He called on an advertiser who wanted him to travel at a figure so low that the question arose as to how he would pay his board, when the advertiser told him he supposed his applicant understood that he “would have to beat the hotels!” In September came the news of the death of his sister and mother.  And still he tramped.  He was now in what his casual acquaintances considered “a hard hole.”  His landlady was “carrying” him—­that is, she was wanting his room worse than his company, but, being a kind-hearted Irish woman, she could not believe another week would pass without better success.  No one with a trade—­no one with the slightest influence—­knows what difficulties are before a stranger in a strange land.

AS GOD WOULD HAVE IT,

on Saturday the seventh of October, 1871, he started out, again full of hope.  About a mile and a half to the west of the city he entered a hotel at which he had often applied before.  The proprietor had broken his leg the day before.  He wanted “a likely young man,” Here was one.  The proprietor was himself an Englishman.  Here was a youth whose rosy cheeks proclaimed the shores of Albion.  On Sunday he made ready.  That night and the following two days there came a calamity that horrified the civilized world—­perhaps the barbarians as well.  The employers who had refused him shelter and food ran like droves of wolves before a prairie-fire, and filled their famished bodies off a charity that has been likened to that of the Savior of the world, so freely was it given.  His hotel was not burned.  In the arduous labors of housing three where one had before been quartered he showed an ability which attracted the attention of a dealer in real estate who soon took him into his office.  Here he learned a trade.  His employer soon found that he had a man who could make a map worth fifty dollars as well as the map-makers, and this gave the young man practice.  Hope, kindled into such a flame, led the young man in a march of improvement that even continued in his dreams, for he often dreamed out some combination of colors, some freak of lettering, that elicited everybody’s admiration.  All this improvement

DID NOT COME IN A WEEK OR A YEAR,

but it led to his permanent engagement in a substantial enterprise of the kind, where work, elegant and original, will always await him, and where his usefulness is ever apparent to the most unwilling investigator.  From being the victim of the most cruel circumstances which a man in health ever encountered under my observation, he has become the valued companion of the leaders of thought, of art, and of music, and I feel confident that the whole of his ultimate success at one time in his career depended on the fact that he had more hope than any other man I ever saw.

HOPE IS LIKE THE CORK TO THE NET,