My boyhood was over. I was alone in the world. The winter deepened and passed, the spring dawned, and with its returning freshness and sense of life my old dreams of distant travel came again upon me. I determined to seek my fortune abroad, to go forth into the waste wilds of the earth. Glencar had but trained my mind and body to further flights. I must go forth to the struggle. It did not take long to arrange matters for this great change. My worldly possessions were easily realized; the cottage and little farm soon found a purchaser; the few mementoes of my father’s life, the keepsakes which my mother had left me, were put carefully away in charge of the old priest; and I found myself the possessor of a few hundred pounds in money, a gun, my father’s sword, a small case containing miniature portraits of my parents—with which to face the new life that lay before me. What was that life?
It was to be a life of wandering in the great wilderness of Western America. I had formed from books a pretty accurate idea of the great divisions of the Northern Continent of America which yet remained in the domain of untamed nature. I knew that far beyond the last settler’s hut there lay a vast region of meadow, which finally gave place to a still vaster realm of forest, which in time yielded dominion to a wild waste of rock and water, until the verge of the Polar Sea. I knew too that these great divisions held roving and scattered tribes of Indians, sometimes at war with each other, always engaged in the pursuit of the wild beasts and birds whose homes were in those untamed wastes. More I did not need to know. I had trust, firm trust, in this great Nature, her lonely hill-tops, her wild lakes. The sigh of winds across November moors had had for me no sense of dreariness, no kinship with sorrow. Why should I dread to meet this world, whose aspects I loved so well, in the still wilder and grander scenes of an empire where civilized man was a total stranger?
Nor was I to be altogether alone in my travels. Donogh was to continue in his old sphere of companion and attendant. Together we had roamed the hill sides of Glencar; together we would tread the vast prairies, pine forests, and mountains of the American wilderness.
The day of our departure came.
It was a bright morning in early summer. We put our small baggage on Sergeant MacMahon’s mule-cart, said good-bye to all our friends, and set out upon our road. The old sergeant insisted upon accompanying me as far as Killarney, from which place the train would take us to Cork, where the steamer for New York called. As we approached the priest’s house, the old man stood at his gate waiting for us. His voice trembled as he said good-bye, and gave us his blessing. “God is everywhere, my boy,” he said, as he wrung my hand. “Remember Him, and He will not forget you.”
At the crest of the hill where the road left the valley, we stopped a moment to take a last look at the old glen. It lay deep in sunshine, every peak clear and cloudless in the summer heaven.