It is just both to my natural and legal guardians to say here, that, when they saw me not only determined but able to support myself, they left me ever afterward quietly to my own devices. My necessities, therefore, and the prosperous result of my first adventures with five coppers, led me to adopt--a little too romantically, perhaps, in the latter and more thoughtful period of my youth--a principle to which I long had a kindly leaning, notwithstanding the hard knocks it dealt me. Indeed, it is still doubtful in my mind whether it is not better to devote half of one’s energies in learning to live on a very small income than to devote all of one’s energies in struggling and waiting miserably for a very large income. That, at least, was my principle; and, if it trammelled the head with false doctrine, it left the soul remarkably free. Thus, it will be seen, my entire subsequent wanderings, my course at an American college, and at a German university--the former on nothing to speak of, and the latter on eighty dollars--all sprang more or less directly from the extraordinary qualities of expansion, both spiritual and financial, which, at the early age of eleven, I discovered in those five copper cents. BOOK II. THREE YEARS AS A NEGRO-MINSTREL. ÆT. 12-15. CHAPTER I. MY FIRST COMPANY. Negro-minstrels were, I think, more highly esteemed at the time of which I am about to write than they are now; at least, I thought more of them then, both as individuals and as ministers to public amusement, than I ever have since. The first troupe of the kind I saw was the old “Kunkels,” and I can convey no idea of the pleasurable thrill I felt at the banjo-solo and the plantation-jig. I resolved on the spot to be a negro-minstrel. Mr. Ford, in whose theatre President Lincoln was assassinated, was, I believe, the agent of this company. I made known my ambition to that gentleman and to Mr. Kunkel himself, and they promised, no doubt, as the best means of getting rid of me, to take me with them the next year. Meantime I bought a banjo, and had pennies screwed on the heels of my boots, and practised “Jordan” on the former and the “Juba” dance with the latter, till my boarding-house keeper gave me warning. I think there is scarcely a serious friend of mine acquainted with me at that period who does not remember me with sorrow and vexation. The racket that I made at all hours and in all places can be accounted for only by the youthful zeal with which I “practised,” and which I despair of describing in anything so cold as words. I was then in my twelfth year, and my own master. It was, indeed, in that prosperous winter after the squalid summer of my six months’ wandering. I was going to school at Toledo, Ohio, and leading a very independent life on the money I had made out of the common investment of my five coppers and of my wages, as key-boy of the steamer Northern Indiana, commanded by the late Captain Pheatt.