clothes on, and didn't wake again for thirty-six
hours.

[Sidenote: (1854.)]

... I worked in that little job-office in Keokuk as much as two years, I
should say, without ever collecting a cent of wages, for Orion was never
able to pay anything--but Dick Higham and I had good times. I don't know
what Dick got, but it was probably only uncashable promises.

[Sidenote: (1856.)]

One day in the midwinter of 1856 or 1857--I think it was 1856--I was
coming along the main street of Keokuk in the middle of the forenoon. It
was bitter weather--so bitter that that street was deserted, almost. A
light dry snow was blowing here and there on the ground and on the
pavement, swirling this way and that way and making all sorts of
beautiful figures, but very chilly to look at. The wind blew a piece of
paper past me and it lodged against a wall of a house. Something about
the look of it attracted my attention and I gathered it in. It was a
fifty-dollar bill, the only one I had ever seen, and the largest
assemblage of money I had ever encountered in one spot. I advertised it
in the papers and suffered more than a thousand dollars' worth of
solicitude and fear and distress during the next few days lest the owner
should see the advertisement and come and take my fortune away. As many
as four days went by without a