"He
was a grand specimen," cried Pinkerton; "I wish you
could have seen him, Mr. Dodd He had an appearance of
magnanimity that used to remind me of the patriarchs."
On the death of this random protector, the boy
inherited the plant and continued the business. "It
was a life I could have chosen, Mr. Dodd!" he cried.
"I have been in all the finest scenes of that
magnificent continent that we were born to be the heirs
of I wish you could see my collection of tin-types; I
wish I had them here. They were taken for my own
pleasure, and to be a memento: and they show Nature in
her grandest as well as her gentlest moments." As he
tramped the Western States and Territories, taking tin-
types, the boy was continually getting hold of books,
good, bad, and indifferent, popular and abstruse, from
the novels of Sylvanus Cobb to Euclid's Elements, both
of which I found (to my almost equal wonder) he had
managed to peruse: he was taking stock by the way, of
the people, the products, and the country, with an eye
unusually observant and a memory unusually retentive;
and he was collecting for himself a body of magnanimous
and semi-intellectual nonsense, which he supposed to be
the natural thoughts and to contain the whole duty of
the born American.
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