n our country nearly every
family knows that domestic tragedy when the son and heir "breaks home
ties," and starts out to earn a living; and if all the world loves a
lover, it at least sympathizes with the boy who is "looking for a job."
The boy who is looking for the job may not think so, but each of those
who has passed through the same hard place gives him, if nothing else,
his good wishes. McGiffin's letters at this period gain for him from
those who have had the privilege to read them the warmest good feeling.

They are filled with the same cheery optimism, the same slurring over
of his troubles, the same homely jokes, the same assurances that he is
feeling "bully," and that it all will come out right, that every boy,
when he starts out in the world, sends back to his mother.

"I am in first-rate health and spirits, so I don't want you to fuss
about me. I am big enough and ugly enough to scratch along somehow, and
I will not starve."

To his mother he proudly sends his name written in Chinese characters,
as he had been taught to write it by the Chinese Consul-General in San
Francisco, and a pen-picture of two elephants. "I am going to bring you
home _two_ of these," he writes, not knowing that in the strange and
wonderful country to which he is going elephants are as infrequent as
they are in Pittsburg.

He reached China in April, and from Nagasaki on his way to Shanghai
the steamer that carried him was chased by two French gunboats. But,
apparently much to his disappointment, she soon ran out of range of
their guns. Though he did not know it then, with the enemy he had
travelled so far to fight this was his first and last hostile meeting;
for already peace was in the air.

Of that and of how, in spite of peace, he obtained the "job" he wanted,
he must tell you himself in a letter home:

TIEN-TSIN, CHINA, April 13, 1885.

"MY DEAR MOTHER--I have not felt much in the humor for writing, for
I did not know what was going to happen. I spent a good deal of money
coming out, and when I got here, I knew, unless something turned up,
I was a gone coon. We got off Taku forts Sunday evening and the next
morning we went inside; the channel is very narrow and sown with
torpedoes. We struck one--an electric one--in coming up, but it didn't
go off. We were until 10.30 P.M. in coming up to Tien-Tsin--thirty miles
in a straight line, but nearly seventy by the river, which is only about
one hundred feet wide--and we grounded