“As my country no longer requires my services, I have made up my mind to go to Texas. My life has been one of danger, toil, and privation, but these difficulties I had to encounter at a time when I considered it nothing more than right good sport to surmount them. Now I start anew upon my own hook, and God only grant that it may be strong enough to support the weight hung upon it. I have a new row to hoe, a long and rough one, but, come what will, I’ll _go ahead_!” At a general meeting in his district Davy spoke for the last time to the voters of western Tennessee. Recounting his services, and the unfair methods by which he thought himself to have been beaten, he made a pretty strong talk, and concluded by saying that he could not think it a fair fight; but that he was done with politics for the present, and that he was going to Texas. In all stories of Davy’s life, the poem said to have been written by himself, on the eve of his departure for Texas, is given a prominent place. In his own story he says that it was as “zigzag as a worm fence” when first written, but was overhauled by one Peleg Longfellow, who could hardly have been a relative of H. W. Longfellow. After this and much lopping of some lines and stretching out of others, Davy says he wished he might be shot if wasn’t worse than ever. This is the concluding verse of the poem: “Farewell to my country! I fought for thee well, When the savage rushed forth like the demons of hell. In peace or in war I have stood by thy side. My country, for thee I have lived――would have died! But I am cast off, my career is now run, And I wander abroad like a prodigal son. Where the wild savage roves, and the broad prairies spread, The fallen――despised――will again――Go Ahead!” Having now determined to “cut out and quit the States until honest men should have a chance to work their way to the head of the heap,” Davy said good-by to his friends and his family, and started for Mills’ Point, to take a boat down the river. “The thermometer stood somewhat below freezing point,” he says, “as I left my wife and children; still there was some thawing about the eyelids, a thing that had not happened since I ran away from my father’s house when a thoughtless, vagabond boy. I dressed myself in a clean hunting-shirt, put on a new fox-skin cap with the tail hanging behind, took hold of my rifle ‘Betsy,’ which all the world knows was presented to me by the patriots of Philadelphia, and, thus equipped, started off to go ahead in a new world.”