When, however, a great truth has once been discovered, it is always easy to find many paths of proof converging toward it. When Kepler, for instance, by some strange guess or inspiration, hit upon the colossal fact that the planets move in elliptical orbits, it was comparatively an easy thing,--or should have been, to make this scientific parallel correct,--to come at half a dozen proofs of it in the simple properties of the conic sections. Thus, too, fortunately for us, the respectability of our family can be proved in many ways, and even, like Kepler’s Laws, by mathematics itself. Nay, our proofs can be, and indeed are, established by common arithmetical notation and numeration; because the members of our family are generally rich. This is manifestly an unusual advantage for an autobiographer, since, as is well known, he almost invariably comes of “poor but honest parents.” And there is no little pride mixed with the candor with which I boast, that I am to this day, pecuniarily, the poorest of my race. The devious course of my wanderings, as a youthful negro-minstrel and as the European tourist of one hundred and eighty-one paper dollars, left me in the early part of my life no time or inclination to look into such commonplaces as the matters of my inheritance. It was but a week ago that I rode over the broad Ohio prairie where I was born, and passed by the pleasant farms which, with the broad prairie, were the patrimony left to me,--or, I should say, to the kind gentlemen who administered them for me. That property has never been any care to me. It was so thoroughly administered during my minority that I have never since had the trouble even of collecting rents. Now there may be people, of a recklessly imaginative type, who suppose it would excite a pleasurable thrill to ride thus over a great prairie which bears one’s own name, but no more tangible emolument for the quondam heir; and there may be people of so aspiring mental constitutions as to think it a grateful, rollicking piece of vanity to pass unrecognized through a town which was once sold by one’s own administrator for fifty-two dollars: but I am free to confess that I have endured these honors within the past week, and have carried nothing away with me, in the matter of gratification or sentiment, but a dash of the sadness which has settled about the wreck and ruin of the old homestead.