In the mean time, while I was dancing and reciting poetry to beautiful women, my generous brother was rapidly making money at the bar in San Francisco, and urging my father and me to leave Georgia and go to him, writing that he was making more money in two months’ practice than my father received in a year. This to my conservative parent seemed incredible; he shook his head, saying to me, “It is hard for an old tree to take root in a new soil.” His friends of the Savannah bar ridiculed his entertaining the notion of leaving Georgia, where his father had been a Judge of the Superior Court of that State; he himself had been United States District Attorney, for years had presided over the Georgia Senate, had been nominated for Governor of the State, and for a lifetime had been at the head of the Georgia bar. Always a Union man, opposing Nullification, he was beloved by the people of his State, and his law practice was then most lucrative. The idea of his pulling up stakes and going to the outposts of civilization seemed absurd. He would not entertain the thought; he laughed at my brother’s Arabian Nights stories of his law firm in San Francisco making money at the rate of $100,000 a year. But just here, my father’s purpose was suddenly shaken, by my brother’s remitting to me a large amount of money in gold dust, and he, my father, being then paid five thousand dollars by the Bank of the State of Georgia for an argument made for them before the United States Supreme Court at Washington. My gold dust was tangible evidence of my brother’s success, and as continual dropping wears away a stone, so by continual pleading I at last persuaded him to take me to California. Mournfully he sold our old homestead and sadly closed up his Savannah law office, and with me, on the 13th of May, 1850, left for San Francisco, where in two years he made a comfortable fortune, retired from practice and went to Europe. My brother Hall’s motto was, “Ten millions or nothing.” He made himself, to my certain knowledge, two comfortable fortunes. Grand speculations to double my father’s fortune very soon made inroads in it, and the dear old gentleman to save a remnant returned to this country. As he expressed himself to me, “California must have a Circuit Judge of the United States. I will get our Democratic Congress to pass a bill to this effect, and will myself return to California as its United States Circuit Judge. I do not care to return to the practice of law when I reach San Francisco, where, I expect to find that, like the ‘fruit of the Dead Sea,’ my little competency will turn into ashes at the touch. Being on the Bench, I shall at least have a support”; all of which he carried out to the letter, and he died devoted to the people of the State of California.