Pinkerton’s parents were from the old country; there too, I incidentally gathered, he had himself been born, though it was a circumstance he seemed prone to forget.  Whether he had run away, or his father had turned him out, I never fathomed; but about the age of twelve, he was thrown upon his own resources.  A travelling tin-type photographer picked him up, like a haw out of a hedgerow, on a wayside in New Jersey; took a fancy to the urchin; carried him on with him in his wandering life; taught him all he knew himself—­to take tin-types (as well as I can make out) and doubt the Scriptures; and died at last 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.