"He tried to go on as usual for several months, but it was no use. At last, he left his practice, and all his connections, and wandered over the United States--through towns and wildernesses. He rode across the plains on a mustang; clambered through the gorges of the Rocky Mountains; saw the tide come in through the Golden Gate at San Francisco. He pushed north as far as Canada, and thence came down the Mississippi to New Orleans. From there he crossed to the Pacific coast again, and lived to find himself a second time in San Francisco. He didn't stay there long, but struck overland, slanting southward, and, in four or five months, appeared at Charleston, South Carolina. So he worked up the Atlantic coast to New York. By the time he got there, he was older and wiser, and strengthened, body and mind, by a rough experience. He resolved to travel no more; but, as yet, it was not in his power to feel happy. "Much had happened in his absence. His friend, after living three or four years with his wife in Europe, was separated from her--not, however, by a regular divorce--and she had disappeared, and had not since been heard of. It was reported that she was dead. She had left with her husband a son, two or three years old, at that time a sickly little fellow, scarcely expected to live. It was supposed that the mother had discovered that it was her money, and not herself, that her husband cared for, and, perhaps, too, may have imagined him to be still thinking of his first love, who, indeed, was said to have in some way fomented the quarrel between them, though how, or to what end, was never known. She, by-the-way, after an absence of some years from New York, suddenly reappeared there, and married a wealthy old Knickerbocker, who died not long afterward, and left her his property. She became eminent in society, and was intimate with all the most distinguished people. Her former lover returned from Europe, with his little son, and, I believe, settled somewhere in the neighborhood of New York. They met, and, I understand, came to be on very friendly terms with one another, but the conditions of their lives would have prevented the possibility of marriage, even had they desired it.