Having sat awhile under the tree, he took up his bundle and
resumed his journey with better heart.
It was by no means the intention of this sagacious youth to walk all
the way to the sea-coast. There was a much more convenient way at that
time of accomplishing the distance, even to a young man with only two
dollars in his pocket. The Black Forest is partly in Astor's native
Baden. The rafts of timber cut in the Black Forest, instead of
floating down the Rhine in the manner practised in America, used to be
rowed by sixty or eighty men each, who were paid high wages, as the
labor was severe.
Large numbers of stalwart emigrants availed themselves of this mode of
getting from the interior to the sea-coast, by which they earned their
subsistence on the way and about ten dollars in money. The tradition
in Waldorf is, that young Astor worked his passage down the Rhine, and
earned his passage-money to England as an oarsman on one of these
rafts. Hard as the labor was, the oarsmen had a merry time of it,
cheering their toil with jest and song by night and day. On the
fourteenth day after leaving home, our youth found himself at a Dutch
seaport, with a larger sum of money than he had ever before possessed.
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