'It was in Troy,' he went on, 'Troy, N.Y. To think that a man
should live on pea-nuts in a town called Troy!'
'Tell us those adventures,' cried Jasper. 'It's a long time since
I heard them, and the girls will enjoy it vastly.'
Dora looked at him with such good-humoured interest that the
traveller needed no further persuasion.
'It came to pass in those days,' he began, 'that I inherited from
my godfather a small, a very small, sum of money. I was making
strenuous efforts to write for magazines, with absolutely no
encouragement. As everybody was talking just then of the
Centennial Exhibition at Philadelphia, I conceived the brilliant
idea of crossing the Atlantic, in the hope that I might find
valuable literary material at the Exhibition--or Exposition, as
they called it--and elsewhere. I won't trouble you with an
account of how I lived whilst I still had money; sufficient that
no one would accept the articles I sent to England, and that at
last I got into perilous straits. I went to New York, and thought
of returning home, but the spirit of adventure was strong in me.
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