"ON Lord Mayor's Day, the 9th of November, 1870, there started from my native town of Blanxton, in the south of England, a party of six persons, bound as emigrants for the far west of America. It consisted of my father, brother, three young men, and myself. My father had been an upholsterer, doing a very good business, but having always had a great wish to go abroad, thought it, I suppose, a good opportunity, when his place was burned down in June of the same year; Harry Parkerhad been a shorthand clerk; on the London and North Western Railway, but for some time past had been in my father's office; Walter Woods was a printer by trade, but had also studied engineering a little; Will Humphrey was the son of a Sussex farmer, and consequently the most useful man of the bunch, as we were going farming and cattle-raising; while my brother Jack and I were schoolboys of the tender ages of twelve and ten years respectively. "