of the prospects that
lure the prudent soul, he threw over all idea of law.[1]

Friends were aghast. Manifestly, the boy had {244} brains. He
devoured information, absorbed facts like an encyclopaedia, and
observed everything. The Greek Testament and Ovid were his companions;
yet he rebelled at the immured existence of the scholar. At that time
(1772), Dartmouth was the rendezvous of {245} missionaries to the
Indians. The college itself held lectures to the singing of the winds
through the forests around it. The blowing of a conch-shell called to
lessons; and a sort of wildwood piety pervaded the atmosphere. Urged
by his mother, Ledyard made one more honest attempt to fit his life to
a stereotyped form, and came to study at Dartmouth for the missionary's
career.

It was not a success. When he thought to get a foretaste of the
missionary vocation by making a dugout and floating down the whole
length of Connecticut River, one hundred and forty miles, the scholarly
professors were shocked. And when he disappeared for four months to
make a farther test by living among the Mohawks, the faculty was
furious. His friends gave him up as hopeless, a ne'er-do-well; and
Ledyard gave over the farce of trying to live according to other men's
patterns.

[Illustration: Ledyard in his dugout, from a contemporaneous print.]

What now determined him was what directs the most of lives--need for
bread and butter. He became a common sailor on the ship of a friend in
New London, and at twenty-five landed in Plymouth, light of heart as he
was light of purse. The world was an oyster to be opened by his own
free lance; and up he tramped from Plymouth to London in company with
an Irishman penniless as himself, gay as a lark, to the world's great
capital with the world's great prizes for those with the wits to win
them. A carriage with driver {246} and footman in livery wearing the
armorial design of his own Ledyard ancestors rolled past in the street.
He ran to the coachman, asked the address, and presented himself at the
door of the ancestral Ledyards, hope beating high. The relationship
was to be the key to open all doors. And the door of the ancestral
Ledyards was shut in his face. The father was out. The son put no
stock in the story of the ragged stranger. He did not even know that
Ledyards existed in America. What was to hinder any common tramp
trumping up such a story? Where were the tattered fellow's proofs?
Le