new fortunes that meant much more than it does now. To-day the
East is as near as San Francisco; the Japanese-Russian War, our
occupation of the Philippines, the part played by our troops in the
Boxer trouble, have made the affairs of China part of the daily
reading of every one. Now, one can step into a brass bed at
Forty-second Street and in four days at the Coast get into another
brass bed, and in twelve more be spinning down the Bund of
Yokohama in a rickshaw. People go to Japan for the winter months
as they used to go to Cairo.

But in 1885 it was no such light undertaking, certainly not for a
young man who had been brought up in the quiet atmosphere of an
inland town, where generations of his family and other families
had lived and intermarried, content with their surroundings.

With very few of his thousand dollars left him, McGiffin arrived in
February, 1885, in San Francisco. From there his letters to his
family give one the picture of a healthy, warm-hearted youth,
chiefly anxious lest his mother and sister should "worry." In our
country nearly every family knows that domestic tragedy when the
son and heir "breaks home ties," and starts out to earn a living; and
if all the world loves a lover, it at least sympathizes with the boy
who is "looking for a job." The boy who is looking for the job may
not think so, but each of those who has passed through the same
hard place gives him, if nothing else, his good wishes. McGiffin's
letters at this period gain for him from those who have had the
privilege to read them the warmest good feeling.

They are filled with the same cheery optimism, the same slurring
over of his troubles, the same homely jokes, the same assurances