I am going to fish in the Rockies. I shall take with me that immaculate tackle which last year inspired me with such hopes in Dovedale. I hear of places where you have only to cast your fly and you pull out a 5 lb. trout (nothing less) with positive certainty; and without taking him off your hook, you have simply to swing him a little behind you into a natural boiling geyser, and in ten minutes your 5-pounder is cooked and ready for your lunch. That is but a small specimen of the kind of sport I am anticipating! That's the sort of thing that inspires me!
But then there is the reverse of this pretty picture, which sometimes, in melancholy moments, makes me contemplate my enforced holiday as a hardship on the part of fate. Are there not mosquitoes on that side of the broad Atlantic? Are there not Red Indians and grizzly bears? I have pictured myself walking though a narrow glen, fishing-rod in hand, in the angler's contemplative mood, and suddenly finding myself confronted by a grizzly! Must, or rather will, he retire, or must I? I never fired a revolver in my life, so I should not think of carrying one; besides, I have no thirst for a grizzly's blood, and I only hope he has none for mine. I am sure if he will let me alone I won't meddle with him. Alas! I get a hug and a pat, and my fate and my fishing are ended!
Then, again, I dream of encountering a band of black-feet, or crow's feet, or spotted-tailed Indians, in feathers and war-paint, armed with tomahawk and scalping-knife. I yield my hoary, or I may say my bald scalp to that horrid knife, and so my fate is ended. When I think of things in that way, am I wrong in talking of it as a hard fate? Then there are six-shooters, bowie-knives, buffaloes, and rattlesnakes!
Nevertheless, to the Rockies I am bound, in spite of all such gloomy possibilities. My passage money is already paid and my berth secured in the good ship "Cunardia": which is, I am told, one of the finest vessels afloat; so I hope I shall be able to give a good account of her.
My youngest son Frank, who has always been somewhat of a rolling stone, and to whom, in the old country, neither wool nor pelf would stick, is now settled away up at the foot of the Rocky Mountains; and when he has sometimes written to me for money, and I have asked him how he has spent it, his answer has invariably been "Come and see!"
Year after year I have put off going, but now I am beginning to feel that if I am ever to go, I must delay no longer; so I am about to see with my own eyes where my money has gone to, and what may be the chances of any portion of it coming back to me.
Frank was always a peculiar youth to manage. He began life in my City counting-house, but he soon tired of it. He had formed the notion that he was better suited to the free life of the prairie than to the routine work of City business. Of course he knew nothing about prairie life, and he would not be persuaded that his notions were but the outcome of a disordered imagination; he was well off where he was, with fair chances before him; but he was quite prepared to throw those chances away, and to strike out into the Far West. He was a strong, healthy, good-looking youth, fond of society, and very popular, and consequently, was gradually being led into habits of extravagance which might have ended badly. I was therefore, willing to humour his wishes.
In the year 1880 I paid his passage to America, and he began his career by engaging himself to a farmer in Minnesota, who for a small stipend was to instruct him in farming and give him his board in exchange for his work.
When Frank began with the farmer, it is not too much to say that he was totally ignorant of everything belonging to a farm; but he had not been on this farm for six months before he became convinced that he had learnt everything there was to learn, and that he could give a few wrinkles to his master.
Then he told me that there was a wonderful farm to be had close at hand, dirt cheap, a chance not to be lost; it was a small place of about 200 acres with good house and building, and splendid feeding prairie-land adjoining. This, he said, was just the place for him to begin on; and he produced such elaborate figures to prove to me that, although the previous occupant had failed there, enormous profits—one hundred per cent. at least—could be made of it, if managed in accordance with his enlightened views, rather than in the humdrum way in which the previous farmer had come to grief. He wrote to me so urgently, so persistently, so enthusiastically, that I, although with many misgivings, found him the money wherewith to purchase and stock the place. More money was expended on that farm than I am now willing to acknowledge, but everything went along swimmingly for a short period.