Embarking in one of the river boats, they pushed up the Schuylkill, and settled at Norristown.  The whole family being industrious and obliging, they soon began to gather little comforts around them; and as these were not embittered by the cold looks and insulting sneers of the neighbourhood, they were comparatively happy for a time.  But even here there was for them no permanent place of rest.  A traveller passing through Norristown, on his way from the capital to the Blue Mountains, recognised Sparks, and told somebody he knew that he wished the community joy of having added to the number of its inhabitants the notorious locksmith of Philadelphia.  The news soon spread.  The family found that they were shunned as they had formerly been by those who had known them longer than the good people of Norristown, and had a fair prospect of starvation opening before them.  They removed again.  This time there was no inducement to linger, for they had no local attachments to detain them.  They crossed the mountains, and, descending into the vale of the Susquehanna, pitched their tent at Sunbury.  Here the same temporary success excited the same hopes, only to be blighted in the bud by the breath of slander, which seemed so widely circulated as to leave them hardly any asylum within the limits of the State.  We need not enumerate the different towns and villages in which they essayed to gain a livelihood, and failed.  They had nearly crossed the State in its whole length, been driven from Pittsburg, and were slowly wending their way further west, and were standing on the high ground overlooking Middleton, as though doubtful if there was to be rest for the soles of their feet even there.  They hesitated to try a new experiment.  Sparks seated himself on a stone beneath a spreading sycamore—­his family clustered around him on the grass:  they had travelled far, and were weary, and, without speaking a word, as their eyes met, and thinking of their prolonged sufferings and slender hopes, they burst into a flood of tears, in which Sparks, burying his face in the golden locks of the sweet girl who bowed her head upon his knee, joined audibly.  At length, wiping away his tears, and checking the rising sobs that shook his manly bosom—­’God’s will be done, my children,’ said the locksmith; ’we cannot help weeping, but let us not murmur.  If we are to be wanderers and fugitives on the earth, let us never lose sight of the promise which assures us of an eternal refuge in a place where the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest.  I was perhaps too proud of that skill of mine—­too apt to plume myself upon it, above others whose gifts had been less abundant.  My error has been that of wiser and greater men, who have been made to feel that what we cherish as the means of obtaining earthly blessings, sometimes turns out a curse.’