terror along the canal two or three years before.  That summer there were medicine pedlers working on all the boats, selling a kind of stuff they called “thieves’ vinegar” which was claimed to be a medicine that was used in the old country somewhere by thieves who robbed the infected houses in safety, protected by this wonderful “vinegar”; and only told how it was made to save their lives when they were about to be hanged.  A man offered me a bottle of this at Rochester, for five dollars, and finally came down to fifty cents.  This made me think it was of no use, and I did not buy, though just before I had been wondering whether I had not better borrow the money of Captain Sproule; so I saved my money, which was getting to be a habit of mine.

California, the Rockies, the fur-trade, the Ohio Valley, the new cities up the Lakes and the new farms in the woods back of them, and some few tales of the prairies—­all these voices of the West kept calling us more loudly and plainly every year, and every year I grew stronger and more confident of myself.

The third year I had made up my mind that I would get work on a passenger boat so as to be able to see and talk with more people who were going up and down the Lakes and the canal.  I went from one to another as I met folks who were coming back from the West, and asked every one if he had known a man out west named John Rucker; but, though I found traces of two or three Ruckers in the course of the three years, it did not take long in each case to find out that it was not the man I hated so, and so much wanted to find.  People used to point me out as the boy who was trying to find a man named Rucker; and two or three came to me and told me of men they had met who might be my man.  I became known to many who traveled the canal as being engaged in some mysterious quest.  I suppose I had an anxious and rather strange expression as I made my inquiries.

It took me two years to make up my mind to change to a passenger boat, so slow was I to alter my way of doing things.  I have always been that way.  My wife read Knickerbocker’s History of New York after the children were grown up and she had more time for reading, and always told the children that she was positive their father must be descended from that ancient Dutchman[4] who took thirteen months to look the ground over before he began to put up that well-known church in Rotterdam of which he was the builder.  After smoking over it to the tune of three hundred pounds of Virginia tobacco, after knocking his head—­to jar his ideas loose, maybe—­and breaking his pipe against every church in Holland and parts of France and Germany; after looking at the site of his church from every point of view—­from land, from water, and from the air which he went up into by climbing other towers; this good old Dutch contractor and builder pulled off his coat and five pairs of breeches, and laid the corner-stone of the church.  I think that