[Illustration: “_Dormer calls his hotel the Sheridan House._”] Monday, the 27th of October, 1873, was an eventful day at the Philadelphia Agency, and formed an epoch in the life history of at least one man, remembrance of which will never fail until his latest breath. Then it was that James McParlan, attired and accoutred as just described, his heart hopeful for the future, but in fact unknowing and unknown, kicked the dust of the city from his heels, at the Callowhill street depot of the Philadelphia and Reading Railway, and after purchasing a ticket for Port Clinton, depositing his two valises—which bore every outward evidence of having seen much tough usage and extended travel in domestic and foreign parts—in the seat beside himself, in the smoking-car of the afternoon train, set out upon his voyage of discovery in the stronghold of the Mollie Maguires. He was James McParlan no longer—but James McKenna, as I must hereafter call him—and he looked backward upon the receding town, and considered whether he would survive ever again to take his old name and place in the world and see the broad, teeming streets, handsome structures, and beautiful girls of the Quaker City. To him it then seemed he was cutting loose from all the nether world. Those who knew him best would pass him by unheeded in his transforming disguise and adopted name, and even his intimate associates—excepting Mr. Franklin and I—in Chicago and elsewhere, fully believed him to be adrift upon the blue waters, shaping his course to lands “beyant the seas,” only to return after the lapse of many months. Would he _ever_ return? That was a question, he soon decided, which, for a favorable response, rested with himself and the manner in which he conducted his researches. He was sure that I watched anxiously over him, and that Mr Franklin was prepared to do everything for his good, but very largely would he be the worker-out of his own destiny. His life and success, or his failure and death, reposed in his own strength, guarded by his own intellect. While these and similar thoughts crowded upon his brain, the detective was traveling onward. Smoothly and swiftly the cars glided over the track, past Belmont Glen, and beyond the outskirts of the city. Then came Fairmount Park, Laurel Hill, seen from the far distance, and closer at hand the broad, still waters of the Schuylkill, of which Ireland’s great poet sang and on whose shores he once found that repose which his weary head had elsewhere sought in vain. It was not within the heart of a man of McKenna’s temperament, or in one born on the soil of the beautiful land that gave him birth, to resist the temptation to search out Tom Moore’s cottage and feast his eyes upon its walls and roof; and he raised the blind, admitted the sunlight, and his senses drank in, in reverent silence, the variegated and pleasing landscape. After a time came Valley Forge, the scene of so much suffering by the American soldiers under General Washington, in the