I pushed across the plains, and went to California,
remaining a long time in San Francisco. This may have been
vagabondism, but it was profitable vagabondism to me. During this
long wandering I held no communication with my friends in the East;
friends and foes alike had an opportunity to forget me, or if they
thought of me they did not know whether I was dead or alive; they
certainly never knew, all the time, where I was; and while I was
journeying I never once met a man or woman who had been acquainted
with me in the past. All the time, too, I had plenty of money;
indeed, when, I returned at last I was richer far than I was when I
left Albany, and left as the common saying graphically expresses it,
"between two days." I had my old resources of recipes, medicines and
my profession, and these I used, and had plenty of opportunity to
use, to the best advantage. I could have settled in San Francisco
for life with the 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.
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