In the happy days of the Adamses, as Professor Agassiz has taught us to say, when every vine was a lodging rent-free, and the fig-trees furnished ready-made clothing, life was a pleasant pastime. But this is an age of cash or barter. The old common-law maxim concerning pains and penalties is the rule of modern society: _Qui non habet in crumena, luat in corpore_,--"He who cannot pay his fare must work his passage." To evade this law, to shirk the forecastle, and to devise some means of climbing into the cabin-windows, is the problem that the youth of this generation are trying to solve. The United States offer so many _unprospected_ or half-worked placers to sharp eyes, that we must look for a great deal of vagabondry. Gold-miners do not settle themselves down to crushing quartz, so long as there are nuggets to be picked up. Rare chances lie hidden in the by-paths of this broad country, to tempt men to straggle from the ranks of the steady workers and turn foragers and _bummers_. And in this generation money has attained an extraordinary value. Since Dr. Johnson announced, in his Tour to the Hebrides, that the feudal system was giving way to wealth, most other social distinctions have yielded to it,--particularly in America, where there were few barriers to break down,--and money has become the chief good. Our standard of position in society is financial worth. Our patents of nobility are railway bonds, stock certificates, and mortgages. The income-return list of the United States Internal Revenue Department is the _Libro d'Oro_ of the American Venice. In this age of scepticism, the excellence of accumulated capital is the one thing no man doubts; and when I take off my hat to a rich man, which I always do when I meet him, I feel that I cannot be mistaken in paying respect to something demonstrable, tangible, real. Money furnishes all the blessings of life in this Western World,--health, beauty, wisdom, virtue, consideration; and some theologians have held that even the eye of the needle may expand to admit the camel who has dropped enough of his precious burden upon their premises. If wealth cannot always give health, it can help to preserve it; it is the best of physicians. There is nothing so becoming as property. "Handsome is who handsome has," is the accepted modern version of the old saw. If a rich man does not pass for sensible and good, it is his own fault. Wisdom can be bought, generally at low prices; and virtue is always assumed to be an attribute of Fortune except in moral didactic treatises. A cubic ounce of gold can be beaten to cover fourteen hundred and sixty-six square feet; and a skilful capitalist can make it hide quite as large an area of meanness.