I saw small steamboats, with their signs up—­“For Wissahickon and Manayunk 25 cents.”  Geo. Lippard, in his Legends of Washington and his Generals, has rendered the Wissahickon sacred in my eyes, and I shall make that trip, as well as one to Germantown, soon . . . .

There is one fine custom observed in Phila.  A gentleman is always expected to hand up a lady’s money for her.  Yesterday I sat in the front end of the bus, directly under the driver’s box—­a lady sat opposite me.  She handed me her money, which was right.  But, Lord! a St. Louis lady would think herself ruined if she should be so familiar with a stranger.  In St. Louis a man will sit in the front end of the stage, and see a lady stagger from the far end to pay her fare.

There are two more letters from Philadelphia:  one of November, 28th, to Orion, who by this time had bought a paper in Muscatine, Iowa, and located the family there; and one to Pamela dated December 5th.  Evidently Orion had realized that his brother might be of value as a contributor, for the latter says: 

I will try to write for the paper occasionally, but I fear my letters will be very uninteresting, for this incessant night work dulls one’s ideas amazingly....  I believe I am the only person in the Inquirer office that does not drink.  One young fellow makes $18 for a few weeks, and gets on a grand “bender” and spends every cent of it.

How do you like “free soil"?—­I would like amazingly to see a good
old-fashioned negro.  My love to all.

Truly your brother, Sam

In the letter to Pamela he is clearly homesick.

“I only want to return to avoid night work, which is injuring my eyes,” is the excuse, but in the next sentence he complains of the scarcity of letters from home and those “not written as they should be.”  “One only has to leave home to learn how to write interesting letters to an absent friend,” he says, and in conclusion, “I don’t like our present prospect for cold weather at all.”

He had been gone half a year, and the first attack of home-longing, for a boy of his age, was due.  The novelty of things had worn off; it was coming on winter; changes had taken place among his home people and friends; the life he had known best and longest was going on and he had no part in it.  Leaning over his case, he sometimes hummed: 

    “An exile from home, splendor dazzles in vain.”

He weathered the attack and stuck it out for more than half a year longer.  In January, when the days were dark and he grew depressed, he made a trip to Washington to see the sights of the capital.  His stay was comparatively brief, and he did not work there.  He returned to Philadelphia, working for a time on the Ledger and North American.  Finally he went back to New York.  There are no letters of this period.  His second experience in New York appears not to have been recorded, and in later years was only vaguely remembered.  It was late in the summer of 1854 when he finally set out on his return to the West.  His ‘Wanderjahr’ had lasted nearly fifteen months.