I would be near her then, and
I would earn fame and glory. The carpenter would come back with
shoulder-straps. Perhaps then, in the castle...I shouldered my
trunk and ran for the station. Such tools, clothes, and things as
it would not hold I sold for what they would fetch, and boarded
the next train for Buffalo, which was as far as my money would take
me.
[Illustration: "I found the valley deserted and dead."]
I cannot resist the temptation at this point to carry the story
thirty years forward to last winter, in order to point out one of
the queer happenings which long ago caused me to be known to my
friends as "the man of coincidences." I have long since ceased to
consider them as such, though in this one there is no other present
significance than that it decided a point which I had been turning
over in my own mind, of moment to me and my publisher. I was
lecturing in Pittsburg at the time, and ran up to take another look
at Brady's Bend. I found the valley deserted and dead. The mills
were gone. Disaster had overtaken them in the panic of 1873, and
all that remained of the huge plant was a tottering stump of the
chimney and clusters of vacant houses dropping to pieces here and
there.
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