"Go seek your fortune farther than at home."

Lawrence Colquhoun returned home to find himself famous. Do you remember a certain book of travels written four or five years ago by Lord Milton and Dr. Cheadle, in which frequent mention was made of un nomme Harris, an inquiring and doubting Christian, who wore a pair of one-eyed spectacles and carried a volume of Paley? If that Harris, thus made illustrious, had suddenly presented himself in a London drawing-room while the book was enjoying his first run, he would have met with much the same success which awaited Lawrence Colquhoun. Harris let his opportunity go, and never showed up; perhaps he is still wandering in the Rocky Mountains and pondering over Paley. But Colquhoun appeared while the work of the Dragoon and the Younger Son was still in the mouths of men and women. The liveliest thing in that book is the account of Empire City and its Solitary. Everybody whose memory can carry him back to last year's reading will remember so much. And everybody who knew Colquhoun knew also that he was the Solitary.

The Hermit; the man with the Golden Butterfly, now a millionaire; the Golden Butterfly, now in a golden cage—all these actually present, so to speak, in the flesh, and ready to witness if the authors lied. Why, each was an advertisement of the book, and if the two Chinamen had been added, probably people might be reading the work still. But they, poor fellows, were defunct.

It annoyed Lawrence at first to find himself, like Cambuscan, with his tale half told; and it was monotonous to be always asked whether it was really true, and if he was the original Hermit. But everything wears off; people in a week or two began to talk of something else, and when Colquhoun met a man for the first time after his return he would startle and confuse that man by anticipating his question. He knew the outward signs of its approach. He would watch for the smile, the look of curiosity, and the parting of the lips before they framed the usual words:

"By the way, Colquhoun, is it actually true that you are the Hermit in Jack Dunquerque's book?"

And while the questioner was forming the sentence, thinking it a perfectly original one, never asked before, Lawrence would answer it for him.

"It is perfectly true that I was the Hermit. Now talk of something else."

For the rest he dropped into his old place. Time, matrimony, good and evil hap, had made havoc among his set; but there was still some left. Club-men come and club-men go; but the club goes on for ever.

Colquhoun had the character of being at once the laziest and the most good-natured of men. A dangerous reputation, because gratitude is a heavy burden to bear. If you do a man a good turn he generally finds it too irksome to be grateful, and so becomes your enemy. But Colquhoun cared little about his reputation.

When he disappeared, his friends for a day or two wondered where he was. Then they ceased to talk of him. Now he was come back they were glad to have him among them again. He was a pleasant addition. He was not altered in the least—his eyes as clear from crows-feet, his beard as silky, and his face as cheerful as ever. Some men's faces have got no sun in them; they only light up with secret joy at a friend's misfortunes; but this is an artificial fire, so to speak; it burns with a baleful and lurid light. There are others whose faces are like the weather in May, being uncertain and generally disagreeable. But Lawrence Colquhoun's face always had a cheerful brightness. It came from an easy temper, a good digestion, a comfortable income, and a kindly heart.

Of course he made haste to find Gilead P. Beck. Jack Dunquerque, who forgot at the time to make any mention of Phillis Fleming, informed him of the Golden Butterfly's wonderful Luck. And they all dined together—the Hermit, the Miner, the Dragoon, and the Younger Son.

They ran the Bear Hunt over again; they talked of Empire City, and speculated on the two Chinamen; had they known the fate of the two, their speculations might have taken a wider range.

"It was rough on me that time," said Gilead. "It had never been so rough before, since I began bumming around."

They waited for more, and presently he began to tell them more. It was the way of the man. He never intruded his personal experiences, being for the most part a humble and even a retiring man; but when he was among men he knew, he delighted in his recollections.

"Thirty-three years ago since I began. Twelve years old; the youngest of the lot. And I wonder where the rest are. Hiram, I know, sat down beside a rattle one morning. He remembered he had an appointment somewhere else, and got up in a hurry. But too late, and his constitution broke up suddenly. But for the rest I never did know what became of them. When I go back with that almighty Pile of mine, they will find me out, I dare say. Then they will bring along all their friends and the rest of the poor relations. The poorer the relations in our country, the more affectionate and self-denying they are."

"What did you do first?" asked Ladds.

"Ran messages; swept out stores; picked up trades; went handy boy to a railway engineer; read what I could and when I could. When I was twenty I kept a village school at a dollar a day. That was in Ohio. I've been many things in my pilgrimage and tried to like them all, but that was most too much for me. Boys and gells, Captain Ladds. Boys themselves are bad; but boys and gells mixed, they air—wal, it's a curious and interestin' thing that, ever since that time, when I see the gells snoopin' around with their eyes as soft as velvet, and their sweet cheeks the colour of peach, I say to myself, 'Shoddy. It is shoddy. I've seen you at school, and I know you better than you think.' As the poet says, 'Let gells delight to bark and bite, for 'tis their nature to.' You believe, Mr. Dunquerque, because you are young and inexperienced, that gells air soft. Air they? Soft as the shell of a clam. And tender? Tender as hickory-nut. Air they gentle, unselfish, and yieldin'? As rattlesnakes. The child is mother to the woman, as the poet says; and school-gells grow up mostly into women. They're sweet to look at; but when you've tended school, you feel to know them. And then you don't yearn after them so much.

"There was once a boy I liked. He was eighteen, stood six foot high in his stocking-boots, and his name was Pete Conkling. The lessons that boy taught me were useful in my after life. We began it every morning at five minutes past nine. Any little thing set us off. He might heave a desk, or a row of books, or the slates of the whole class at my head. I might go for him first. It was uncertain how it began, but the fight was bound to be fought. The boys expected it, and it pleased the gells. Sometimes it took me half an hour, and sometimes the whole morning, to wallop that boy. When it was done, Pete would take his place among the little gells, for he never could learn anything, and school would begin. To see him after it was over sitting alongside of little Hepzibah and Keziah, as meek as if he'd never heard of a black eye, and never seen the human fist, was one of my few joys. I was fond of Pete, and he was fond of me. Ways like his, gentlemen, kinder creep round the heart of the lonely teacher. Very fond of him I grew. But I got restless and dug out for another place; it was when I went on the boards and became an actor, I think; and it was close on fifteen years afterwards that I met him. Then he was lying on the slopes of Gettysburg—it was after the last battle—and his eyes were turned up to the sky; one of them, I noticed, was black; so that he had kept up his fighting to the end. For he was stark dead, with a Confed. bullet in his heart. Poor Pete!"

"You fought for the North?" asked one of his audience.

"I was a Northerner," he replied simply. How could he help taking his part in maintaining undivided that fair realm of America, which every one of his countrymen love as Queen Elizabeth's yeoman loved the realm of England? We have no yeomen now, which is perhaps one of the reasons why we could not understand the cause of the North.

"I worried through that war without a scratch. We got wary towards the end, and let the bullets drop into trunks of trees for choice. And when it was over, I was five-and-thirty, and had to begin the world again. But I was used to it."

"And you enjoyed a wandering life?"

"Yes, I believe I did enjoy barking up a new tree. There's a breed of Americans who can't keep still. I belong to that breed. We do not like to sit by a river and watch the water flow; we get tired livin' in the village lookin' in each other's faces while the seasons come round like the hands of a clock. There's a mixture among us of Dutch and German and English to sit quiet and till the ground. They get their heels well grounded in the clay, and there they stick."

"Where do you get it from, the wandering blood?" asked Colquhoun.

Gilead P. Beck became solemn.

"There air folk among us," he whispered, "Who hold that we are descended from the Ten Tribes. I don't say those folk are right, but I do say that it sometimes looks powerful like as if they were. Descended from the Ten Tribes, they say, and miraculously kept separate from the English among whom they lived. Lost their own language—which, if it was Hebrew, I take it was rather a good thing to be quit of—and speakin' English, like the rest. What were the tribes? Wanderers, mostly. Father Abraham went drivin' his cows and his camels up and down the country. Isaac went around on the rove, and Jacob couldn't sit still. Very well, then. Didn't their children walk about, tryin' one location after another, for forty years, and always feelin' after a bit as if there must be a softer plank farther on? And when they'd be settled down for a few hundred years, didn't they get up and disappear altogether? Mark you, they didn't want to settle. And where are the Ten Tribes now? For they never went back; you may look Palesteen through and through, and nary a tribe."

He looked round asking the question generally, but no one ventured to answer it.

"Our folk, who have mostly gut religion, point to themselves. They say; 'Look at us; we air the real original Wanderers.' Look at us all over the world. What are the hotels full of? Full of Americans. We are everywhere. We eat up the milk and the honey, and we tramp off on ramble again. But there's more points of gen'ral resemblance. We like bounce and bunkum; so did those people down in Syria; we like to pile up the dollars; so did the Jews; they liked to set up their kings and pull them down again; we pursue the same generous and confiding policy with our presidents; and if they were stiff-necked and backsliding, we are as stiff-necked and backsliding as any generation among all the lot."

"A very good case, indeed," said Colquhoun.

"I did not think so, sir, till lately. But it's been borne in upon me with the weight and force that can't be resisted, and I believe it now. The lost Ten Tribes, gentlemen, air now located in the United States. I am certain of it from my own case. Do any of you think—I put it to you seriously—that such an inseck as the Golden Butterfly would have been thrown away upon an outsider? It is likely that such all-fired Luck as mine would have been wasted on a man who didn't belong to the Chosen People? No, sir; I am of the children of Israel; and I freeze to that."