his friends, and his native village, though his lot there had been forlorn enough.  While still in sight of Waldorf, he sat down under a tree and thought of the future before him and the friends he had left.  He there, as he used to relate in after-life, made three resolutions:  to be honest, to be industrious, and not to gamble,—­excellent resolutions, as far as they go.  Having sat awhile under the tree, he took up his bundle and resumed his journey with better heart.

It was by no means the intention of this sagacious youth to walk all the way to the sea-coast.  There was a much more convenient way at that time of accomplishing the distance, even to a young man with only two dollars in his pocket.  The Black Forest is partly in Astor’s native Baden.  The rafts of timber cut in the Black Forest, instead of floating down the Rhine in the manner practised in America, used to be rowed by sixty or eighty men each, who were paid high wages, as the labor was severe.

Large numbers of stalwart emigrants availed themselves of this mode of getting from the interior to the sea-coast, by which they earned their subsistence on the way and about ten dollars in money.  The tradition in Waldorf is, that young Astor worked his passage down the Rhine, and earned his passage-money to England as an oarsman on one of these rafts.  Hard as the labor was, the oarsmen had a merry time of it, cheering their toil with jest and song by night and day.  On the fourteenth day after leaving home, our youth found himself at a Dutch seaport, with a larger sum of money than he had ever before possessed.  He took passage for London, where he landed a few days after, in total ignorance of the place and the language.  His brother welcomed him with German warmth, and assisted him to procure employment,—­probably in the flute and piano manufactory of Astor and Broadwood.

As the foregoing brief account of the early life of John Jacob Astor differs essentially from any previously published in the United States, it is proper that the reader should be informed of the sources whence we have derived information so novel and unexpected.  The principal source is a small biography of Astor published in Germany about ten years ago, written by a native of Baden, a Lutheran clergyman, who gathered his material in Waldorf, where were then living a few aged persons who remembered Astor when he was a sad and solitary lad in his father’s disorderly house.  The statements of this little book are confirmed by what some of the surviving friends and descendants of Mr. Astor in New York remember of his own conversation respecting his early days.  He seldom spoke of his life in Germany, though he remembered his native place with fondness, revisited it in the time of his prosperity, pensioned his father, and forgot not Waldorf in his will; but the little that he did say of his youthful years accords with the curious narrative in the work to which we have alluded.  We believe the reader may rely on our story as being essentially true.