I was, in knowledge of worldly life, scarcely less a child then than I had been when, at the age of ten, I determined to go out into the world and make my own career, free from the obstacles I imagined to be preventing me from following my ideals. The ever-present feeling developed in me by the religious training of my mother, that an overruling Providence had my life in keeping, made me quite oblivious of or indifferent to the chances of disaster, for the assurance of protection and leading to the best end left no place for anxieties. It was a mental phenomenon which I now look back on with a wonder which I think most sane people will share, that, at the age when most boys have become men, for I graduated at twenty, I should have been capable of going out into a strange world like one of the children of the Children's Crusade, with an unfaltering faith that I should be led and cared for by Providence as I had been by my parents. I had no apprehension, from the moment that one of the ship-owners who was in business relations with my elder brother offered me a free passage on one of his sailing ships to Liverpool, that I should not find a similar bridge back again; and with my thirty dollars changed into six sovereigns, and a little valise with only a change of clothes, I went on board the Garrick, a packet of the Black Ball line, sailing in the last days of December, 1849. There had been a thaw and the Hudson River was full of floating ice, which in the ebbing of the tide endangered the shipping lying out in the stream, and the captain made such haste to get out of the danger (the extent of which was shown by the topmasts of an Austrian brig, showing above water where she had been sunk by the floating ice) that the ship had her anchor apeak before the boat which carried my brother and myself out could reach it. We barely arrived in time for me to get aboard, the difficulty of threading our way amongst the masses of ice making our boating difficult. That my childish faith in Providence was a family trait might be deduced from the fact that my brother, who had from boyhood stood to me _in loco parentis_, had not asked me, until I was on the point of going aboard, what my means of subsistence were, and, when he found that I had only my six sovereigns, he told me to wait at Liverpool for a letter of credit he would send me by the steamer which followed.