in Ohio at the
corner of a road. "He was a grand specimen," cried Pinkerton; "I wish
you could have seen him, Mr. Dodd. He had an appearance of magnanimity
that used to remind me of the patriarchs." On the death of this random
protector, the boy inherited the plant and continued the business. "It
was a life I could have chosen, Mr. Dodd!" he cried. "I have been in all
the finest scenes of that magnificent continent that we were born to be
the heirs of. I wish you could see my collection of tin-types; I wish I
had them here. They were taken for my own pleasure, and to be a memento:
and they show Nature in her grandest as well as her gentlest moments."
As he tramped the Western States and Territories, taking tin-types, the
boy was continually getting hold of books, good, bad, and indifferent,
popular and abstruse, from the novels of Sylvanus Cobb to Euclid's
Elements, both of which I found (to my almost equal wonder) he had
managed to peruse: he was taking stock by the way, of the people, the
products, and the country, with an eye unusually observant and a memory
unusually retentive; and he was collecting for himself a body of
magnanimous and semi-intellectual nonsense, which he supposed to be the
natural thoughts and to contain the whole duty of the born American. To
be pure-minded, to be patriotic, to get culture and money with both
hands and with the same irrational fervour--these appeared to be the
chief articles of his creed. In later days (not of course upon this
first occasion) I would sometimes ask him why; and he had his answer
pat. "To build up the type!" he would cry. "We're all committed to that;
we're all under bond to fulfil the American Type! Loudon, the hope of
the world is there. If we fail, like these old feudal monarchies, what
is left?"

The trade of a tin-typer proved too narrow for the lad's ambition; it
was insusceptible of expansion, he explained; it was not truly modern;
and by a sudden conversion of front he became a railroad-scalper. The
principles of this trade I never clearly understood; but its essence
appears to be to cheat the railroads out of their due fare. "I threw my
whole soul into it; I grudged myself food and sleep while I was at it;
the most practised hands admitted I had caught on to the idea in a month
and revolutionised the practice inside of a year," he said. "And there's
interest in it, too. It's amusing to pick out some one going by, make up
your mind about his character and t