he 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