"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.