It was not a success. When he thought to get a foretaste of the
missionary vocation by making a dugout and floating down the whole
length of Connecticut River, one hundred and forty miles, the scholarly
professors were shocked. And when he disappeared for four months to
make a farther test by living among the Mohawks, the faculty was
furious. His friends gave him up as hopeless, a ne'er-do-well; and
Ledyard gave over the farce of trying to live according to other men's
patterns.
[Illustration: Ledyard in his dugout, from a contemporaneous print.]
What now determined him was what directs the most of lives--need for
bread and butter. He became a common sailor on the ship of a friend in
New London, and at twenty-five landed in Plymouth, light of heart as he
was light of purse. The world was an oyster to be opened by his own
free lance; and up he tramped from Plymouth to London in company with
an Irishman penniless as himself, gay as a lark, to the world's great
capital with the world's great prizes for those with the wits to win
them. A carriage with driver {246} and footman in livery wearing the
armorial design of his own Ledyard ancestors rolled past in the street.
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