Then having thoroughly equipped himself to practise as a
physician, after a brief return to his native city, and as short a stay
in Philadelphia, he took down his shingle forever, and proceeded
to New Orleans to study law. In two years he was admitted to the
bar of Louisiana. But because clients were few, or because the red
tape of the law chafed his spirit, within a year, as already he had
abandoned the Church and Medicine, he abandoned his law
practice and became an editorial writer on the New Orleans
_Crescent_. A year later the restlessness which had rebelled
against the grave professions led him to the gold fields of
California, and San Francisco. There, in 1852, at the age of only
twenty-eight, as editor of the San Francisco _Herald_, Walker
began his real life which so soon was to end in both disaster and
glory.

Up to his twenty-eighth year, except in his restlessness, nothing in
his life foreshadowed what was to follow. Nothing pointed to him
as a man for whom thousands of other men, from every capital of
the world, would give up their lives.

Negatively, by abandoning three separate callings, and in making it
plain that a professional career did not appeal to him, Walker had
thrown a certain sidelight on his character; but actively he never
had given any hint that under the thoughtful brow of the young
doctor and lawyer there was a mind evolving schemes of empire,
and an ambition limited only by the two great oceans.

Walker's first adventure was undoubtedly inspired by and in
imitation of one which at the time of his arrival in San Francisco