rned" professions. It was
the wish of his father that he should be a minister of the Presbyterian
Church, and as a child he was trained with that end in view. He himself
preferred to study medicine, and after graduating at the University of
Tennessee, at Edinburgh he followed a course of lectures, and for two
years travelled in Europe, visiting many of the great hospitals.

Then having thoroughly equipped himself to practise as a physician,
after a brief return to his native city, and as short a stay in
Philadelphia, he took down his shingle forever, and proceeded to
New Orleans to study law. In two years he was admitted to the bar of
Louisiana. But because clients were few, or because the red tape of the
law chafed his spirit, within a year, as already he had abandoned
the Church and Medicine, he abandoned his law practice and became
an editorial writer on the New Orleans _Crescent_. A year later the
restlessness which had rebelled against the grave professions led him to
the gold fields of California, and San Francisco. There, in 1852, at
the age of only twenty-eight, as editor of the San Francisco _Herald_,
Walker began his real life which so soon was to end in both disaster and
glory.

Up to his twenty-eighth year, except in his restlessness, nothing in his
life foreshadowed what was to follow. Nothing pointed to him as a man
for whom thousands of other men, from every capital of the world, would
give up their lives.

Negatively, by abandoning three separate callings, and in making it
plain that a professional career did not appeal to him, Walker had
thrown a certain sidelight on his character; but actively he never had
given any hint that under the thoughtful brow of the young doctor and
lawyer there was a mind evolving schemes of empire, and an ambition
limited only by the two great oceans.

Walker's first adventure was undoubtedly inspired by and in imitation
of one which at the time of his arrival in San Francisco had just been
brought to a disastrous end. This was the De Boulbon expedition into
Mexico. The Count Gaston Raoulx de Raousset-Boulbon was a young French
nobleman and Soldier of Fortune, a _chasseur d'Afrique_, a duellist,
journalist, dreamer, who came to California to dig gold. Baron
Harden-Hickey, who was born in San Francisco a few years after Boulbon
at the age of thirty was shot in Mexico, also was inspired to dreams of
conquest by this same gentleman adventurer.

Boulbon was a young man of