I had my old resources of recipes, medicines and my profession, and these I used, and had plenty of opportunity to use, to the best advantage.  I could have settled in San Francisco for life with the certainty of securing a handsome annual income.  I never feared coming to want.  If I had lost my money and all other resources had failed, I was not afraid to make a horse-nail or turn a horse-shoe with the best blacksmith in California, and I could have got my living, as I did for many a year, at the forge and anvil.

But I made more money in other and easier ways, and I made friends.  In every conceivable way my two years’ wandering was of far more benefit to me than I dreamed of when I wildly set out for the West without knowing exactly where, or for what, I was going.  The new country, too, had given me, not only a fresh fund of ideas, but a new stock of health—­morally and physically I was in better condition than I ever was before in my life.  I had a clear head; a keen sense of my past follies; a vivid consciousness of the consequences which such follies, crimes they may be called, are almost certain to bring.  I flattered myself that I was not only a reformed prisoner, but a reformed drunkard, and a thoroughly restored matrimonial monomaniac.

And when I returned, at last, to the East, and went once more to visit my near and dear friends in Ontario County, I was received as one who had come back from the dead.  When I had been here a few weeks, and had communicated to my cousins so much of the story of my life as I then thought advisable, I took good counsel and finally did what I ought to have done long years before.  I commenced proper legal proceedings for a divorce from my first and worst wife.  I do not need to dwell upon the particulars; it is enough to say, that the woman, who was then living, so far from opposing me, aided me all she could, even making affidavit to her adultery with the hotel clerk at Bainbridge, long ago, and I easily secured my full and complete divorce.  Now I was, indeed, a free man-all the other wives whom I had married, or who had married me, whether I would or no, were as nothing; some were dead and others were again married.  It may be that this new, and to me strange sense of freedom, legitimate freedom, set me to thinking that I might now secure a genuine and true wife, who would make a new home happy to me as long as we both should live.

Fortune, not fate now, followed me, led me rather and guided my footsteps.  It was not many months before I met a woman who seemed to me in every way calculated to fill the first place in that home which I had pictured as a final rest after all my woes and wanderings.  From mutual esteem our acquaintance soon ripened into mutual love.  She was all that my heart could desire.  I was tolerably well off; my position was reputable; my connections were respectable.  To us, and to our friends, the match seemed a most desirable one.  It was no hasty courtship; we knew each other for months and learned to know each other well; and with true love for each other, we had for each other a genuine respect.  I frankly told her the whole story of my life as I have now written it.  She only pitied my misfortunes, pardoned my errors, and, one bright, golden, happy autumn day, we were married.