One bleak day in the winter of 1857-8, a young man was walking slowly down Broadway, humming a lively tune in a mournful voice, and doing his utmost to keep up his spirits, which, just then, were at their lowest ebb. In the nature of things, the poor fellow could not be otherwise. While in the senior class in college, preparing for the ministry, and succeeding most brilliantly, he was summoned home to New York, just in time to receive his father’s dying blessing; his mother having fallen asleep several years before, he was thus left an orphan, with a younger brother to provide for. As his father had been a leading merchant in the great metropolis, there seemed to be little difficulty in this, and he assumed the control of affairs at once.
But the mutterings of that financial storm were already heard in the sky, and it soon burst over the land, toppling old, established houses, like so many ninepins, and carrying woe and desolation to many a hearthstone. George Inwood placed his shoulder to the wheel, and toiled manfully; but, where so many thousands of experienced merchants were swept away by the current, it would have been almost a miracle, had he been able to resist the whelming tide. Finding it useless, he threw up his arms, and went down with the multitude. When everything was gone, he found that he still owed his creditors many thousand dollars.
And so he hummed the lively air in his mournful voice, as he dreamily walked down Broadway, and asked himself what was to be done. He was poverty-stricken, with his younger brother depending upon him, and the big African, Jim Tubbs, who had always lived in the family from his childhood, with no means of support.
Naturally, a hundred schemes presented themselves, as they always will to a young man, when thrown upon his own resources. He might serve as a clerk—that is if anybody wanted him, which was by no means likely; he might teach, if any school was in want of such a teacher as himself, which was equally improbable. He might do any thing, if the opportunity were given him; but, during these “hard times,” he soon learned that the worst possible place for a man out of employment, is in a large city. When he was turned away again and again, his heart failed him, and as he hummed his lively air in his mournful voice, he came to a conclusion which he ought to have made a considerable time before.
“I must leave New York; I shall soon starve here.”
When he reached his lodgings, where his brother Edwin was staying, and where Jim managed to earn his own board, by doing odd jobs around the house, he called the two together, and proposed the oft-repeated question:
“Where shall we go?”
“Let’s go to Quito,” said Edwin, who had just been studying his geography, “they always have spring weather there, and plenty to eat, and so they have in several other places in South America.”
“It is hardly the place for us, however.”
“I tells you whar to go,” said Jim.