I HAD no sooner disclosed to my father my musings with Fame, and the aspirations she had excited in me, than he went right into a passion, and set me down as extravagant and mad. He had entertained hopes of making me a schoolmaster, perhaps an inspector of fish, in which office excellent opportunities for increasing one's fortunes were offered; but I had been rendered quite useless to the parish ever since the New York politicians had taken me into their favor. Anybody, he said, might go out upon and know the world, but few had the courage and daring to grapple with its difficulties. And then, the world was so wicked that men of reflection instinctively shrank from it. Notwithstanding my wild, visionary plans, he yet had hopes of me. But if I sought distinction in the political world, it would be well not to forget that it had at this day become a dangerous quicksand, over which a series of violent storms continually heaved. And these storms, by some mysterious process or other, were incessantly casting up on the shore of political popularity and making heroes of men whose virtues were not weighty enough to keep them at the bottom. "Be an humble citizen, my son," said he: "learn to value a quiet life. You are not given to loud and boisterous talking, to lying, or to slandering; which things, at this day, are essential to political success. Worthy and well disposed persons are too much afraid of being drowned in the violence of the storm politicians with shallow brains and empty pockets create, by their anxiety to take the affairs of the nation into their own keeping. Remember, too, that if you fail in the object of your ambition (and you are not vagabond enough to succeed), the remotest desert will not hide you from the evil designs of your enemies. You may seek some crystal stream; you may let your tears flow with its waters; but such will not lighten your disappointment, for the persecuted heart is no peace-offering to the political victor. Politically vanquished; and you are like an unhappy lover who seeks him a rural deity and sings his complaints to the winds. Your eye will become jealous at the fortunes of others, but your sighs over the cruelty of what you are pleased to call human imperfections will not bring back your own. Stay quietly at home, my son, and if you cannot be a schoolmaster, chance may one day turn you up President of these United States. Let your insanity for writing books not beguile you into crime; and above all, I would enjoin you, my son, never to write the 'Life and Character' of an in-going President, for then, to follow the fashion of the day, and make for him a life that would apply with equal truth to King Mancho, or any one of his sable subjects, will be necessary that you write him down the hero of adventures he never dreamed of, and leave out the score of delinquincies his real life is blemished with. If you do this, wise men will set you down a scribbler for charity's sake."