lesson that peace is nowhere, and
friendship, for the most part, but a name.

"Once during my wanderings I visited the home of my boyhood. Unseen and
unknown I trod a familiar ground and gazed on familiar, though time-worn
faces. I stood at the window of Mr. Graham's library; saw the contented,
happy countenance of Emily--happy in her blindness and her forgetfulness
of the past. A young girl sat near the fire endeavouring to read by its
flickering light. I knew not then what gave such a charm to her
thoughtful features, nor why my eyes dwelt upon them with a rare
pleasure; for there was no voice to proclaim to the father's heart that
he looked on the face of his child. I am not sure that the strong
impulse which prompted me then to enter, acknowledge my identity, and
beg Emily to speak to me a word of forgiveness, might not have prevailed
over the dread of her displeasure; but Mr. Graham at the moment
appeared, cold and implacable as ever; I gazed an instant, then fled
from the house.

"Although in the various labours which I was compelled to undertake to
earn a decent maintenance, I had more than once met with such success as
to give me temporary independence, and to enable me to indulge in
expensive travelling, I had never amassed a fortune; indeed, I had not
cared to do so, since I had no use for money, except to employ it in the
gratification of my immediate wants. Accident, however, at last thrust
upon me a wealth which I could scarcely be said to have sought.

"After a year spent in the wilderness of the west, amid adventures the
relation of which now would seem to you almost incredible, I gradually
continued my retreat across the country, and after encountering
innumerable hardships, which had no other object than the indulgence of
my vagrant habits, I found myself in that land which has recently been
termed the land of promise, but which has proved to many a greedy
emigrant a land of deceit. For me, however, who sought it not, it
showered gold. I was among the earliest discoverers of its
treasure-vaults--one of the most successful, though the least laborious,
of the seekers after gain. Nor was it merely, or indeed chiefly, at the
mines that fortune favoured me. With the first results of my labours I
purchased an immense tract of land, little dreaming at the time that
those desert acres were destined to become the streets and squares of a
great and prosperous city. So that without effort, almost without my own