ound, and the Hudson Bay Company's station there. At the Dalles
he was smitten with the small-pox, and lay ill for six weeks. He often
spoke with the warmest gratitude of the kind care that was taken of him
there. But when only partially recovered he plunged off again into the
wilderness. At another time he fell very ill upon the Plains, and lay
down, as he supposed, to die; but after some time struggled up and on
again.

He returned to the counting-room, but, unsated with adventure, joined
the disastrous expedition of Lieutenant Strain, during which his
health was still more weakened, and he came home again in 1854. In the
following year he studied law and was admitted to the bar. In 1856 he
entered heartily into the Fremont campaign, and from the strongest
conviction. He went into some of the dark districts of Pennsylvania and
spoke incessantly. The roving life and its picturesque episodes, with
the earnest conviction which inspired him, made the summer and autumn
exciting and pleasant. The following year he went to St. Louis to
practise law. The climate was unkind to him, and he returned and began
the practice in New York. But he could not be a lawyer. His health was
too uncertain, and his tastes and ambition allured him elsewhere. His
mind was brimming with the results of observation. His fancy was alert
and inventive, and he wrote tales and novels. At the same time he
delighted to haunt the studio of his friend Church, the painter, and
watch day by day the progress of his picture, the Heart of the Andes. It
so fired his imagination that he wrote a description of it, in which, as
if rivalling the tropical and tangled richness of the picture, he threw
together such heaps and masses of gorgeous words that the reader was
dazzled and bewildered.

The wild campaigning life was always a secret passion with him. His
stories of travel were so graphic and warm, that I remember one evening,
after we had been tracing upon the map a route he had taken, and he had
touched the whole region into life with his description, my younger
brother, who had sat by and listened with wide eyes all the evening,
exclaimed with a sigh of regretful satisfaction, as the door closed upon
our story-teller, "It's as good as Robinson Crusoe!" Yet, with all
his fondness and fitness for that kind of life, or indeed any active
administrative function, his literary ambition seemed to be the deepest
and strongest.

He had always been writing. In colle