s of failures, which tired out both kinsmen and
creditors, and at length shipped for New Zealand, leaving a wife and
seven children to the care of the said three brothers, till he should
see how the climate agreed with him, and find a home for them. Bill
did not belong to the extended fraternity of scapegraces. He was
neither wild nor worthless, in the ordinary sense of those terms, but
there was a faith in him, the origin of which baffled his most
penetrating friends, that he was to get money somehow without working
for it by any of the common methods. Unlike many a professor of better
principles, Bill had carried that faith into practice. Under its
influence, he had engaged in every scheme for making fortunes with
incredible rapidity which coffee-house acquaintances or advertising
sheets brought to his knowledge. There was not a banking bubble by
which he had not lost, nor a mining company of vast promise and brief
existence in which he had not held shares. Uncompromisingly averse to
the jog-trot work of ordinary mortals. Bill was neither indolent nor
timid in his own peculiar fashion of seeking riches. He would have
gone up in a balloon to any height, or down in a diving-bell to depths
yet unsounded, had the promise been large enough; and there was
something so suitable to his inclinations in the Californian reports,
that he was the prime mover of our visit to San Francisco, and the
entire desertion of the ship. Strange to say, every man on board
believed in Bill; from the captain to the cabin-boy, they had all
listened to his tales. Where he had learned such a number, fortune
knows, concerning found treasures, and wealth suddenly obtained by
unexpected and rather impracticable ways. That was the whole circle of
Bill's literature, and going over it appeared his chief joy; but the
gem of the collection was a prophecy which a gipsy woman, whom his
mother met once in a country excursion, had uttered concerning
himself--that he should find riches he never wrought for, and leave a
great fortune behind him. In the faith of that prediction Bill had
lived; and it was a curious illustration of the sympathetic force
inherent in a firm belief, that both passengers and seamen, even those
who affected to laugh at the rest of what they called his wonderful
yarns, entertained a secret conviction in favour of that tale, and
felt secure of gold-gathering in Bill's company.

I am not certain that my own mind was entirely clear of a si