California Sketches, New Series

Introduction

The first issue of the “California Sketches” was very popular, deservedly so. The distinguished Author has prepared a Second Series. In this fact the reading public will rejoice.

In these hooks we have the romance and prestige of fiction; the thrill of incident and adventure; the wonderful phases of society in a new country, and under the pressure of strong and peculiar excitements; human character loose from the restraints of an old civilization—a settled order of things; individuality unwarped by imitation—free, varied, independent. The materials are rich, and they are embodied in a glowing narrative. The writer himself lived amid the scenes and the people he describes, and, as a citizen, a preacher, and an editor, was an important factor among the forces destined to mold the elements which were to be formulated in the politics of the State and the enterprises of the Church. A close observer, gifted with a keen discrimination and retentive memory, a decided relish for the ludicrous and the sportive, and always ready to give a religions turn to thought and conversation, he is admirably adapted to portray and recite what he saw, heard, and felt.

These Sketches furnish good reading for anybody. For the young they are charming, full of entertainment, and not wanting in moral instruction. They will gratify the taste of those who love to read, and, what is more important, beget the appetite for books among the dull and indifferent. He who can stimulate children and young men and women to read renders a signal service to society at large. Mental growth depends much upon reading, and the fertilization of the original soil by the habit wisely directed connects vitally with the outcome and harvest of the future.

Dr. Fitzgerald is doing good service in the work already done, and I trust the patronage of the people will encourage him to give us another and another of the same sort. At my house we all read the “California Sketches”—old and young—and long for more.

G. F. Pierce.

At the request of a number of families, the lady who presided in the curious little parsonage near the church on the hill-side had started a school for little girls. The public schools might do for the boys, but were too mixed for their sisters—so they thought. Boys could rough it —they were a rough set, anyway—but the girls must he raised according to the traditions of the old times and the old homes. That was the view taken of the matter then, and from that day to this the average California girl has been superior to the average California boy. The boy gets his bias from the street; the girl, from her mother at home. The boy plunges into the life that surges around him; the girl only feels the touch of its waves as they break upon the embankments of home. The boy gets more of the father; the girl gets more of the mother. This may explain their relative superiority. The school for girls was started on condition that it should be free, the proposed teacher refusing all compensation. That part of the arrangement was a failure, for at the end of the first month every little girl brought a handful of money, and laid it on the teacher’s desk. It must have been a concerted matter. That quiet, unselfish woman had suddenly become a money-maker in spite of herself. (Use was found for the coin in the course of events.) The school was opened with a Psalm, a prayer, and a little song in which the sweet voices of the little Jewish, Spanish, German, Irish, and American maidens united heartily. Dear children! they are scattered now. Some of them have died, and some of them have met with what is worse than death. There was one bright Spanish girl, slender, graceful as a willow, with the fresh Castilian blood mantling her cheeks, her bright eyes beaming with mischief and affection. She was a beautiful child, and her winning ways made her a pet in the little school. But surrounded as the bright, beautiful girl was, Satan had a mortgage on her from her birth, and her fate was too dark and sad to be told in these pages. She inherited evil condition, and perhaps evil blood, and her evil life seemed to be inevitable. Poor child of sin, whose very beauty was thy curse, let the curtain fall upon thy fate and name; we leave thee in the hands of the pitying Christ, who hath said, “Where little is given little will be required.” Little was given thee in the way of opportunity, for it was a mother’s hand that bound thee with the chains of evil.

Among the children that came to that remarkable academy on the hill was little Mary Kinneth, a thin, delicate child, with mild blue eyes, flaxen hair, a peach complexion, and the blue veins on her temples that are so often the sign of delicacy of organization and the presage of early death. Mike Kinneth,—her father, was a drinking Irishman, a good-hearted fellow when sober, but pugnacious and disposed to beat his wife when drunk. The poor woman came over to see me one day. She had been crying, and there was an ugly bruise on her cheek.

“Your riverence will excuse me,” she said, curtseying, “but I wish you would come over and spake a word to me husband. Mike’s a kind, good craythur except when he is dhrinking, but then he is the very Satan himself.”

“Did he give you that bruise on your face, Mrs. Kinneth?”

“Yis; he came home last night mad with the whisky, and was breaking ivery thing in the house. I tried to stop him, and thin he bate me—O! he never did that before! My heart is broke!”

Here the poor woman broke down and cried, hiding her face in her apron.

“Little Mary was asleep, and she waked up frightened and crying to see her father in such a way. Seeing the child seemed to sober him a little, and he stumbled on to the bed, and fell asleep. He was always kind to the child, dhrunk or sober. And there is a good heart in him if he will only stay away from the dhrink.”

“Would he let me talk to him?”

“Yis; we belong to the old Church, but there is no priest here now, and the kindness your lady has shown to little Mary has softened his heart to ye both. And I think he feels a little sick and ashamed this mornin’, and he will listen to kind words now if iver.”

I went to see Mike, and found him half-sick and in a penitent mood. He called me “Father Fitzgerald,” and treated me with the utmost politeness and deference. I talked to him about little Mary, and his warm Irish heart opened to me at once.

“She is a good child, your riverence, and shame on the father that would hurt or disgrace her!”

The tears stood in Mike’s eyes as he spoke the words.

“All the trouble comes from the whisky. Why not give it up?”

“By the help of God I will!” said Mike, grasping my hand with energy.

And he did. I confess that the result of my visit exceeded my hopes. Mike kept away from the saloons, worked steadily, little Mary had no lack of new shoes and neat frocks, and the Kinneth family were happy in a humble way. Mike always seemed glad to see me, and greeted me warmly.

One morning about the last of November there was a knock at the door of the little parsonage. Opening the door, there stood Mrs. Kinneth with a turkey under her arm.

“Christmas will soon be coming, and I’ve brought ye a turkey for your kindness to little Mary and your good talk to Mike. He has not touched a dhrop since the blissed day ye spake to him. Will ye take the turkey, and my thanks wid it?”

The turkey was politely and smilingly accepted, and Mrs. Kinneth went away looking mightily pleased.

I extemporized a little coop for our turkey. Having but little mechanical ingenuity, it was a difficult job, but it resulted more satisfactorily than did my attempt to make a door for the miniature kitchen attached to the parsonage. My object was to nail some cross-pieces on some plain boards, hang it on hinges, and fasten it on the inside by a leather strap attached to a nail. The model in my mind was, as the reader sees, of the most simple and primitive pattern. I spent all my leisure time for a week at work on that door. I spoiled the lumber, I blistered my hands, I broke several dollars’ worth of carpenter’s tools, which I had to pay, and—then I hired a man to make that door! This was my last effort in that line of things, excepting the turkey-coop, which was the very last. It lasted four days, at the end of which time it just gave way all over, and caved in. Fortunately, it was no longer needed. Our turkey would not leave us. The parsonage fare suited him, and he staid, and throve, and made friends.

We named him Dick. He is the hero of this Sketch. Dick was intelligent, sociable, and had a good appetite. He would eat any thing, from a crust of bread to the pieces of candy that the schoolgirls would give him as they passed. He became as gentle as a dog, and would answer to his name. He had the freedom of the town, and went where he pleased, returning at meal-times, and at night to roost on the western end of the kitchen-roof. He would eat from our hands, looking at us with a sort of human expression in his shiny eyes. If he were a hundred yards away, all we had to do was to go to the door and call out, “Dick!”

“Dick!” once or twice, and here he would come, stretching his long legs, and saying, “Oot,” “oot,” “oot” (is that the way to spell it?). He got to like going about with me. He would go with me to the post-office, to the market, and sometimes he would accompany me in a pastoral visit. Dick was well known and popular. Even the bad boys of the town did not throw stones at him. His ruling passion was the love of eating. He ate between meals. He ate all that was offered to him. Dick was a pampered turkey, and made the most of his good luck and popularity. He was never in low spirits, and never disturbed except when a dog came about him. He disliked dogs, and seemed to distrust them.

The days rolled by, and Dick was fat and happy. It was the day before Christmas. We had asked two bachelors to take Christmas-dinner with us, having room and chairs for just two more persons. (One of our four chairs was called a stool—it had a bottom and three legs, one of which was a little shaky, and no back.) There was a constraint upon us both all day. I knew what was the matter, but said nothing. About four o’clock in the afternoon Dick’s mistress sat down by me, and, after a pause, remarked:

“Do you know that tomorrow is Christmas-day?”

“Yes, I know it.”

Another pause. I had nothing to say just then. “Well, if—if—if any thing is to be done about that turkey, it is time it were done.”

“Do you mean Dick?”

“Yes,” with a little quiver in her voice.

“I understand you—you mean to kill him—poor Dick! the only pet we ever had.”

She broke right down at this, and began to cry.

“What is the matter here?” said our kind, energetic neighbor, Mrs. T—, who came in to pay us one of her informal visits. She was from Philadelphia, and, though a gifted woman, with a wide range of reading and observation of human life, was not a sentimentalist. She laughed at the weeping mistress of the parsonage, and, going to the back-door, she called out:

“Dick!” “Dick!”

Dick, who was taking the air high up on the hillside, came at the call, making long strides, and sounding his “Oot,” “oot,” “oot,” which was the formula by which he expressed all his emotions, varying only the tone.

Dick, as he stood with outstretched neck and a look of expectation in his honest eyes, was scooped up by our neighbor, and carried off down the hill in the most summary manner.

In about an hour Dick was brought back. He was dressed. He was also stuffed.

The Diggers.

The Digger Indian holds a low place in the scale of humanity. He is not intelligent; he is not handsome; he is not very brave. He stands near the foot of his class, and I fear he is not likely to go up any higher. It is more likely that the places that know him now will soon know him no more, for the reason that he seems readier to adopt the bad white man’s whisky and diseases than the good white man’s morals and religion. Ethnologically he has given rise to much conflicting speculation, with which I will not trouble the gentle reader. He has been in California a long time, and he does not know that he was ever anywhere else. His pedigree does not trouble him; he is more concerned about getting something to eat. It is not because he is an agriculturist that he is called a Digger, but because he grabbles for wild roots, and has a general fondness for dirt. I said he was not handsome, and when we consider his rusty, dark-brown color, his heavy features, fishy black eyes, coarse black hair, and clumsy gait, nobody will dispute the statement. But one Digger is uglier than another, and an old squaw caps the climax.

The first Digger I ever saw was the best-looking. He had picked up a little English, and loafed around the mining-camps picking up a meal where he could get it. He called himself “Captain Charley,” and, like a true native American, was proud of his title. If it was self-assumed, he was still following the precedent set by a vast host of captains, majors, colonels, and generals, who never wore a uniform or hurt anybody. He made his appearance at the little parsonage on the hill-side in Sonora one day, and, thrusting his bare head into the door, he said:

“Me Cappin Charley,” tapping his chest complacently as he spoke.

Returning his salutation, I waited for him to speak again.

“You got grub—coche carne?” he asked, mixing his Spanish and English.

Some food was given him, which he snatched rather eagerly, and began to eat at once. It was, evident that Captain Charley had not breakfasted that morning. He was a hungry Indian, and when he got through his meal there was no reserve of rations in the unique repository of dishes and food which has been mentioned heretofore in these Sketches. Peering about the premises, Captain Charley made a discovery. The modest little parsonage stood on a steep incline, the upper side resting on the red gravelly earth, while the lower side was raised three or four feet from the ground. The vacant space underneath had been used by our several bachelor predecessors as a receptacle for cast-off clothing. Malone, Lockley, and Evans, had thus disposed of their discarded apparel, and Drury Bond and one or two other miners had also added to the treasures that caught the eye of the inquisitive Digger. It was a museum of sartorial curiosities—seedy and ripped broadcloth coats, vests, and pants, flannel mining-shirts of gay colors and of different degrees of wear and tear, linen shirts that looked like battle-flags that had been through the war, and old shoes and boots of all sorts, from the high rubber water-proofs used by miners to the ragged slippers that had adorned the feet of the lonely single parsons whose names are written above.

“Me take um?” asked Captain Charley, pointing to the treasure he had discovered.

Leave was given, and Captain Charley lost no time in taking possession of the coveted goods. He chuckled to himself as one article after another was drawn forth from the pile which seemed to be almost inexhaustible. When he had gotten all out and piled up together, it was a rare-looking sight.

“Mucho bueno!” exclaimed Captain Charley, as he proceeded to array himself in a pair of trousers. Then a shirt, then a vest, and then a coat, were put on. And then another, and another, and yet another suit was donned in the same order. He was fast becoming a “big Indian” indeed. We looked on and smiled, sympathizing with the evident delight of our visitor in his superabundant wardrobe. He was in full-dress, and enjoyed it. But he made a failure at one point—his feet were too large, or were not the right shape, for white men’s boots or shoes. He tried several pairs, but his huge flat foot would not enter them, and finally he threw down the last one tried by him with a Spanish exclamation not fit to be printed in these pages. That language is a musical one, but its oaths are very harsh in sound. A battered “stove-pipe” hat was found among the spoils turned over to Captain Chancy. Placing it on his head jauntily, he turned to us, saying, Adios, and went strutting down the street, the picture of gratified vanity. His appearance on Washington Street, the main thoroughfare of the place, thus gorgeously and abundantly arrayed, created a sensation. It was as good as a “show” to the jolly miners, always ready to be amused. Captain Charley was known to most of them, and they had a kindly feeling for the good-natured “fool Injun,” as one of them called him in my hearing.

The next Digger I noticed was of the gentler (but in this case not lovelier) sex. She was an old squaw, who was in mourning. The sign of her grief was the black adobe mud spread over her face. She sat all day motionless and speechless, gazing up into the sky. Her grief was caused by the death of a child, and her sorrowful look showed that she had a mother’s heart. Poor, degraded creature! What were her thoughts as she sat there looking so pitifully up into the silent, far-off heavens? All the livelong day she gazed thus fixedly into the sky, taking no notice of the passersby, neither speaking, eating, nor drinking. It was a custom of the tribe, but its peculiar significance is unknown to me.

It was a great night at an adjoining camp when the old chief died. It was made the occasion of a fearful orgy. Dry wood and brush were gathered into a huge pile, the body of the dead chief was placed upon it, and the mass set on fire. As the flames blazed upward with a roar, the Indians, several hundred in number, broke forth into wild wailings and howlings, the shrill soprano of the women rising high above the din, as they marched around the burning pyre. Fresh fuel was supplied from time to time, and all night long the flames lighted up the surrounding hills which echoed with the shouts and howls of the savages. It was a touch of pandemonium. At dawn there was nothing left of the dead chief but ashes. The mourners took up their line of march toward the Stanislaus River, the squaws bearing their papooses on their backs, the “bucks” leading the way.

The Digger believes in a future life, and in future rewards and punishments. Good Indians and bad Indians are subjected to the same ordeal at death. Each one is rewarded according to his deeds.

The disembodied soul comes to a wide, turbid river, whose angry waters rush on to an unknown destination, roaring and foaming. From high banks on either side of the stream is stretched a pole smooth and small, over which he is required to walk. Upon the result of this post-mortem Blondinizing his fate depends. If he was in life a very good Indian he goes over safely, and finds on the other side a paradise, where the skies are cloudless, the air balmy, the flowers brilliant in color and sweet in perfume, the springs many and cool, and the deer plentiful and fat. In this fair clime there are no bad Indians, no briers, no snakes, no grizzly bears. Such is the paradise of good Diggers.

The Indian who was in life a mixed character, not all good or bad, but made up of both, starts across the fateful river, gets on very well until he reaches about half-way over, when his head becomes dizzy, and he tumbles into the boiling flood below. He swims for his life. (Every Indian on earth can swim, and he does not forget the art in the world of spirits.) Buffeting the waters, he is carried swiftly down the rushing current, and at last makes the shore, to find a country which, like his former life, is a mixture of good and bad. Some days are fair, and others are rainy and chilly; flowers and brambles grow together; there are some springs of water, but they are few, and not all cool and sweet; the deer are few, and shy, and lean, and grizzly bears roam the hills and valleys. This is the limbo of the moderately-wicked Digger.

The very bad Indian, placing his feet upon the attenuated bridge of doom, makes a few steps forward, stumbles, falls into the whirling waters below, and is swept downward with fearful velocity. At last, with desperate struggles he half swims, and is half washed ashore on the same side from which he started, to find a dreary land where the sun never shines, and the cold rains always pour down from the dark skies, where the water is brackish and foul, where no flowers ever bloom, where leagues may be traversed without seeing a deer, and grizzly bears abound. This is the hell of very bad Indians—and a very had one it is.

The worst Indians of all, at death, are transformed into grizzly bears.

The Digger has a good appetite, and he is not particular about his eating. He likes grasshoppers, clover, acorns, roots, and fish. The flesh of a dead mule, horse, cow, or hog, does not come amiss to him—I mean the flesh of such as die natural deaths. He eats what he can get, and all he can get. In the grasshopper season he is fat and flourishing. In the suburbs of Sonora I came one day upon a lot of squaws, who were engaged in catching grasshoppers. Stretched along in line, armed with thick branches of pine, they threshed the ground in front of them as they advanced, driving the grasshoppers before them in constantly increasing numbers, until the air was thick with the flying insects. Their course was directed to a deep gully, or gulch, into which they fell exhausted. It was astonishing to see with what dexterity the squaws would gather them up and thrust them into a sort of covered basket; made of willow-twigs or tule-grass, while the insects would be trying to escape; but would fall back unable to rise above the sides of the gulch in which they had been entrapped. The grasshoppers are dried, or cured, for winter use. A white man who had tried them told me they were pleasant eating, having a flavor very similar to that of a good shrimp. (I was content to take his word for it.)

When Bishop Soule was in California, in 1853, he paid a visit to a Digger campoody (or village) in the Calaveras hills. He was profoundly interested, and expressed an ardent desire to be instrumental in the conversion of one of these poor kin. It was yet early in the morning when the Bishop and his party arrived, and the Diggers were not astir, save here and there a squaw, in primitive array, who slouched lazily toward a spring of water hard by. But soon the arrival of the visitors was made known, and the bucks, squaws, and papooses, swarmed forth. They cast curious looks upon the whole party, but were specially struck with the majestic bearing of the Bishop, as were the passing crowds in London, who stopped in the streets to gaze with admiration upon the great American preacher. The Digger chief did not conceal his delight. After looking upon the Bishop fixedly for some moments, he went up to him, and tapping first his own chest and then the Bishop’s, he said:

“Me big man—you big man!”

It was his opinion that two great men had met, and that the occasion was a grand one. Moralizers to the contrary notwithstanding, greatness is not always lacking in self-consciousness.

“I would like to go into one of their wigwams, or huts, and see how they really live,” said the Bishop.

“You had better drop that idea,” said the guide, a white man who knew more about Digger Indians than was good for his reputation and morals, but who was a good-hearted fellow, always ready to do a friendly turn, and with plenty of time on his hands to do it. The genius born to live without work will make his way by his wits, whether it be in the lobby at Washington City, or as a hanger-on at a Digger camp.

The Bishop insisted on going inside the chief’s wigwam, which was a conical structure of long tule-grass, air-tight and weather-proof, with an aperture in front just large enough for a man’s body in a crawling attitude. Sacrificing his dignity, the Bishop went down on all-fours, and then a degree lower, and, following the chief; crawled in. The air was foul, the smells were strong, and the light was dim. The chief proceeded to tender to his distinguished guest the hospitalities of the establishment, by offering to share his breakfast with him. The bill of fare was grasshoppers, with acorns as a side-dish. The Bishop maintained his dignity as he squatted there in the dirt—his dignity was equal to any test. He declined the grasshoppers tendered him by the chief, pleading that he had already breakfasted, but watched with peculiar sensations the movements of his host, as handful after handful of the crisp and juicy gryllus vulgaris were crammed into his capacious mouth, and swallowed. What he saw and smelt, and the absence of fresh air, began to tell upon the Bishop—he became sick and pale, while a gentle perspiration, like unto that felt in the beginning of seasickness, beaded his noble forehead. With slow dignity, but marked emphasis, he spoke:

“Brother Bristow, I propose that we retire.”

They retired, and there is no record that Bishop Soule ever expressed the least desire to repeat his visit to the interior of a Digger Indian’s abode.

The whites had many difficulties with the Diggers in the early days. In most cases I think the whites were chiefly to blame. It is very hard for the strong to be just to the weak. The weakest creature, pressed hard, will strike back. White women and children were massacred in retaliation for outrages committed upon the ignorant Indians by white outlaws. Then there would be a sweeping destruction of Indians by the excited whites, who in those days made rather light of Indian shooting. The shooting of a “buck” was about the same thing, whether it was a male Digger or a deer.

“There is not much fight in a Digger unless he’s got the dead-wood on you, and then he’ll make it rough for you. But these Injuns are of no use, and I’d about as soon shoot one of them as a coyote” (ki-o-te).

The speaker was a very red-faced, sandy-haired man, with blood-shot blue eyes, whom I met on his return to the Humboldt country after a visit to San Francisco.

“Did you ever shoot an Indian?” I asked.

“I first went up into the Eel River country in ’46,” he answered. “They give us a lot of trouble in them days. They would steal cattle, and our boys would shoot. But we’ve never had much difficulty with them since the big fight we had with them in 1849. A good deal of devilment had been goin’ on all roun’, and some had been killed on both sides. The Injuns killed two women on a ranch in the valley, and then we set in just to wipe ’em out. Their camp was in a bend of the river, near the head of the valley, with a deep slough on the right flank. There was about sixty of us, and Dave was our captain. He was a hard rider, a dead shot, and not very tender-hearted. The boys sorter liked him, but kep’ a sharp eye on him, knowin’ he was so quick and handy with a pistol. Our plan was to git to their camp and fall on em at daybreak, but the sun was risin’ just as we come in sight of it. A dog barked, and Dave sung out:

“‘Out with your pistols! pitch in, and give ’em the hot lead!’

“In we galloped at full speed, and as the Injuns come out to see what was up, we let ’em have it. We shot forty bucks—about a dozen got away by swimmin’ the river.”

“Were any of the women killed?”

“A few were knocked over. You can’t be particular when you are in a hurry; and a squaw, when her blood is up, will fight equal to a buck.”

The fellow spoke with evident pride, feeling that he was detailing a heroic affair, having no idea that he had done any thing wrong in merely killing “bucks.” I noticed that this sane man was very kind to an old lady who took the stage for Bloomfield—helping her into the vehicle, and looking after her baggage. When we parted, I did not care to take the hand that had held a pistol that morning when the Digger camp was “wiped out.”

The scattered remnants of the Digger tribes were gathered into a reservation in Round Valley, Mendocino county, north of the Bay of San Francisco, and were there taught a mild form of agricultural life, and put under the care of Government agents, contractors, and soldiers, with about the usual results. One agent, who was also a preacher, took several hundred of them into the Christian Church. They seemed to have mastered the leading facts of the gospel, and attained considerable proficiency in the singing of hymns. Altogether, the result of this effort at their conversion showed that they were human beings, and as such could be made recipients of the truth and grace of God, who is the Father of all the families of the earth. Their spiritual guide told me he had to make one compromise with them—they would dance. Extremes meet—the fashionable white Christians of our gay capitals and the tawny Digger exhibit the same weakness for the fascinating exercise that cost John the Baptist his head.

There is one thing a Digger cannot bear, and that is the comforts and luxuries of civilized life. A number of my friends, who had taken Digger children to raise, found that as they approached maturity they fell into a decline and died, in most cases of some pulmonary affection. The only way to save them was to let them rough it, avoiding warm bed-rooms and too much clothing. A Digger girl belonged to my church at Santa Rosa, and was a gentle, kind-hearted, grateful creature. She was a domestic in the family of Colonel H—. In that pleasant Christian household she developed into a pretty fair specimen of brunette young womanhood, but to the last she had an aversion to wearing shoes.

The Digger seems to be doomed. Civilization kills him; and if he sticks to his savagery, he will go down before the bullets, whisky, and vices of his white fellow-sinners.

The California Mad-House.

On my first visit to the State Insane Asylum, at Stockton, I was struck by the beauty of a boy of some seven or eight years, who was moving about the grounds clad in a strait-jacket. In reply to my inquiries, the resident physician told me his history:

“About a year ago he was on his way to California with the family to which he belonged. He was a general pet among the passengers on the steamer. Handsome, confiding, and overflowing with boyish spirits, everybody had a smile and a kind word for the winning little fellow. Even the rough sailors would pause a moment to pat his curly head as they passed. One day a sailor, yielding to a playful impulse in passing, caught up the boy in his arms, crying:

“‘I am going to throw you into the sea!’

“The child gave one scream of terror, and went into convulsions. When the paroxysm subsided, he opened his eyes and gazed around with a vacant expression. His mother, who bent over him with a pale face, noticed the look, and almost screamed:

“‘Tommy, here is your mother—don’t you know me?’

“The child gave no sign of recognition. He never knew his poor mother again. He was literally frightened out of his senses. The mother’s anguish was terrible. The remorse of the sailor for his thoughtless freak was so great that it in some degree disarmed the indignation of the passengers and crew. The child had learned to read, and had made rapid progress in the studies suited to his age, but all was swept away by the cruel blow. He was unable to utter a word intelligently. Since he has been here, there have been signs of returning mental consciousness, and we have begun with him as with an infant. He knows and can call his own name, and is now learning the alphabet.”

“How is his health?”

“His health is pretty good, except that he has occasional convulsive attacks that can only be controlled by the use of powerful opiates.”

I was glad to learn, on a visit made two years later, that the unfortunate boy had died.

This child was murdered by a fool. The fools are always murdering children, though the work is not always done as effectually as in this case. They cripple and half kill them by terror. There are many who will read this Sketch who will carry to the grave, and into the world of spirits, natures out of which half the sweetness, and brightness, and beauty has been crushed by ignorance or brutality. In most cases it is ignorance. The hand that should guide, smites; the voice that should soothe, jars the sensitive chords that are untuned forever. He who thoughtlessly excites terror in a child’s heart is unconsciously doing the devil’s work; he that does it consciously is a devil.

“There is a lady here whom I wish you would talk to. She belongs to one of the most respectable families in San Francisco, is cultivated, refined, and has been the center of a large and loving circle. Her monomania is spiritual despair. She thinks she has committed the unpardonable sin. There she is now. I will introduce you to her. Talk with her, and comfort her if you can.”

She was a tall, well-formed woman in black, with all the marks of refinement in her dress and bearing. She was walking the floor to and fro with rapid steps, wringing her hands, and moaning piteously. Indescribable anguish was in her face—it was a hopeless face. It haunted my thoughts for many days, and it is vividly before me as I write now. The kind physician introduced me, and left the apartment.

There is a sacredness about such an interview that inclines me to veil its details.

“I am willing to talk with you, sir, and appreciate your motive, but I understand my situation. I have committed the unpardonable sin, and I know there is no hope for me.”

With the earnestness excited by intense sympathy, I combated her conclusion, and felt certain that I could make her see and feel that she had given way to an illusion. She listened respectfully to all I had to say, and then said again:

“I know my situation. I denied my Saviour after all his goodness to me, and he has left me forever.”

There was the frozen calmness of utter despair in look and tone. I left her as I found her.

“I will introduce you to another woman, the opposite of the poor lady you have just seen. She thinks she is a queen, and is perfectly harmless. You must be careful to humor her illusion. There she is—let me present you.”

She was a woman of immense size, enormously fat, with broad red face, and a self-satisfied smirk, dressed in some sort of flaming scarlet stuff, profusely tinseled all over, making a gorgeously ridiculous effect. She received me with a mixture of mock dignity and smiling condescension, and surveying herself admiringly, she asked:

“How do you like my dress?”

It was not the first time that royalty had shown itself not above the little weaknesses of human nature. On being told that her apparel was indeed magnificent, she was much pleased, and drew herself up proudly, and was a picture of ecstatic vanity. Are the real queens as happy? When they lay aside their royal robes for their grave clothes, will not the pageantry which was the glory of their lives seem as vain as that of this tinseled queen of the mad-house? Where is happiness, after all? Is it in the circumstances, the external conditions? or, is it in the mind? Such were the thoughts passing through my mind, when a man approached with a violin. Every eye brightened, and the queen seemed to thrill with pleasure in every nerve.

“This is the only way we can get some of them to take any exercise. The music rouses them, and they will dance as long as they are permitted to do so.”

The fiddler struck up a lively tune, and the queen, with marvelous lightness of step and ogling glances, ambled up to a tall, raw-boned Methodist preacher, who had come with me, and invited him to dance with her. The poor parson seemed sadly embarrassed, as her manner was very pressing, but he awkwardly and confusedly declined, amid the titters of all present. It was a singular spectacle, that dance of the mad-women. The most striking figure on the floor was the queen. Her great size, her brilliant apparel, her astonishing agility, the perfect time she kept, the bows, the smiles and blandishments, she bestowed on an imaginary partner, were indescribably ludicrous. Now and then, in her evolutions, she would cast a momentary reproachful glance at the ungallant clergyman who had refused to dance with feminine royalty, and who stood looking on with a sheepish expression of face. He was a Kentuckian, and lack of gallantry is not a Kentucky trait.

During the session of the Annual Conference at Stockton, in 1859 or 1860, the resident physician invited me to preach to the inmates of the Asylum on Sunday afternoon. The novelty of the service, which was announced in the daily papers, attracted a large number of visitors, among them the greater part of the preachers. The day was one of those bright, clear, beautiful October days, peculiar to California, that make you think of heaven. I stood on the steps, and the hundreds of men and Women stood below me, with their upturned faces. Among them were old men crushed by sorrow, and old men ruined by vice; aged women with faces that seemed to plead for pity, women that made you shrink from their unwomanly gaze; lion-like young men, made for heroes but caught in the devil’s trap and changed into beasts; and boys whose looks showed that sin had already stamped them with its foul insignia, and burned into their souls the shame which is to be one of the elements of its eternal punishment. A less impressible man than I would have felt moved at the sight of that throng of bruised and broken creatures. A hymn was read, and when Burnet, Kelsay, Neal, and others of the preachers, struck up an old tune, voice after voice joined in the melody until it swelled into a mighty volume of sacred song. I noticed that the faces of many were wet with tears, and there was an indescribable pathos in their voices. The pitying God, amid the rapturous hallelujahs of the heavenly hosts, bent to listen to the music of these broken harps. This text was announced, My peace I give unto you; and, the sermon began.

Among those standing nearest to me was “Old Kelley,” a noted patient whose monomania was the notion that he was a millionaire, and who spent most of his time in drawing checks on imaginary deposits for vast sums of money. I held one of his checks for a round million, but it has never yet been cashed. The old man pressed up close to me, seeming to feel that the success of the service somehow depended on him. I had not more than fairly begun my discourse, when he broke in:

“That’s Daniel Webster!”

I don’t mind a judicious “Amen,” but this put me out a little. I resumed my remarks, and was getting another good start, when he again broke in enthusiastically:

“Henry Clay!”

The preachers standing around me smiled—I think I heard one or two of them titter. I could not take my eyes from Kelley, who stood with open mouth and beaming countenance, waiting for me to go on. He held me with an evil fascination. I did go on in a louder voice, and in a sort of desperation; but again my delighted hearer exclaimed:

“Calhoun!”

“Old Kelley” spoiled that sermon, though he meant kindly. He died not long afterward, gloating over his fancied millions to the last.

“If you have steady nerves, come with me and I will show you the worst case we have—a woman half tigress, and half devil.”

Ascending a stairway, I was led to an angle of the building assigned to the patients whose violence required them to be kept in close confinement.

“Hark! don’t you hear her? She is in one of her paroxysms now.”

The sounds that issued from one of the cells were like nothing I had ever heard before. They were a series of unearthly, fiendish shrieks, intermingled with furious imprecations, as of a lost spirit in an ecstasy of rage and fear.

The face that glared upon me through the iron grating was hideous, horrible. It was that of a woman, or of what had been a woman, but was now a wreck out of which evil passion had stamped all that was womanly or human. I involuntarily shrunk back as I met the glare of those fiery eyes, and caught the sound of words that made me shudder. I never suspected myself of being a coward, but I felt glad that the iron bars of the cell against which she dashed herself were strong. I had read of Furies—one was now before me. The bloated, gin-inflamed face, the fiery-red, wicked eyes, the swinish chin, the tangled coarse hair falling around her like writhing snakes, the tiger-like clutch of her dirty fingers, the horrible words—the picture was sickening, disgust for the time almost, extinguishing pity.

“She was the keeper of a beer-saloon in San Francisco, and led a life of drunkenness and licentiousness until she broke down, and she was brought here.”

“Is there any hope of her restoration?”

“I fear not—nothing short of a miracle can, retune an instrument so fearfully broken and jangled.”

I thought of her out of whom were cast the seven devils, and of Him who came to seek and to save the lost, and resisting the impulse that prompted me to hurry away from the sight and hearing of this lost woman, I tried to talk with her, but had to retire at last amid a volley of such language as I hope never to hear from a woman’s lips again.

“Listen! Did you ever hear a sweeter voice than that?”

I had heard the voice before, and thrilled under its power. It was a female voice of wonderful richness and volume, with a touch of something in it that moved you strangely—a sort of intensity that set your pulses to beating faster, while it entranced you. The whole of the spacious grounds were flooded with the melody, and the passing teamsters on the public highway would pause and listen with wonder and delight. The singer was a fair young girl, with dark auburn hair, large brown eyes, that were at times dreamy and sad, and then again lit up with excitement, as her moods changed from sad to gay.

“She will sit silent for hours gazing listlessly out of the window, and then all at once break forth into a burst of song so sweet and thrilling that the other patients gather near her and listen in rapt silence and delight. Sometimes at a dead hour of the night her voice is heard, and then it seems that she is under a special afflatus—she seems to be inspired by the very soul of music, and her songs, wild and sad, wailing and rollicking, by turns, but all exquisitely sweet, fill the long night-hours with their melody.”

The shock caused by the sudden death of her betrothed lover overthrew her reason, and blighted her life. By the mercy of God, the love of music and the gift of song survived the wreck of love and of reason. This girl’s voice, pealing forth upon the still summer evening air, is mingled with my last recollection of Stockton and its refuge for the doubly miserable who are doomed to death in life.

San Quentin.

“I want you to go with me over to San Quentin next Thursday, and preach a thanksgiving-sermon to the poor fellows in the State-prison.”

On the appointed morning, I met our party at the Vallejo-street wharf, and we were soon steaming on our way. Passing under the guns of Fort Alcatraz, past Angel Island—why so called I know not, as in early days it was inhabited not by angels but goats only—all of us felt the exhilaration of the California sunshine, and the bracing November air, as we stood upon the guards, watching the play of the lazy-looking porpoises, that seemed to roll along, keeping up with the swift motion of the boat in such a leisurely way. The porpoise is a deceiver. As he rolls up to the surface of the water, in his lumbering way, he looks as if he were a huge lump of unwieldy awkwardness, floating at random and almost helpless; but when you come to know him better, you find that he is a marvel of muscular power and swiftness. I have seen a “school” of porpoises in the Pacific swimming for hours alongside one of our fleetest ocean-steamers, darting a few yards ahead now and then, as if by mere volition, cutting their way through the water with the directness of an arrow. The porpoise is playful at times, and his favorite game is a sort of leap-frog. A score or more of the creatures, seemingly full of fun and excitement, will chase one another at full speed, throwing themselves from the water and turning somersaults in the air, the water boiling with the agitation, and their huge bodies flashing in the light. You might almost imagine that they had found something in the sea that had made them drunk, or that they had inhaled some sort of piscatorial anaesthetic. But here we are at our destination. The bell rings, we round to, and land.

At San Quentin nature is at her best, and man at his worst. Against the rocky shore the waters of the bay break in gentle splashings when the winds are quiet. When the gales from the southwest sweep through the Golden Gate, and set the white caps to dancing to their wild music, the waves rise high, and dash upon the dripping stones with a hoarse roar, as of anger. Beginning a few hundreds of yards from the water’s edge, the hills slope up, and up, and up, until they touch the base of Tamalpais, on whose dark and rugged summit, four thousand feet above the sea that laves his feet on the west, the rays of the morning sun fall with transfiguring, glory while yet the valley below lies in shadow. On this lofty pinnacle linger the last rays of the setting sun, as it drops into the bosom of the Pacific. In stormy weather, the mist and clouds roll in from the ocean, and gather in dark masses around his awful head, as if the sea-gods had risen from their homes in the deep, and were holding a council of war amid the battle of the elements; at other times, after calm, bright days, the thin, soft white clouds that hang about his crest deepen into crimson and gold, and the mountaintop looks as if the angels of God had come down to encamp, and pitched here their pavilions of glory. This is nature at San Quentin, and this is Tamalpais as I have looked upon it many a morning and many an evening from my window above the sea at North Beach.

The gate is opened for us, and we enter the prison-walls. It is a holiday, and the day is fair and balmy; but the chill and sadness cannot be shaken off, as we look around us. The sunshine seems almost to be a mockery in this place where fellow-men are caged and guarded like wild beasts, and skulk about with shaved heads, clad in the striped uniform of infamy. Merciful God! is this what thy creature man was made for? How long, how long?

Seated upon the platform with the prison officials and visitors, I watched my strange auditors as they came in. There were one thousand of them. Their faces were a curious study. Most of them were bad faces. Beast and devil were printed on them. Thick necks, heavy back-heads, and low, square foreheads, were the prevalent types. The least repulsive were those who looked as if they were all animal, creatures of instinct and appetite, good-natured and stupid; the most repulsive were those whose eyes had a gleam of mingled sensuality and ferocity. But some of these faces that met my gaze were startling—they seemed so out of place. One old man with gray hair, pale, sad face, and clear blue eyes, might have passed, in other garb and in other company, for an honored member of the Society of Friends. He had killed a man in a mountain county. If he was indeed a murderer at heart, nature had given him the wrong imprint. My attention was struck by a smooth-faced, handsome young fellow, scarcely of age, who looked as little like a convict as anybody on that platform. He was in for burglary, and had a very bad record. Some came in half laughing, as if they thought the whole affair more a joke than anything else. The Mexicans, of whom there was quite a number, were sullen and scowling. There is gloom in the Spanish blood. The irrepressible good nature of several ruddy-faced Irishmen broke out in sly merriment. As the service began, the discipline of the prison showed itself in the quiet that instantly prevailed; but only a few, who joined in the singing, seemed to feel the slightest interest in it. Their eyes were wandering, and their faces were vacant. They had the look of men who had come to be talked at and patronized, and who were used to it. The prayer that was offered was not calculated to banish such a feeling —it was dry and cold. I stood up to begin the sermon. Never before had I realized so folly that God’s message was to lost men, and for lost men. A mighty tide of pity rushed in upon my soul as I looked down into the faces of my hearers. My eyes filled, and my heart melted within me. I could not speak until after a pause, and only then by great effort. There was a deep silence, and every face was lifted to mine as I announced the text. God had touched my heart and theirs at the start. I read the words slowly: God hath not appointed us to wrath, but to obtain salvation by our Lord Jesus Christ. Then I said:

“My fellow-men, I come to you today with a message from my Father, and your Father in heaven. It is a message of hope. God help me to deliver it as I ought! God help you to hear it as you ought! I will not insult you by saying that because you have an extra dinner, a few hours respite from your toil, and a little fresh air and sunshine, you ought to have a joyful thanksgiving today. If I should talk thus, you would be ready to ask me how I would like to change places with you. You would despise me, and I would despise myself, for indulging in such cant. Your lot is a hard one. The battle of life has gone against you—whether by your own fault or by hard fortune, it matters not, so far as the fact is concerned; this thanksgiving-day finds you locked in here, with broken lives, and wearing the badge of crime. God alone knows the secrets of each throbbing heart before me, and how it is that you have come to this. Fellow-men, children of my Father in heaven, putting myself for the moment in your place, the bitterness of your lot is real and terrible to me. For some of you there is no happier prospect for this life than to toil within these walls by day, and sleep in yonder cells by night, through the weary, slow-dragging years, and then to die, with only the hands of hired attendants to wipe the death-sweat from your brows; and then to be put in a convict’s coffin, and taken up on the hill yonder, and laid in a lonely grave. My God! this is terrible!”

An unexpected dramatic effect followed these words. The heads of many of the convicts fell forward on their breasts, as if struck with sudden paralysis. They were the men who were in for life, and the horror of it overcame them. The silence was broken by sobbings all over the room. The officers and visitors on the platform were weeping. The angel of pity hovered over, the place, and the glow of human sympathy had melted those stony hearts. A thousand strong men were thrilled with the touch of sympathy, and once more the sacred fountain of tears was unsealed. These convicts were men, after all, and deep down under the rubbish of their natures there was still burning the spark of a humanity not yet extinct. It was wonderful to see the softened expression of their faces. Yes, they were men, after all, responding to the voice of sympathy, which had been but too strange to many of them all their evil lives. Many of them had inherited hard conditions; they were literally conceived in sin and born in iniquity; they grew up in the midst of vice. For them pure and holy lives were a moral impossibility. Evil with them was hereditary, organic, and the result of association; it poisoned their blood at the start, and stamped itself on their features from their cradles. Human law, in dealing with these victims of evil circumstance, can make little discrimination. Society must protect itself, treating a criminal as a criminal. But what will God do with them hereafter? Be sure he will do right. Where little is given, little will be required. It shall be better for Tyre and Sidon at the day of judgment than for Chorazin and Bethsaida. There is no ruin without remedy, except that which a man makes for himself by abusing mercy, and throwing away proffered opportunity. Thoughts like these rushed through the preacher’s mind, as he stood there looking in the tear-bedewed faces of these men of crime. A fresh tide of pity rose in his heart, that he felt came from the heart of the all-pitying One.

“I do not try to disguise from you, or from myself the fact that for this life your outlook is not bright. But I come to you this day with a message of hope from God our Father. He hath not appointed you to wrath. He loves all his children. He sent his Son to die for them. Jesus trod the paths of pain, and drained the cup of sorrow. He died as a malefactor, for malefactors. He died for me. He died for each one of you. If I knew the most broken, the most desolate-hearted, despairing man before me, who feels that he is scorned of men and forsaken of God, I would go to where he sits and put my hand on his head, and tell him that God hath not appointed him to wrath, but to obtain salvation by our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us. I would tell him that his Father in heaven loves him still, loves him more than the mother that bore him. I would tell him that all the wrongs and follies of his past life may from this hour be turned into so much capital of a warning experience, and that a million of years from today he may be a child of the Heavenly Father, and an heir of glory, having the freedom of the heavens and the blessedness of everlasting life. O brothers, God does love you! Nothing can ruin you but your own despair. No man has any right to despair who has eternity before him. Eternity? Long, long eternity! Blessed, blessed eternity! That is yours—all of it. It may be a happy eternity for each one of you. From this moment you may begin a better life. There is hope for you, and mercy, and love, and heaven. This is the message I bring you warm from a brother’s heart, and warm from the heart of Jesus, whose life-blood was poured out for you and me. His loving hand opened the gate of mercy and hope to every man. The proof is that he died for us. O Son of God, take us to thy pitying arms, and lift us up into the light that never, never grows dim—into the love that fills heaven and eternity!”

As the speaker sunk into his seat, there was a silence that was almost painful for a few moments. Then the pent-up emotion of the men broke forth in sobs that shook their strong frames. Dr. Lucky, the prisoner’s friend, made a brief, tearful prayer, and then the benediction was said, and the service was at an end. The men sat still in their seats. As we filed out, of the chapel, many hands were extended to grasp mine, holding it with a clinging pressure. I passed out bearing with me the impression of an hour I can never forget; and the images of those thousand faces are still painted in memory.

“Corralled.”

“So you were corralled last night?”

This was the remark of a friend whom I met in the streets of Stockton the morning after my adventure. I knew what the expression meant as applied to cattle, but I had never heard it before in reference to a human being. Yes, I had been corralled; and this is how it happened:

It was in the old days, before there were any railroads in California. With a wiry, clean-limbed pinto horse, I undertook to drive from Sacramento City to Stockton one day. It was in the winter season, and the clouds were sweeping up from the south-west, the snow-crested Sierras hidden from sight by dense masses of vapor boiling at their bases and massed against their sides. The roads were heavy from the effects of previous rains, and the plucky little pinto sweated as he pulled through the long stretches of black adobe mud. A cold wind struck me in the face, and the ride was a dreary one from the start. But I pushed on confidently, having faith in the spotted mustang, despite the evident fact that he had lost no little of the spirit with which he dashed out of town at starting. When a genuine mustang flags, it is a serious business. The hardiness and endurance of this breed of horses almost exceed belief.

Toward night a cold rain began to fall, driving in my face with the headwind. Still many a long mile lay between me and Stockton. Dark came on, and it was dark indeed. The outline of the horse I was driving could not be seen, and the flat country through which I was driving was a great black sea of night. I trusted to the instinct of the horse, and moved on. The bells of a wagon-team meeting me fell upon my ear. I called out,

“Halloo there!”

“What’s the matter?” answered a heavy voice through the darkness.

“Am I in the road to Stockton, and can I get there tonight?”

“You are in the road, but you will never find your way such a night as this. It is ten good miles from here; you have several bridges to cross —you had better stop at the first house you come to, about half a mile ahead. I am going to strike camp myself.”

I thanked my adviser, and went on, hearing the sound of the tinkling bells, but unable to see any thing. In a little while I saw a light ahead, and was glad to see it. Driving up in front and halting, I repeated the traveler’s “halloo” several times, and at last got a response in a hoarse, gruff voice.

“I am belated on my way to Stockton, and am cold, and tired, and hungry. Can I get shelter with you for the night?”

“You may try it, if you want to,” answered the unmusical voice abruptly.

In a few moments a man appeared to take the horse, and taking my satchel in hand, I went into the house. The first thing that struck my attention on entering the room was a big log-fire, which I was glad to see, for I was wet and very cold. Taking a chair in the corner, I looked around. The scene that presented itself was not reassuring. The main feature of the room was a bar, with an ample supply of barrels, demijohns, bottles, tumblers, and all the et ceteras. Behind the counter stood the proprietor, a burly fellow with a buffalo-neck, fair skin and blue eyes, with a frightful scar across his left under-jaw and neck; his shirt-collar was open, exposing, a huge chest, and his sleeves were rolled up above the elbows. I noticed also that one of his hands was minus all the fingers but the half of one—the result probably of some desperate reencounter. I did not like the appearance of my landlord, and he eyed me in a way that led me to fear that he liked my looks as little as I did his; but the claims of other guests soon diverted his attention from me, and I was left to get warm and make further observations. At a table in the middle of the room several hard-looking fellows were betting at cards, amid terrible profanity and frequent drinks of whisky. They cast inquiring and not very friendly glances at me from time to time, once or twice exchanging whispers and giggling. As their play went on, and tumbler after tumbler of whisky was drunk by them, they became more boisterous. Threats were made of using pistols and knives, with which they all seemed to be heavily armed; and one sottish-looking brute actually drew forth a pistol, but was disarmed in no gentle way by the big-limbed landlord. The profanity and other foul language were horrible. Many of my readers have no conception of the brutishness of men when whisky and Satan have full possession of them. In the midst of a volley of oaths and terrible imprecations by one of the most violent of the set, there was a faint gleam of lingering decency exhibited by one of his companions:

“Blast it, Dick, don’t cuss so loud—that fellow in the corner there is a preacher!”

There was some potency in “the cloth” even there. How he knew my calling I do not know. The remark directed particular attention to me and I became unpleasantly conspicuous. Scowling glances were bent upon me by two or three of the ruffians, and one fellow made a profane remark not at all complimentary to my vocation—where at there was some coarse laughter. In the meantime I was conscious of being very hungry. My hunger, like that of a boy, is a very positive, thing at, least it was very much so in those days. Glancing toward the maimed and scarred giant who stood behind the bar, I found he was gazing at me with a fixed expression.

“Can I get something to eat? I am very hungry, sir,” I said in my blandest tones.

“Yes, we’ve, plenty of ’cold’ goose, and maybe Pete can pick up something else for you if he, is sober and in a good humor. Come this way.”

I followed him through a narrow passage-way, which led to a long, low-ceiled room, along nearly the whole length of which was stretched a table, around which were placed rough stools for the rough men about the place.

Pete, the cook; came in and the head of the house turned me over to him, and returned to his duties behind the bar. From the noise of the uproar going on, his presence was doubtless needed. Pete set before me a large roasted wild-goose, not badly cooked, with bread, milk, and the inevitable cucumber pickles. The knives and forks were not very bright —in fact, they had been subjected to influences promotive of oxidation; and the dishes were not free from signs of former use. Nothing could be said against the tablecloth—there was no tablecloth there. But the goose was fat, brown, and tender; and a hungry man defers his criticisms until he is done eating. That is what I did. Pete evidently regarded me with curiosity. He was about fifty years of age, and had the look of a man who had come down in the world. His face bore the marks of the effects of strong drink, but it was not a bad face; it was more weak than wicked.

“Are you a preacher?” he asked.

“I thought so,” he added, after getting my answer to his question. “Of what persuasion are you?”! he further inquired.

When I told him I was a Methodist, he said quickly and with some warmth:

“I was sure of it. This is a rough place for a man of your calling. Would you like some eggs? we’ve plenty on hand. And may be you would like a cup of coffee,” he added, with, increasing hospitality.

I took the eggs, but declined the coffee, not liking the looks of the cups and saucers, and not caring to wait.

“I used to be a Methodist myself,” said Pete, with a sort of choking in his throat, “but bad luck and bad company have brought me down to this. I have a family in Iowa, a wife and four children. I guess they think I’m dead, and sometimes I wish I was.”

Pete stood by my chair, actually crying. The sight of a Methodist preacher brought up old times. He told me his story. He had come to California hoping to make a fortune in a hurry, but had only ill luck from the start. His prospectings were always failures, his partners cheated him, his health broke down, his courage gave way, and—he faltered a little, and then spoke it out—he took to whisky, and then the worst came.

“I have come down to this—cooking for a lot of roughs at five dollars a week, and all the whisky I want. It would have been better for me if I had died when I was in the hospital at San Andreas.”

Poor Pete! he had indeed touched bottom. But he had a heart and a conscience still, and my own heart warmed toward my poor backslidden brother.

“You are not a lost man yet. You are worth a thousand dead men. You can get out of this, and you must. You must act the part of a brave man, and not be any longer a coward. Bad luck and lack of success are a disgrace to no man. There is where you went wrong. It was cowardly to give up and not write to your family, and then take to whisky.”

“I know all that, Elder. There is no better little woman on earth than my wife”—Pete choked up again.

“You write to her this very night, and go back to her and your children just as soon as you can get the money to pay your way. Act the man, and all will come right yet. I have writing materials here in my satchel —pen, ink, paper, envelopes, stamps, every thing; I am an editor, and go fixed up for writing.”

The letter was written, I acting as Pete’s amanuensis, he pleading that he was a poor scribe at best and that his nerves were too unsteady for such work. Taking my advice, he made a clean breast of the whole matter, throwing himself on the forgiveness of the wife whom he had so shamefully neglected, and promising by the help of God to make all the amends possible in time to come. The letter was duly directed, sealed, and stamped; and Pete looked as if a great weight had been lifted from his soul, He had made me a fire in the little stove, saying it was better than the barroom; in which opinion I was fully agreed.

“There is no place for you to sleep tonight without corralling you with the fellows; there is but one bedroom, and there are fourteen bunks in it.”

I shuddered at the prospect-fourteen bunks in one small room, and those whisky-sodden, loud-cursing card-players to be my roommates for the night!

“I prefer sitting here by the stove all night,” I said; “I can employ most of the time writing, if I can have a light.”

Pete thought a moment, looked grave, and then said:

“That won’t do, Elder; those fellows would take offense, and make trouble. Several of them are out now goose-hunting; they will be coming in at all hours from now till daybreak, and it won’t do for them to find you sitting up here alone. The best, thing for you to do is to go in and take one of those bunks; you, needn’t takeoff any thing but your coat and boots, and”—here he lowered his voice, looking about him as he spoke—“if you have any money about, keep it next to your body.”

The last words were spoken with peculiar emphasis.

Taking the advice given me, I took up my baggage and followed Pete to the room where I was to spend the night. Ugh! it was dreadful. The single window in the room was nailed down, and the air was close and foul. The bunks were damp and dirty beyond belief, grimed with foulness, and reeking with ill odors. This was being corralled.

I turned to Pete, saying:

“I can’t stand this—I will go back to the kitchen.”

“You had better follow my advice, Elder,” said he very gravely. “I know things about here better than you do. It’s rough, but you had better stand it.”

And I did; being corralled, I had to stand it. That fearful night! The drunken fellows staggered in one by one, cursing and hiccoughing, until every bunk was occupied. They muttered oaths in their sleep, and their stertorous breathings made a concert fit for Tartarus. The sickening odors of whisky, onions, and tobacco filled the room. I lay there and longed for daylight, which seemed as if it never would come. I thought of the descriptions I had heard and read of hell, and just then the most vivid conception of its horror was to be shut up forever with the aggregated impurity of the universe. By contrast I tried to think of that city of God into which, it is said, “there shall in no wise enter into it any thing that defileth, neither whatsoever worketh abomination, or maketh a lie; but they which are written in the Lamb’s book of life.” But thoughts of heaven did not suit the situation; it was more suggestive of the other place. The horror of being shut up eternally in hell as the companion of lost spirits was intensified by the experience and reflections of that night when I was corralled.

Day came at last. I rose with the first streaks of the dawn, and not having much toilet to make, I was soon out-of-doors. Never did I breathe the pure, fresh air with such profound pleasure and gratitude. I drew deep inspirations, and, opening my coat and vest, let the breeze that swept up the valley blow upon me unrestricted. How bright, was the face of nature, and how sweet her, breath after the sights, sounds, and smells of the night!

I did not wait for breakfast, but had my pinto and buggy brought out, and, bidding Pete good-by, hurried on to Stockton.

“So you were corralled last night?” was the remark of a friend, quoted at the beginning of this true sketch. “What was the name of the proprietor of the house?”

I gave him the name.

“Dave W—!” he exclaimed with fresh astonishment. “That is the roughest place in the San Joaquin Valley. Several men have been killed and robbed there during the last two or three years.”

I hope Pete got back safe to his wife and children in Iowa; and I hope I may never be corralled again.

The Reblooming.

It is now more than twenty years since the morning a slender youth of handsome face and modest mien came into my office on the corner of Montgomery and Clay streets, San Francisco. He was the son of a preacher well known in Missouri and California, a man of rare good sense, caustic wit, and many eccentricities. The young man became an attache of my newspaper-office and an inmate of my home. He was as fair as a girl, and refined in his taste and manners. A genial taciturnity, if the expression may be allowed, marked his bearing in the social circle. Everybody had a kind feeling and a good word for the quiet, brightfaced youth. In the discharge of his duties in the office he was punctual and trustworthy, showing not only industry but unusual aptitude for business It was with special pleasure that I learned that he was turning his thoughts to the subject of religion. During the services in the little Pine-street church he would sit with thoughtful face, and not seldom with moistened eyes. He read the Bible and prayed in secret. I was not surprised when he came to me one day and opened his heart. The great crisis in his life had come. God was speaking to his soul, and he was listening to his voice. The uplifted cross drew him, and he yielded to the gentle attraction. We prayed together, and henceforth there was a new and sacred bond that bound us to each other. I felt that I was a witness to the most solemn transaction that can take place on earth—the wedding of a soul to a heavenly faith. Soon thereafter he went to Virginia, to attend college. There he united with the Church. His letters to me were full of gratitude and joy. It was the blossoming of his spiritual life, and the air was full of its fragrance, and the earth was flooded with glory. A pedestrian tour among the Virginia hills brought him into communion with Nature at a time when it was rapture to drink in its beauty and its grandeur. The light kindled within his soul by the touch of the Holy Spirit transfigured the scenery upon which he gazed, and the glory of God shone round about the young student in the flush and blessedness of his first love. O blessed days! O days of brightness, and sweetness, and rapture! The soul is then in its blossoming-time, and all high enthusiasms, all bright dreams, all thrilling joys, are realities which inwork themselves into the consciousness, to be forgotten never; to remain with us as prophecies of the eternal springtime that awaits the true-hearted on the hills of God beyond the grave, or as accusing voices charging us with the murder of our dead ideals! Amid the dust and din of the battle in after-years we turn to this radiant spot in our journey with smiles or tears; according as we have been true or false to the impulses, aspirations, and purposes inspired within us by that first, and brightest, and nearest manifestation of God. Such a season is a natural to every life as the April buds and June roses are to forest and garden. The springtime of some lives is deferred by unpropitious circumstance to the time when it should be glowing with autumnal glory, and rich in the fruitage of the closing year. The life that does not blossom into religion in youth may have light at noon, and peace at sunset, but misses the morning glory on the hills, and the dew that sparkles on grass and flower. The call of God to the young to seek him early is the expression of a true psychology no less than of a love infinite in its depth and tenderness.

His college-course finished, my young friend returned to California, and in one of its beautiful valley-towns he entered a law-office, with a view to prepare himself for the legal profession. Here he was thrown into daily association with a little knot of skeptical lawyers. As is often the case, their moral obliquities ran parallel with their errors in opinion. They swore, gambled genteelly, and drank. It is not strange that in this icy atmosphere the growth of any young friend in the Christian life was stunted. Such influences are like the dreaded north wind that at times sweeps over the valleys of California in the spring and early summer, blighting and withering the vegetation it does not kill. The brightness of his hope was dimmed, and his soul knew the torture of doubt—a torture that is always keenest to him who allows himself to sink in the region of fogs after he has once stood upon the sunlit summit of faith. Just at this crisis, a thing little in itself deepened the shadow that was falling upon his life. A personal misunderstanding with the pastor kept him from attending church. Thus he lost the most effectual defense against the assaults that were being made upon his faith and hope, in being separated from the fellowship and cut off from the activities of the Church of God. Have you not noted these malign coincidences in life? There are times when it seems that the tide of events sets against us when, like the princely sufferer of the land of Uz, every messenger that crosses the threshold brings fresh tidings of ill, and our whole destiny seems to be rushing to a predoomed perdition. The worldly call it bad luck; the superstitious call it fate; the believer in God calls it by another name. Always of a delicate constitution, my friend now exhibited symptoms of serious pulmonary disease. It was at that time the fashion in California to prescribe whisky as a specific for that class of ailments. It is possible that there is virtue in the prescription, but I am sure of one thing, namely, that if consumption diminished, drunkenness increased; if fewer died of phthisis, more died of delirium tremens. The physicians of California have sent a host of victims raving and gibbering in drunken frenzy or idiocy down to death and hell! I have reason to believe that my friend inherited a constitutional weakness at this point. As flame to tinder, was the medicinal whisky to him. It grew upon him rapidly, and soon this cloud overshadowed all his life. He struggled hard to break the serpent-folds that were tightening around him; but the fire that had been kindled seemed to be quenchless. An uncontrolled evil passion is hellfire. He writhed in its burnings in an agony that could be understood only by such as knew how almost morbidly sensitive was his nature, and how vital was his conscience. I became a pastor in the town where he lived, and renewed my association with him as far as I could. But there was a constraint unlike the old times. When under the influence of liquor, he would pass me in the streets with his head down, a deeper flush mantling his cheek as he hurried by with unsteady step. Sometimes I met him staggering homeward through a back street, hiding from the gaze of men. He was at first shy of me when sober, but gradually the constraint wore off, and he seemed disposed to draw nearer to me, as in the old days. His struggle went on, days of drunkenness following weeks of soberness, his haggard face after each debauch wearing a look of unspeakable weariness and wretchedness. One of the lawyers who had led him into the mazes of doubt—a man of large and versatile gifts, whose lips were touched with a noble and persuasive eloquence—sunk deeper and deeper into the black depths of drunkenness, until the tragedy ended in a horror that lessened the gains of the saloons for at least a few days. He was found dead in his bed one morning in a pool of blood, his throat cut by his own guilty hand.

My friend had married a lovely girl, and the cottage in which they lived was one of the coziest, and the garden in front was a little paradise of neatness and beauty. Ah! I must drop a veil over a part of this true tale. All along I have written under half protest, the image of a sad, wistful face rising at times between my eyes and the sheet on which these words are traced. They loved each other tenderly and deeply, and both were conscious of the presence of the devil that was turning their heaven into hell.

“Save him, Doctor, save him! He is the noblest of men, and the tenderest, truest husband. He loves you, and he will let you talk to him. Save him, O save him! Help me to pray for him! My heart will break!”

Poor child! her loving heart was indeed breaking; and her fresh young life was crushed under a weight of grief and shame too heavy to be borne.

What he said to me in the interviews held in his sober intervals I have not the heart to repeat now. He still fought against his enemy; he still buffeted the billows that were going over him, though with feebler stroke. When their little child died, her tears fell freely, but he was like one stunned. Stony and silent he stood and saw the little grave filled up, and rode away tearless, the picture of hopelessness.

By a coincidence; after my return to San Francisco, he came thither, and again became my neighbor at North Beach. I went up to see him one evening. He was very feeble, and it was plain that the end was not far off. At the first glance I saw that a great change had taken place in him.

He had found his lost self. The strong drink was shut out from him, and he was shut in with his better thoughts and with God. His religious life rebloomed in wondrous beauty and sweetness. The blossoms of his early joy had fallen off, the storms had torn its branches and stripped it of its foliage, but its root had never perished, because he had never ceased to struggle for deliverance. Aspiration and hope live or die together in the human soul. The link that bound my friend to God was never wholly sundered. His better nature clung to the better way with a grasp that never let go altogether.

“O Doctor, I am a wonder to myself! It does seem to me that God has given back to me every good thing I possessed in the bright and blessed past. It has all come back to me. I see the light and feel the joy as I did when I first entered the new life. O it is wonderful! Doctor, God never gave me up, and I never ceased to yearn for his mercy and love, even in the darkest season of my unhappy life?”

His very face had recovered its old look, and his voice its old tone. There could be no doubt of this soul had rebloomed in the life of God.

The last night came—they sent for me with the message,

“Come quickly! he is dying.”

I found him with that look which I have seen on the faces of others who were nearing death—a radiance and a rapture that awed the beholder. O solemn, awful mystery of death! I have stood in its presence in every form of terror and of sweetness, and in every case the thought has been impressed upon me that it was a passage into the Great Realities.

“Doctor,” he said, smiling, and holding my hand; “I had hoped to be with you in your office again, as in the old days—not as a business arrangement, but just to be with you, and revive old memories, and to live the old life over again. But that cannot be, and I must wait till we meet in the world of spirits, whither I go before you. It seems to be growing dark. I cannot see your face hold my hand. I am going—going. I am on the waves—on the waves—.” The radiance was still upon his face, but the hand I held no longer clasped mine-the wasted form was still. It was the end. He was launched upon the Infinite Sea for the endless voyage.

The Emperor Norton.

That was his title. He wore it with an air that was a strange mixture of the mock-heroic and the pathetic. He was mad on this one point, and strangely shrewd and well-informed on almost every other. Arrayed in a faded-blue uniform, with brass buttons and epaulettes, wearing a cocked-hat with an eagle’s feather, and at times with a rusty sword at his side, he was a conspicuous figure in the streets of San Francisco, and a regular habitue of all its public places. In person he was stout, full-chested, though slightly stooped, with a large head heavily coated with bushy black hair, an aquiline nose, and dark gray eyes, whose mild expression added to the benignity of his face. On the end of his nose grew a tuft of long hairs, which he seemed to prize as a natural mark of royalty, or chieftainship. Indeed, there was a popular legend afloat that he was of true royal blood—a stray Bourbon, or something of the sort. His speech was singularly fluent and elegant. The Emperor was one of the celebrities that no visitor failed to see. It is said that his mind was unhinged by a sudden loss of fortune in the early days, by the treachery of a partner in trade. The sudden blow was deadly, and the quiet, thrifty, affable man of business became a wreck. By nothing is the inmost quality of a man made more manifest than by the manner in which he meets misfortune. One, when the sky darkens, having strong impulse and weak will, rushes into suicide; another, with a large vein of cowardice, seeks to drown the sense of disaster in strong drink; yet another, tortured in every fiber of a sensitive organization, flees from the scene of his troubles and the faces of those that know him, preferring exile to shame. The truest man, when assailed by sudden calamity, rallies all the reserved forces of a splendid manhood to meet the shock, and, like a good ship, lifting itself from the trough of the swelling sea, mounts the wave and rides on. It was a curious idiosyncrasy that led this man, when fortune and reason were swept away at a stroke, to fall back upon this imaginary imperialism. The nature that could thus, when the real fabric of life was wrecked, construct such another by the exercise of a disordered imagination, must have been originally of a gentle and magnanimous type. The broken fragments of mind, like those of a statue, reveal the quality of the original creation. It may be that he was happier than many who have worn real crowns. Napoleon at Chiselhurst, or his greater uncle at St. Helena, might have been gainer by exchanging lots with this man, who had the inward joy of conscious greatness without its burden and its perils. To all public places he had free access, and no pageant was complete without his presence. From time to time he issued proclamations, signed “Norton I.,” which the lively San Francisco dailies were always ready to print conspicuously in their columns. The style of these proclamations was stately, the royal first person plural being used by him with all gravity and dignity. Ever and anon, as his uniform became dilapidated or ragged, a reminder of the condition of the imperial wardrobe would be given in one or more of the newspapers, and then in a few days he would appear in a new suit. He had the entree of all the restaurants, and he lodged—nobody knew where. It was said that he was cared for by members of the Freemason Society to which he belonged at the time of his fall. I saw him often in my congregation in the Pine-street church, along in 1858, and into the sixties. He was a respectful and attentive listener to preaching. On the occasion of one of his first visits he spoke to me after the service, saying, in a kind and patronizing tone:

“I think it my duty to encourage religion and morality by showing myself at church, and to avoid jealousy I attend them all in turn.”

He loved children, and would come into the Sunday-school, and sit delighted with their singing. When, in distributing the presents on a Christmas-tree, a necktie was handed him as the gift of the young ladies, he received it with much satisfaction, making a kingly bow of gracious acknowledgment. Meeting him one day, in the springtime, holding my little girl by the hand, he paused, looked at the child’s bright face, and taking a rose-bud from his button-hole, he presented it to her with a manner so graceful, and a smile so benignant, as to show that under the dingy blue uniform there beat the heart of a gentleman. He kept a keen eye on current events, and sometimes expressed his views with great sagacity. One day he stopped me on the street, saying:

“I have just read the report of the political sermon of Dr.—(giving the name of a noted sensational preacher, who was in the habit, at times, of discussing politics from his pulpit). I disapprove political-preaching. What do you think?”

I expressed my cordial concurrence.

“I will put a stop to it. The preachers must stop preaching politics, or they must all come into one State Church. I will at once issue a decree to that effect.”

For some unknown reason, that decree never was promulgated.

After the war, he took a deep interest in the reconstruction of the Southern States. I met him one day on Montgomery street, when he asked me in a tone and with a look of earnest solicitude:

“Do you hear any complaint or dissatisfaction concerning me from the South?”

I gravely answered in the negative.

“I was for keeping the country undivided, but I have the kindest feeling for the Southern people, and will see that they are protected in all their rights. Perhaps if I were to go among them in person, it might have a good effect. What do you think?”

I looked at him keenly as I made some suitable reply, but could see nothing in his expression but simple sincerity. He seemed to feel that he was indeed the father of his people. George Washington himself could not have adopted a more paternal tone.

Walking along the street behind the Emperor one day, my curiosity was a little excited by seeing him thrust his hand into the hip-pocket of his blue trousers with sudden energy. The hip-pocket, by the way, is a modern American stupidity, associated in the popular mind with rowdyism, pistol shooting, and murder. Hip-pockets should be abolished wherever there are courts of law and civilized men and women. But what was the Emperor after? Withdrawing his hand just as I overtook him, the mystery was revealed—it grasped a thick Bologna sausage, which he began to eat with unroyal relish. It gave me a shock, but he was not the first royal personage who has exhibited low tastes and carnal hankerings.

He was seldom made sport of or treated rudely. I saw him on one occasion when a couple of passing hoodlums jeered at him. He turned and gave them a look so full of mingled dignity, pain, and surprise, that the low fellows were abashed, and uttering a forced laugh, with averted faces they hurried on. The presence that can bring shame to a San Francisco hoodlum must indeed be kingly, or in some way impressive. In that genus the beastliness and devilishness of American city-life reach their lowest denomination when the brutality of the savage and the lowest forms of civilized vice are combined, human nature touches bottom.

The Emperor never spoke of his early life. The veil of mystery on this point increased the popular curiosity concerning him, and invested him with something of a romantic interest. There was one thing that excited his disgust and indignation. The Bohemians of the San Francisco press got into the practice of attaching his name to their satires and hits at current follies, knowing that the well-known “Norton I.” at the end would insure a reading. This abuse of the liberty of the press he denounced with dignified severity, threatening extreme measures unless it were stopped. But nowhere on earth did the press exhibit more audacity, or take a wider range, and it would have required a sterner heart and a stronger hand than that of Norton I. to put a hook into its jaws.

The end of all human grandeur, real or imaginary, comes at last. The Emperor became thinner and more stooped as the years passed. The humor of his hallucination retired more and more into the background, and its pathetic side came out more strongly. His step was slow and feeble, and there was that look in his eyes so often seen in the old and sometimes in the young, just before the great change comes—a rapt, far-away look, suggesting that the invisible is coming into view, the shadows vanishing and the realities appearing. The familiar face and form were missed on the streets, and it was known that he was dead. He had gone to his lonely lodging, and quietly lain down and died. The newspapers spoke of him with pity and respect, and all San Francisco took time, in the midst of its roar-and-rush fever of perpetual excitement, to give a kind thought to the dead man who had passed over to the life where all delusions are laid aside, where the mystery of life shall be revealed, and where we shall see that through all its tangled web ran the golden thread of mercy. His life was an illusion, and the thousands who sleep with him in Lone Mountain waiting the judgment-day were his brothers.

Camilla Cain.

She was from Baltimore, and had the fair face and gentle voice peculiar to most Baltimore women. Her organization was delicate but elastic—one of the sort that bends easily, but is hard to break. In her eyes was that look of wistful sadness so often seen in holy women of her type. Timid as a fawn, in the class-meeting she spoke of her love to Jesus and delight in his service in a voice low and a little hesitating, but with strangely thrilling effect. The meetings were sometimes held in her own little parlor in the cottage on Dupont street, and then we always felt that we had met where the Master himself was a constant and welcome guest. She was put into the crucible. For more than fifteen years she suffered unceasing and intense bodily pain. Imprisoned in her sick chamber, she fought her long, hard battle. The pain-distorted limbs lost their use, the patient face waxed more wan, and the traces of agony were on it always; the soft, loving eyes were often tear washed. The fires were hot, and they burned on through the long, long years without respite. The mystery of it all was too deep for me; it was too deep for her. But somehow it does seem that the highest suffer most:

The sign of rank in Nature Is capacity for pain, And the anguish of the singer Makes the sweetness of the strain.

The victory of her faith was complete. If the inevitable why? sometimes was in her thought, no shadow of distrust ever fell upon her heart. Her sick-room was the quietest, brightest spot in all the city. How often did I go thither weary and faint with the roughness of the way, and leave feeling that I had heard the voices and inhaled the odors of paradise! A little talk, a psalm, and then a prayer, during which the room seemed to be filled with angel-presences; after which the thin, pale face was radiant with the light reflected from our Immanuel’s face. I often went to see her, not so much to convey as to get a blessing. Her heart was kept fresh as a rose of Sharon in the dew of the morning. The children loved to be near her; and the pathetic face of the dear crippled boy, the pet of the family, was always brighter in her presence. Thrice death came into the home-circle with its shock and mighty wrenchings of the heart, but the victory was not his, but hers. Neither death nor life could separate her from the love of her Lord. She was one of the elect. The elect are those who know, having the witness in themselves. She was conqueror of both—life with its pain and its weariness, death with its terror and its tragedy. She did not endure merely, she triumphed. Borne on the wings of a mighty faith, her soul was at times lifted above all sin, and temptation, and pain, and the sweet, abiding peace swelled into an ecstasy of sacred joy. Her swimming eyes and rapt look told the unutterable secret. She has crossed over the narrow stream on whose margin she lingered so long; and there was joy on the other side when the gentle, patient, holy Camilla Cain joined the glorified throng.

O though oft depressed and lonely, All my fears are laid aside, If I but remember only Such as these have lived and died!

Lone Mountain.

The sea-wind sweeps over the spot at times in gusts like the frenzy of hopeless grief, and at times in sighs as gentle as those heaved by aged sorrow in sight of eternal rest. The voices of the great city come faintly over the sand-hills, with subdued murmur like a lullaby to the pale sleepers that are here lying low. When the winds are quiet, which is not often, the moan of the mighty Pacific can be heard day or night, as if it voiced in muffled tones the unceasing woe of a world under the reign of death. Westward, on the summit of a higher hill, a huge cross stretches its arms as if embracing the living and the dead-the first object that catches the eye of the weary voyager as he nears the Golden Gate, the last that meets his lingering gaze as he goes forth upon the great waters. O sacred emblem of the faith with which we launch upon life’s stormy main—of the hope that assures that we shall reach the port when the night and the tempest are past! When the winds are high, the booming of the breakers on the cliff sounds as if nature were impatient of the long, long delay, and had anticipated the last thunders that wake the sleeping dead. On a clear day, the blue Pacific, stretching away beyond the snowy surf-line, symbolizes the shoreless sea that rolls through eternity. The Cliff House road that runs hard by is the chief drive of the pleasure-seekers of San Francisco. Gayety, and laughter, and heart-break, and tears, meet on the drive; the wail of agony and the laugh of gladness mingle as the gay crowds dash by the slow-moving procession on its way to the grave. How often have I made that slow, sad journey to Lone Mountain—a Via Doloroso to many who have never been the same after they had gone thither, and coming back found the light quenched and the music bushed in their homes! Thither the dead Senator was borne, followed by the tramping thousands, rank on rank, amid the booming of minute-guns, the tolling of bells, the measured tread of plumed soldiers, and the roll of drums. Thither was carried, in his rude coffin, the “unknown man” found dead in the streets, to be buried in potter’s-field. Thither was borne the hard and grasping idolater of riches, who clung to his coin, and clutched for more, until he was dragged away by the one hand that was colder and stronger than his own. Here was brought the little child, out of whose narrow grave there blossomed the beginnings of a new life to the father and mother, who in the better life to come will be found among the blessed company of those whose only path to paradise lay through the valley of tears. Here were brought the many wanderers, whose last earthly wish was to go back home, on the other side of the mountains, to die, but were denied by the stern messenger who never waits nor spares. And here was brought the mortal part of the aged disciple of Jesus, in whose dying-chamber the two worlds met, and whose death-throes were demonstrably the birth of a child of God into the life of glory.

The first time I ever visited the place was to attend the funeral of a suicide. The dead man I had known in Virginia, when I was a boy. He was a graduate of the Virginia Military Institute, and when I first knew him he was the captain of a famous volunteer company. He was as handsome as a picture—the admiration of the girls, and the envy of the young men of his native town. He was among the first who rushed to California on the discovery of gold, and of all the heroic men who gave early California its best bias none was knightlier than this handsome Virginian; none won stronger friends, or had brighter hopes. He was the first State Senator from San Francisco. He had the magnetism that won and the nobility that retained the love of men. Some men push themselves forward by force of intellect or of will—this man was pushed upward by his friends because he had their hearts. He married a beautiful woman, whom he loved literally unto death. I shall not recite the whole story. God only knows it fully, and he will judge righteously. There was trouble, rage, and tears, passionate partings and penitent reunions—the old story of love dying a lingering yet violent death. On the fatal morning I met him on Washington street. I noticed his manner was hurried and his look peculiar, as I gave him the usual salutation and a hearty grasp of the hand. As be moved away, I looked after him with mingled admiration and pity, until his faultless figure turned the corner and disappeared.

Ten minutes afterward he lay on the floor of his room dead, with a bullet through his brain, his hair dabbled in blood. At the funeral-service, in the little church on Pine street, strong men bowed their heads and sobbed. His wife sat on a front seat, pale as marble and as motionless, her lips compressed as with inward pain; but I saw no tears on the beautiful face. At the grave the body had been lowered to its resting-place, and all being ready, the attendants standing with uncovered heads, I was just about to begin the reading of the solemn words of the burial service, when a tall, blue-eyed man with gray side-whiskers pushed his way to the head of the grave, and in a voice choked with passion, exclaimed:

“There lies as noble a gentleman as ever breathed, and he owes his death to that fiend!” pointing his finger at the wife, who stood pale and silent looking down into the grave.

She gave him a look that I shall never forget, and the large steely-blue eyes flashed fire, but she spoke no word. I spoke:

“Whatever maybe your feelings, or whatever the occasion for them, you degrade yourself by such an exhibition of them here.”

“That is so, sir; excuse me, my feelings overcame me,” he said, and retiring a few steps, he leaned upon a branch of a scrub-oak and sobbed like a child.

The farce and the tragedy of real life were here exhibited on another occasion. Among my acquaintances in the city were a man and his wife who were singularly mismatched. He was a plain, unlettered, devout man, who in a prayer-meeting or class-meeting talked with a simple-hearted earnestness that always produced a happy effect.

She was a cultured woman, ambitious and worldly, and so fine-looking that in her youth she must have been a beauty and a belle. They lived in different worlds, and grew wider apart as time passed by—he giving himself to religion, she giving herself to the world. In the gay city circles in which she moved she was a little ashamed of the quiet, humble old man, and he did not feel at home among them. There was no formal separation, but it was known to the friends of the family that for months at a time they never lived together. The fashionable daughters went with their mother. The good old man, after a short sickness, died in great peace. I was sent for to officiate at the funeral-service. There was a large gathering of people, and a brave parade of all the externals of grief, but it was mostly dry-eyed grief, so far as I could see. At the grave, just as the sun that was sinking in the ocean threw his last rays upon the spot, and the first shovelful of earth fell upon the coffin that had been gently lowered to its resting-place, there was a piercing shriek from one of the carriages, followed by the exclamation:

“What shall I do? How can I live? I have lost my all! O! O! O!”

It was the dead man’s wife. Significant glances and smiles were interchanged by the bystanders. Approaching the carriage in which the woman was sitting, I laid my hand upon her arm, looked her in the face, and said:

“Hush!”

She understood me, and not another sound did she utter. Poor woman! She was not perhaps as heartless as they thought she was. There was at least a little remorse in those forced exclamations, when she thought of the dead man in the coffin; but her eyes were dry, and she stopped very short.

Another incident recurs to me that points in a different direction. One day the most noted gambler in San Francisco called on me with the request that I should attend the funeral of one of his friends, who had died the night before. A splendid-looking fellow was this knight of the faro-table. More than six feet in height, with deep chest and perfectly rounded limbs, jet black hair, brilliant black eyes, clear olive complexion, and easy manners, he might have been taken for an Italian nobleman or a Spanish Don. He had a tinge of Cherokee blood in his veins. I have noticed that this cross of the white and Cherokee blood often results in producing this magnificent physical development. I have known a number of women of this lineage, who were very queens in their beauty and carriage. But this noted gambler was illiterate. The only book of which he knew or cared much was one that had fifty-two pages, with twelve pictures. If he had been educated, he might have handled the reins of government, instead of presiding over a nocturnal banking institution.

“Parson, can you come to number—, on Kearney street, tomorrow at ten o’clock, and give us a few words and a prayer over a friend of mine, who died last night?”

I promised to be there, and he left.

His friend, like himself, had been a gambler. He was from New York. He was well educated, gentle in his manners, and a general favorite with the rough and desperate fellows with whom he associated, but with whom he seemed out of place. The passion for gambling had put its terrible spell on him, and be was helpless in its grasp. But though he mixed with the crowds that thronged the gambling-hells, he was one of them only in the absorbing passion for play. There was a certain respect shown him by all that venturesome fraternity. He went to Frazer River during the gold excitement. In consequence of exposure and privation in that wild chase after gold, which proved fatal to so many eager adventurers, he contracted pulmonary disease, and came back to San Francisco to die. He had not a dollar. His gambler friend took charge of him, placed him in a good boarding-place, hired a nurse for him, and for nearly a year provided for all his wants.

Newton.

The miners called him the “Wandering Jew.” That was behind his back. To his face they addressed him as Father Newton. He walked his circuits in the northern mines. No pedestrian could keep up with him, as with his long form bending forward, his immense yellow beard that reached to his breast floating in the wind, he strode from camp to camp with the message of salvation. It took a good trotting-horse to keep pace with him. Many a stout prospector, meeting him on a highway, after panting and straining to bear him company, had to fall behind, gazing after him in wonder, as he swept out of sight at that marvelous gait. There was a glitter in his eye, and an intensity of gaze that left you in doubt whether it was genius or madness that it bespoke. It was, in truth, a little of both. He had genius. Nobody ever talked with him, or heard him preach, without finding it out. The rough fellow who offended him at a camp-meeting, near “Yankee Jim’s,” no doubt thought him mad. He was making some disturbance just as the long bearded old preacher was passing with a bucket of water in his hand.

“What do you mean?” he thundered, stopping and fixing his keen eye upon the rowdy.

A rude and profane reply was made by the jeering sinner.

Quick as thought Newton rushed upon him with flashing eye and uplifted bucket, a picture of fiery wrath that was too much for the thoughtless scoffer, who fled in terror amid the laughter of the crowd. The vanquished son of Belial had no sympathy from anybody, and the plucky preacher was none the less esteemed because he was ready to defend his Master’s cause with carnal weapons. The early Californians left scarcely any path of sin unexplored, and were a sad set of sinners, but for virtuous women and religion they never lost their reverence. Both were scarce in those days, when it seemed to be thought that gold-digging and the Decalogue could not be made to harmonize. The pioneer preachers found that one good woman made a better basis for evangelization than a score of nomadic bachelors. The first accession of a woman to a church in the mines was an epoch in its history. The church in the house of Lydia was the normal type—it must be anchored to woman’s faith, and tenderness, and love, in the home.

He visited San Francisco during my pastorate in 1858. On Sunday morning he preached a sermon of such extraordinary beauty and power that at the night-service the house was crowded by a curious congregation, drawn thither by the report of the forenoon effort. His subject was the faith of the mother of Moses, and he handled it in his own way. The powerful effect of one passage I shall never forget. It was a description of the mother’s struggle, and the victory of her faith in the crisis of her trial. No longer able to protect her child, she resolves to commit him to her God. He drew a picture of her as she sat weaving together the grasses of the little ark of bulrushes, her hot tears falling upon her work, and pausing from time to time with her hand pressed upon her throbbing heart. At length, the little vessel is finished, and she goes by night to the bank of the Nile, to take the last chance to save her boy from the knife of the murderers. Approaching the river’s edge, with the ark in her hands, she stoops a moment, but her mother’s heart fails her. How can she give up her child? In frenzy of grief she sinks upon her knees, and lifting her gaze to the heavens, passionately prays to the God of Israel. That prayer! It was the wail of a breaking heart, a cry out of the depths of a mighty agony. But as she prays the inspiration of God enters her soul, her eyes kindle, and her face beams with the holy light of faith. She rises, lifts the little ark, looks upon the sleeping face of the fair boy, prints a long, long kiss upon his brow, and then with a firm step she bends down, and placing the tiny vessel upon the waters, lets it go. “And away it went,” he, said, “rocking upon the waves as it swept beyond the gaze of the mother’s straining eyes. The monsters of the deep were there, the serpent of the Nile was there, behemoth was there, but the child slept as sweetly and as safely upon the rocking waters as if it were nestled upon its mother’s breast—for God was there!” The effect was electric. The concluding words, “for God was there!” were uttered with upturned face and lifted hands, and in a tone of voice that thrilled the hearers like a sudden clap of thunder from a cloud over whose bosom the lightnings had rippled in gentle flashes. It was true eloquence.

In a revival meeting, on another occasion, he said, in a sermon of terrific power: “O the hardness of the human heart! Yonder is a man in hell. He is told that there is one condition on which he may be delivered, and that is that lie must get the consent of every good being in the universe. A ray of hope enters his soul, and he sets out to comply with the condition. He visits heaven and earth, and finds sympathy and consent from all. All the holy angels consent to his pardon; all the pure and holy on earth consent; God himself repeats the assurance of his willingness that he maybe saved. Even in hell, the devils do not object, knowing that his misery only heightens theirs. All are willing, all are ready—all but one man. He refuses; he will not consent. A monster of cruelty and wickedness, he refuses his simple consent to save a soul from an eternal hell! Surely a good God and all good beings in the universe would turn in horror from such a monster. Sinner, you are that man! The blessed God, the Holy Trinity, every angel in heaven, every good man and woman on earth, are not only willing but anxious that you shall be saved. But you will not consent. You refuse to come to Jesus that you may have life. You are the murderer of your own immortal soul. You drag yourself down to hell. You lock the door of your own dungeon of eternal despair, and throw the key into the bottomless pit, by rejecting the Lord that bought you with his blood! You will be lost! you must be lost! you ought to be lost.”

The words were something like these, but the energy, the passion, the frenzy of the speaker must be imagined. Hard and stubborn hearts were moved under that thrilling appeal. They were made to feel that the preacher’s picture of a self doomed soul described their own eases. There was joy in heaven that night over repenting sinners.

This old man of the mountains was a walking encyclopedia of theological and other learning. He owned books that could not be duplicated in California; and he read them, digested their contents, and constantly surprised his cultivated bearers by the affluence of his knowledge, and the fertility of his literary and classic allusion. He wrote with elegance and force. His weak point was orthography. He would trip sometimes in the spelling of the most common words. His explanation of this weakness was curious: He was a printer in Mobile, Alabama. On one occasion a thirty-two-page book-form of small type was “pied.” “I undertook,”, said he, “to set that pied form to rights, and, in doing so, the words got so mixed in my brain that my spelling was spoiled forever!”

He went to Oregon, and traveled and preached from the Cascade Mountains to Idaho, thrilling, melting, and amusing, in turn, the crowds that came out to hear the wild-looking man whose coming was so sudden, and whose going as so rapid, that they were lost in wonder, as if gazing at a meteor that flashed across the sky.

He was a Yankee from New Hampshire, who, going to Alabama, lost his heart, and was ever afterward intensely Southern in all his convictions and affections. His fiery soul found congenial spirits among the generous, hotblooded people of the Gulf States, whose very faults had a sort of charm for this impulsive, generous, erratic, gifted, man. He made his way back to his New England hills, where he is waiting for the sunset, often turning a longing eye southward, and now and then sending a greeting to Alabama.

The California Politician.

The California politician of the early days was plucky. He had to be so, for faint heart won no votes in those rough times. One of the Marshalls (Tom or Ned—I forget which), at the beginning of a stump speech one night in the mines, was interrupted by a storm of hisses and execrations from a turbulent crowd of fellows, many of whom were full of whisky. He paused a moment, drew himself up to his full height, coolly took a pistol from his pocket, laid it on the stand before him, and said:

“I have seen bigger crowds than this many a time. I want it to be fully understood that I came here to make a speech tonight, and I am going to do it, or else there will be a funeral or two.”

That touch took with that crowd. The one thing they all believed in was courage. Marshall made one of his grandest speeches, and at the close the delighted miners bore him in triumph from the rostrum.

That was a curious exordium of “Uncle Peter Mehan,” when he made his first stump-speech at Sonora: “Fellow-citizens, I was born an orphin at a very early period of my life.” He was a candidate for supervisor, and the good-natured miners elected him triumphantly. He made a good supervisor, which is another proof that book-learning and elegant rhetoric are not essential where there are integrity and native good sense. Uncle Peter never stole any thing, and he was usually on the right side of all questions that claimed the attention of the county-fathers of Tuolumne.

In the early days, the Virginians, New Yorkers, and Tennesseans, led in politics. Trained to the stump at home, the Virginians and Tennesseans were ready on all occasions to run a primary-meeting, a convention, or a canvass. There was scarcely a mining-camp in the State in which there was not a leading local politician from one or both of these States. The New Yorker understood all the inside management of party organization, and was up to all the smart tactics developed in the lively struggles of parties in the times when Whiggery and Democracy fiercely fought for rule in the Empire State. Broderick was a New Yorker, trained by Tammany in its palmy days. He was a chief, who rose from the ranks, and ruled by force of will. Thick-set, strong-limbed, full-chested, with immense driving-power in his back-head, he was an athlete whose stalwart physique was of more value to him than the gift of eloquence, or even the power of money. The sharpest lawyers and the richest money-kings alike went down before this uncultured and moneyless man, who dominated the clans of San Francisco simply by right of his manhood. He was not without a sort of eloquence of his own. He spoke right to the point, and his words fell like the thud of a shillalah; or rang like the clash of steel. He dealt with the rough elements of politics in an exciting and turbulent period of California politics, and was more of a border chief than an Ivanhoe in his modes of warfare. He reached the United States Senate, and in his first speech in that august body he honored his manhood by an allusion to his father, a stone mason, whose hands, said Broderick, had helped to erect the very walls of the chamber in which he spoke. When a man gets as high as the United States Senate, there is less tax upon his magnanimity in acknowledging his humble origin than while he is lower down the ladder. You seldom hear a man boast how low he began until he is far up toward the summit of his ambition. Ninety-nine out of every hundred self-made men are at first more or less sensitive concerning their low birth; the hundredth man who is not is a man indeed.

Broderick’s great rival was Gwin. The men were antipodes in every thing except that they belonged to the same party. Gwin still lives, the most colossal figure in the history of California. He looks the man he is. Of immense frame, ruddy complexion, deep-blue eyes that almost blaze when he is excited, rugged yet expressive features, a massive bead crowned with a heavy suit of silver-white hair, he is marked by Nature for leadership. Common men seem dwarfed in his presence. After he had dropped out of California politics for awhile, a Sacramento hotel-keeper expressed what many felt during a legislative session: “I find myself looking around for Gwin. I miss the chief.”

My first acquaintance with Dr. Gwin began with, an incident that illustrates the man and the times. It was in 1856. The Legislature was in session at Sacramento, and a United States Senator was to, be elected. I was making a tentative movement toward starting a Southern Methodist newspaper, and visited Sacramento on that business. My friend Major P. L. Solomon was there, and took a friendly interest in my enterprise. He proposed to introduce me to the leading men of both parties, and I thankfully availed myself of his courtesy. Among the first to whom he presented me was a noted politician who, both before and since, has enjoyed a national notoriety, and who still lives, and is as, ready as ever to talk or fight. His name I need not give. I presented to him my mission, and he seemed embarrassed.

“I am with you, of course. My mother was a Methodist, and all my sympathies are with the Methodist Church. I am a Southern man in all my convictions and impulses, and I am a Southern Methodist in principle. But you see, sir, I am a candidate for United States Senator, and sectional feeling is likely to enter into the contest, and if it were known that my name was on your list of subscribers, it might endanger my election.”

He squeezed my arm, told me he loved me and my Church, said he would be happy to see me often, and so forth—but he did not give me his name. I left him, saying in my heart, Here is a politician.

Going on together, in the corridor we met Gwin. Solomon introduced me, and told him my business.

“I am glad to know that you are going to start a Southern Methodist newspaper. No Church can do without its organ. Put me down on your list, and come with me, and I will make all these fellows subscribe. There is not much religion among them, I fear, but we will make them take the paper.”

This was said in a hearty and pleasant way, and he took me from man to man, until I had gotten more than a dozen names, among them two or three of his most active political opponents.

This incident exhibits the two types of the politician, and the two classes of men to be found in all communities—the one all “blarney” and selfishness, the other with real manhood redeeming poor human nature, and saving it from utter contempt. The senatorial prize eluded the grasp of both aspirants, but the reader will not be at a loss to guess whose side I was on. Dr. Gwin made a friend that day, and never lost him. It was this sort of fidelity to friends that, when fortune frowned on the grand old Senator after the collapse at Appomattox, rallied thousands of true hearts to his side, among whom were those who had fought him in many a fierce political battle. Broderick and Gwin were both, by a curious turn of political fortune, elected by the same Legislature to the United States Senate. Broderick sleeps in Lone Mountain, and Gwin still treads the stage of his former glory, a living monument of the days when California politics was half romance and half tragedy. The friend and protege of General Andrew Jackson, a member of the first Constitutional Convention of California, twice United States Senator, a prominent figure in the civil war, the father of the great Pacific Railway, he is the front figure on the canvas of California history.

Gwin was succeeded by McDougall. What a man was he! His face was as classic as a Greek statue. It spoke the student and the scholar in every line. His hair was snow-white, his eyes bluish gray, and his form sinewy and elastic. He went from Illinois, with Baker and other men of genius, and soon won a high place at the bar of San Francisco. I heard it said, by an eminent jurist, that when McDougall had put his whole strength into the examination of a case, his side of it was exhausted. His reading was immense, his learning solid. His election was doubtless a surprise to himself as well as to the California public. The day before he left for Washington City, I met him in the street, and as we parted I held his hand a moment, and said:

“Your friends will watch your career with hope and with fear.”

He knew what I meant, and said, quickly:

“I understand you. You are afraid that I will yield to my weakness for strong drink. But you may be sure I will play the man, and California shall have no cause to blush on my account.”

That was his fatal weakness. No one, looking upon his pale, scholarly face, and noting his faultlessly neat apparel, and easy, graceful manners, would have thought of such a thing. Yet he was a—I falter in writing it—a drunkard. At times he drank deeply and madly. When half intoxicated he was almost as brilliant as Hamlet, and as rollicking as Falstaff. It was said that even when fully drunk his splendid intellect never entirely gave way.

“McDougall commands as much attention in the Senate when drunk as any other Senator does when sober,” said a Congressman in Washington in 1866. It is said that his great speech on the question of “confiscation,” at the beginning of the war, was delivered when he was in a state of semi-intoxication. Be that as it may, it exhausted the whole question, and settled the policy of the Government.

“No one will watch your senatorial career with more friendly interest than myself; and if you will abstain wholly from all strong drink, we shall all, be proud of you, I know.”

“Not a drop will I touch, my friend; and I’ll make you proud of me.”

He spoke feelingly, and I think there was a moisture about his eye as he pressed my hand and walked away.

I never saw him again. For the first few months he wrote to me often, and then his letters came at longer intervals, and then they ceased. And then the newspapers disclosed the shameful secret California’s brilliant Senator was a drunkard. The temptations of the Capital were too strong for him. He went down into the black waters a complete wreck. He returned to the old home of his boyhood in New Jersey to die. I learned that he was lucid and penitent at the last. They brought his body back to San Francisco to be buried, and when at his funeral the words “I know that my Redeemer liveth,” in clear soprano, rang through the vaulted cathedral like a peal of triumph, I indulged the hope that the spirit of my gifted and fated friend had, through the mercy of the Friend of sinners, gone from his boyhood hills up to the hills of God.

The typical California politician was Coffroth. The “boys” fondly called him “Jim” Coffroth. There is no surer sign of popularity than a popular abbreviation of this sort, unless it is a pet nickname. Coffroth was from Pennsylvania, where he had gained an inkling of polities and general literature. He gravitated into California polities by the law of his nature. He was born for this, having what a friend calls the gift of popularity. His presence was magnetic; his laugh was contagious; his enthusiasm irresistible. Nobody ever thought of taking offense at Jim Coffroth. He could change his politics with impunity without losing a friend—he never had a personal enemy; but I believe he only made that experiment once. He went off with the Know-nothings in 1855, and was elected by them to the State Senate, and was called to preside over their State Convention. He hastened back to his old party associates, and at the first convention that met in his county on his return from the Legislature, he rose and told them how lonesome he had felt while astray from the old fold, how glad he was to get back, and how humble he felt, concluding by advising all his late supporters to do as he had done by taking “a straight chute” for the old party. He ended amid a storm of applause, was reinstated at once, and was made President of the next Democratic State Convention. There he was in his glory. His tact and good humor were infinite, and he held those hundreds of excitable and explosive men in the hollow of his hand. He would dismiss a dangerous motion with a witticism so apt that the mover himself would join in the laugh, and give it up. His broad face in repose was that of a Quaker, at other times that of a Bacchus. There was a religious streak in this jolly partisan, and he published several poems that breathed the sweetest and loftiest religious sentiment. The newspapers were a little disposed to make a joke of these ebullitions of devotional feeling, but they now make the light that casts a gleam of brightness upon the background of his life. I take from an old volume of the Christian Spectator one of these poems as a literary curiosity. Every man lives two lives. The rollicking politician, “Jim Coffroth,” every Californian knew; the author of these lines was another man by the same name:

Amid the Silence of the Night. “Behold, he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep.” Psalm cxxi.

Amid the silence of the night, Amid its lonely hours and dreary, When we Close the aching sight, Musing sadly, lorn and weary, Trusting that tomorrow’s light May reveal a day more cheery;

Amid affliction’s darker hour, When no hope beguiles our sadness, When Death’s hurtling tempests lower, And forever shroud our gladness, While Grief’s unrelenting power Goads our stricken hearts to madness;

When from friends beloved we’re parted, And from scenes our spirits love, And are driven, broken-hearted, O’er a heartless world to rove; When the woes by which we’ve smarted, Vainly seek to melt or move; When we trust and are deluded, When we love and are denied, When the schemes o’er which we brooded Burst like mist on mountain’s side, And, from every hope excluded, We in dark despair abide;

Then, and ever, God sustains us, He whose eye no slumber knows, Who controls each throb that pains us, And in mercy sends our woes, And by love severe constrains us To avoid eternal throes.

Happy he whose heart obeys him! Lost and ruined who disown! O if idols e’er displace him, Tear them from his chosen throne! May our lives and language praise him! May our hearts be his alone!

He took defeat with a good nature that robbed it of its sting, and made his political opponents half sorry for having beaten him. He was talked of for Governor at one time, and he gave as a reason, why he would like the office that “a great many of his friends were in the State-prison, and he wanted to use the pardoning power in their behalf.” This was a jest, of course, referring to the fact that as a lawyer much of his practice was in the criminal courts. He was never suspected of treachery or dishonor in public or private life. His very ambition was unselfish: he was always ready to sacrifice himself in a hopeless candidacy if he could thereby help his party or a friend.

His good nature was tested once while presiding over a party convention at Sonora for the nomination of candidates for legislative and county offices. Among the delegates was the eccentric John Vallew, whose mind was a singular compound of shrewdness and flightiness, and was stored with the most out-of-the-way scraps of learning, philosophy, and poetry. Some one proposed Vallew’s name as a candidate for the Legislature. He rose to his feet with a clouded face, and in an angry voice said:

“Mr. President, I am surprised and mortified. I have lived in this county more than seven years, and I have never had any difficulty with my neighbors. I did not know that I had an enemy in the world. What have I done, that it should be proposed to send me to the Legislature? What reason has anybody to think I am that sort of a man? To think I should have come to this! To propose to send me to the Legislature, when it is a notorious fact that you have never sent a man thither from this county who did not come back morally and pecuniarily ruined!”

The crowd saw the point, and roared with laughter, Coffroth, who had served in the previous session, joining heartily in the merriment. Vallew was excused.

Coffroth grew fatter and jollier; his strong intellect struggled against increasing sensual tendencies. What the issue might have been, I know not. He died suddenly, and his destiny was transferred to another sphere. So there dropped out of California-life a partisan without bitterness, a satirist without malice, a wit without a sting, the jolliest, freest, readiest man that ever faced a California audience on the hustings—the typical politician of California.

Old Man Lowry.

I had marked his expressive physiognomy among my hearers in the little church in Sonora for some weeks before he made himself known to me. As I learned afterward, he was weighing the young preacher in his critical balances. He had a shrewd Scotch face, in which there was a mingling of keenness, benignity, and humor. His age might be sixty, or it might be more. He was an old bachelor, and wide guesses are sometimes made as to the ages of that class of men. They may not live longer than married men, but they do not show the effects of life’s wear and tear so early. He came to see us one evening. He fell in love with the mistress of the parsonage, just as he ought to have done, and we were charmed with the quaint old bachelor. There was a piquancy, a sharp flavor, in his talk that was delightful. His aphorisms often crystallized a neglected truth in a form all his own. He was an original character. There was nothing commonplace about him. He had his own way of saying and doing every thing.

Society in the mines was limited in that day, and we felt that we had found a real thesaurus in this old man of unique mold. His visits were refreshing to us, and his plain-spoken criticisms were helpful to me.

He had left the Church because he did not agree with the preachers on some points of Christian ethics, and because they used tobacco. But he was unhappy on the outside, and finding that my views and habits did not happen to cross his peculiar notions, he came back. His religious experience was out of the common order. Bred a Calvinist, of the good old Scotch-Presbyterian type, he had swung away from that faith, and was in danger of rushing into Universalism, or infidelity. That once famous and much-read little book, “John Nelson’s Journal,” fell into his hands, and changed his whole life. It led him to Christ, and to the Methodists. He was a true spiritual child of the unflinching Yorkshire stone-cutter. Like him he despised half-way measures, and like him he was aggressive in thought and action. What he liked he loved, what he disliked he hated. Calvinism he abhorred, and he let no occasion pass for pouring into it the hot shot of his scorn and wrath. One night I preached from the text, Should it be according to thy mind?

“The first part of your sermon,” he said to me as we passed out of the church, “distressed me greatly. For a full half hour you preached straight out Calvinism, and I thought you had ruined every thing; but you had left a little slip-gap, and crawled out at the last.”

His ideal of a minister of the gospel was Dr. Keener, whom he knew at New Orleans before coming to California. He was the first man I ever heard mention Dr. Keener’s name for the episcopacy. There was much in common between them. If my eccentric California bachelor friend did not have as strong and cool a head, he had as brave and true a heart as the incisive and chivalrous Louisiana preacher, upon whose head the miter was placed by the suffrage of his brethren at Memphis in 1870.

He became very active as a worker in the Church. I made him class-leader, and there have been few in that office who brought to its sacred duties as much spiritual insight, candor, and tenderness. At times his words flashed like diamonds, showing what the Bible can reveal to a solitary thinker who makes it his chief study day and night. When needful, he could apply caustic that burned to the very core of an error of opinion or of practice. He took a class in the Sunday-school, and his freshness, acuteness, humor, and deep knowledge of the Scriptures, made him far more than an ordinary teacher. A fine pocket Bible was offered as a prize to the scholar who should, in three months, memorize the greatest number of Scripture verses. The wisdom of such a contest is questionable to me now, but it was the fashion then, and I was too young and self-distrustful to set myself against the current in such matters. The contest was an exciting one—two boys, Robert A—and Jonathan R—, and one girl, Annie P—, leading all the school. Jonathan suddenly fell behind, and was soon distanced by his two competitors. Lowry, who was his teacher, asked him what was the reason of his sudden breakdown. The boy blushed, and stammered out:

“I didn’t want to beat Annie.”

Robert won the prize, and the day came for its presentation. The house was full, and everybody was in a pleasant mood. After the prize had been presented in due form and with a little flourish, Lowry arose, and producing a costly Bible, in a few words telling how magnanimously and gallantly Jonathan had retired from the contest, presented it to the pleased and blushing boy. The boys and girls applauded California fashion, and the old man’s face glowed with satisfaction. He had in him curiously mingled the elements of the Puritan and the Cavalier—the uncompromising persistency of the one, and the chivalrous impulse and openhandedness of the other.

The old man had too many crotchets and too much combativeness to be popular. He spared no opinion or habit he did not like. He struck every angle within reach of him. In the state of society then existing in the mines there were many things to vex his soul, and keep him on the warpath. The miners looked upon him as a brave, good man, just a little daft. He worked a mining-claim on Wood’s Creek, north of town, and lived alone in a tiny cabin on the hill above. That was the smallest of cabins, looking like a mere box from the trail which wound through the flat below. Two little scrub-oaks stood near it, under which he sat and read his Bible in leisure moments. There, above the world, he could commune with his own heart and with God undisturbed, and look down upon a race he half pitied and half despised. From the spot the eye took in a vast sweep of hill and dale: Bald Mountain, the most striking object in the near background, and beyond its dark, rugged mass the snowy summits of the Sierras, rising one above another, like gigantic stair-steps, leading up to the throne of the Eternal. This lonely height suited Lowry’s strangely compounded nature. As a cynic, he looked down with contempt upon the petty life that seethed and frothed in the camps below; as a saint, he looked forth upon the wonders of God’s handiwork around and above him.

There was an intensity in all that he did. Passing his mining-claim on horseback one day, I paused to look at him in his work. Clad in a blue flannel mining-suit, he was digging as for life. The embankment of red dirt and gravel melted away rapidly before his vigorous strokes, and he seemed to feel a sort of fierce delight in his work. Pausing a moment, he looked up and saw me.

“You dig as if you were in a hurry,” I said.

“Yes, I have been digging here three years. I have a notion that I have just so much of the earth to turn over before I am turned under,” he replied with a sort of grim humor.

He was still there when we visited Sonora in 1857. He invited us out to dinner, and we went. By skillful circling around the hill, we reached the little cabin on the summit with horse and buggy. The old man had made preparations for his expected guests. The floor of the cabin had been swept, and its scanty store of furniture put to rights, and a dinner was cooking in and on the little stove. His lady-guest insisted on helping in the preparation of the dinner, but was allowed to do nothing further than to arrange the dishes on the primitive table, which was set out under one of the little oaks in the yard. It was a miner’s feast—can-fruits, can-vegetables, can-oysters, can-pickles, can-every thing nearly, with tea distilled from the Asiatic leaf by a receipt of his own. It was a hot day, and from the cloudless heavens the sun flooded the earth with his glory, and the shimmer of the sunshine was in the still air. We tried to be cheerful, but there was a pathos about the affair that touched us. He felt it too. More than once there was a tear in his eye. At parting, he kissed little Paul, and gave us his hand in silence. As we drove down the hill, he stood gazing after us with a look fixed and sad. The picture is till before me the lonely old man standing sad and silent, the little cabin, the rude dinner-service under the oak, and the overarching sky. That was our last meeting. The next will be on the Other Side.

Suicide in California.

A half protest rises within me as I begin this Sketch. The page almost turns crimson under my gaze, and shadowy forms come forth out of the darkness into which they wildly plunged out of life’s misery into death’s mystery. Ghostly lips cry out, “Leave us alone! Why call us back to a world where we lost all, and in quitting which we risked all? Disturb us not to gratify the cold curiosity of unfeeling strangers. We have passed on beyond human jurisdiction to the realities we dared to meet. Give us the pity and courtesy of your silence, O living brother, who didst escape the wreck!” The appeal is not without effect, and if I lift the shroud that covers the faces of these dead self-destroyed, it will be tenderly, pityingly. These simple Sketches of real California life would be imperfect if this characteristic feature were entirely omitted; for California was (and is yet) the land of suicides. In a single year there were one hundred and six in San Francisco alone. The whole number of suicides in the State would, if the horror of each case could be even imperfectly imagined, appall even the dryest statistician of crime. The causes for this prevalence of self-destruction are to be sought in the peculiar conditions of the country, and the habits of the people. California, with all its beauty, grandeur, and riches, has been to the many who have gone thither a land of great expectations, but small results. This was specially the case in the earlier period of its history, after the discovery of gold and its settlement by “Americans,” as we call ourselves, par excellence. Hurled from the topmost height of extravagant hope to the lowest deep of disappointment, the shock is too great for reaction; the rope, razor, bullet, or deadly drug, finishes the tragedy. Materialistic infidelity in California is the avowed belief of multitudes, and its subtle poison infects the minds and unconsciously the actions of thousands who recoil from the dark abyss that yawns at the feet of its adherents with its fascination of horror. Under some circumstances, suicide becomes logical to a man who has neither hope nor dread of a hereafter. Sins against the body, and especially the nervous system, were prevalent; and days of pain, sleepless nights, and weakened wills, were the precursors of the tragedy that promised change, if not rest. The devil gets men inside a fiery circle, made by their own sin and folly, from which there seems to be no escape but by death, and they will unbar its awful door with their own trembling hands. There is another door of escape for the worst and most wretched, and it is opened to the penitent by the hand that was nailed to the rugged cross. These crises do come, when the next step must be death or life-penitence or perdition. Do sane men and women ever commit suicide? Yes—and, No. Yes, in the sense that they sometimes do it with even pulse and steady nerves. No, in the sense that there cannot be perfect soundness in the brain and heart of one who violates a primal instinct of human nature. Each case has its own peculiar features, and must be left to the all-seeing and all-pitying Father. Suicide, where it is not the greatest of crimes, is the greatest of misfortunes. The righteous Judge will classify its victims.

A noted case in San Francisco was that of a French Catholic priest. He was young, brilliant, and popular—beloved by his flock, and admired by a large circle outside. He had taken the solemn vows of his order in all sincerity of purpose, and was distinguished as well for his zeal in his pastoral work as for his genius. But temptation met him, and he fell. It came in the shape in which it assailed the young Hebrew in Potiphar’s house, and in which it overcame the poet-king of Israel. He was seized with horror and remorse, though he had no accuser save that voice within, which cannot be hushed while the soul lives. He ceased to perform the sacred functions of his office, making some plausible pretext to his superiors, not daring to add sacrilege to mortal sin. Shutting himself in his chamber, he brooded over his crime; or, no longer able to endure the agony he felt, he would rush forth, and walk for hours over the sand-dunes, or along the sea-beach. But no answer of peace followed his prayers, and the voices of nature soothed him not. He thought his sin unpardonable—at least, he would not pardon himself. He was found one morning lying dead in his bed in a pool of blood. He had severed the jugular-vein with a razor, which was still clutched in his stiffened fingers. His handsome and classic face bore no trace of pain. A sealed letter, lying on the table, contained his confession and his farewell.

Among the lawyers in one of the largest mining towns of California was H. B—. He was a native of Virginia, and an alumnus of its noble University. He was a scholar, a fine lawyer, handsome and manly in person and bearing, and had the gift of popularity. Though the youngest lawyer in the town, he took a front place at the bar at once. Over the heads of several older aspirants, he was elected county judge. There was no ebb in the tide of his general popularity, and he had qualities that won the warmest regard of his inner circle of special friends. But in this case, as in many others, success had its danger. Hard drinking was the rule in those days. Horace B—had been one of the rare exceptions. There was a reason for this extra prudence. He had that peculiar susceptibility to alcoholic excitement which has been the ruin of so many gifted and noble men. He knew his weakness, and it is strange that he did not continue to guard against the danger that he so well understood. Strange? No; this infatuation is so common in everyday life that we cannot call it strange. There is some sort of fatal fascination that draws men with their eyes wide open into the very jaws of this hell of strong drink. The most brilliant physician in San Francisco, in the prime of his magnificent young manhood, died of delirium tremens, the victim of a self-inflicted disease, whose horrors no one knew or could picture so well as himself. Who says man is not a fallen, broken creature, and that there is not a devil at hand to tempt him? This devil, under the guise of sociability, false pride, or moral cowardice, tempted Horace B—, and he yielded. Like tinder touched by flame, he blazed into drunkenness, and again and again the proud-spirited, manly, and cultured young lawyer and jurist was seen staggering along the streets, maudlin or mad with alcohol. When he had slept off his madness, his humiliation was intense, and he walked the streets with pallid face and downcast eyes. The coarser-grained men with whom he was thrown in contact had no conception of the mental tortures he suffered, and their rude jests stung him to the quick. He despised himself as a weakling and a coward, but he did not get more than a transient victory over his enemy. The spark had struck a sensitive organization, and the fire of hell, smothered for the time, would blaze out again. He was fast becoming a common drunkard, the accursed appetite growing stronger, and his will weakening in accordance with that terrible law by which man’s physical and moral nature visits retribution on all who cross its path. During a term of the court over which he presided, he was taken home one night drunk. A pistol-shot was heard by persons in the vicinity some time before daybreak; but pistol-shots, at all hours of the night, were then too common to excite special attention. Horace B—was found next morning lying on the floor with a bullet through his head. Many a stout, heavy-bearded man had, wet eyes when the body of the ill-fated and brilliant young Virginian was let down into the grave, which had been dug for him on the hill overlooking the town from the south-east.

In the same town there was a portrait-painter, a quiet, pleasant fellow, with a good face and easy, gentlemanly ways. As an artist, he was not without merit, but his gift fell short of genius. He fell in love with a charming girl, the eldest daughter of a leading citizen. She could not return his passion. The enamored artist still loved, and hoped against hope, lingering near her like a moth around a candle. There was another and more favored suitor in the case, and the rejected lover had all his hopes killed at one blow by her marriage to his rival. He felt that without her life was not worth living. He resolved to kill himself, and swallowed the contents of a two-ounce bottle of laudanum. After he had done the rash deed, a reaction took place. He told what he had done, and a physician was sent for. Before the doctor’s arrival, the deadly drug asserted its power, and this repentant suicide began to show signs of going into a sleep from which it was certain he would never awake.

“My God! What have I done?” he exclaimed in horror. “Do your best, boys, to keep me from going to sleep before the doctor gets here.”

The doctor came quickly, and by the prompt and very vigorous use of the stomach-pump he was saved. I was sent for, and found the would-be suicide looking very weak, sick, silly, and sheepish. He got well, and went on making pictures; but the picture of the fair, sweet girl, for love of whom he came so near dying, never faded from his mind. His face always wore a sad look, and he lived the life of a recluse, but he never attempted suicide again—he had had enough of that.

“It always makes me shudder to look at that place,” said a lady, as we passed an elegant cottage on the western side of Russian Hill, San Francisco.

“Why so? The place to me looks specially cheerful and attractive, with its graceful slope, its shrubbery, flowers, and thick greensward.”

“Yes, it is a lovely place, but it has a history that it shocks me to think of. Do you see that tall pumping-apparatus, with water-tank on top, in the rear of the house?”

“Yes; what of it?”

“A woman hanged herself there a year ago. The family consisted of the husband and wife, and two bright, beautiful children. He was thrifty and prosperous, she was an excellent housekeeper, and the children were healthy and well-behaved. In appearance a happier family could not be found on the hill. One day Mr. P—came home at the usual hour, and, missing the wife’s customary greeting, he asked the children where she was. The children had not seen their mother for two or three hours, and looked startled when they found she was missing. Messengers were sent to the nearest neighbors to make inquiries, but no one had seen her. Mr. P ——’s face began to wear a troubled look as he walked the floor, from time to time going to the door and casting anxious glances about the premises.

“About dusk a sudden shriek was heard, issuing from the water-tank in the yard, and the Irish servant-girl came rushing from it, with eyes distended and face pale with terror.

“Holy Mother of God! It’s the Missus that’s hanged herself!”

The alarm spread, and soon a crowd, curious and sympathetic, had collected. They found the poor lady suspended by the neck from a beam at the head of the staircase leading to the top of the inclosure. She was quite dead, and a horrible sight to see. At the inquest no facts were developed throwing any light on the tragedy. There had been no cloud in the sky portending the lightning stroke that laid the happy little home in ruins. The husband testified that she was as bright and happy the morning of the suicide as he had ever seen her, and had parted with him at the door with the usual kiss. Every thing about the house that day bore the marks of her deft and skillful touch. The two children were dressed with accustomed neatness and, good taste. And yet the bolt was in the cloud, and it fell before the sun had set! What was the mystery? Ever afterward I felt something of the feeling expressed by my lady friend when, in passing, I looked upon the structure which had been the scene of this singular tragedy.

One of the most energetic business men living in one of the foothill towns, on the northern edge of the Sacramento Valley, had a charming wife, whom he loved with a deep and tender devotion. As in all true love-matches, the passion of youth had ripened into a yet stronger and purer love with the lapse of years and participation in the joys and sorrows of wedded life. Their union had been blessed with five children, all intelligent, sweet, and full of promise. It was a very affectionate and happy household. Both parents possessed considerable literary taste and culture, and the best books and current magazine literature were read, discussed, and enjoyed in that quiet and elegant home amid the roses and evergreens. It was a little paradise in the hills, where Love, the home-angel, brightened every room and blessed every heart. But trouble came in the shape of business reverses; and the worried look and wakeful nights of the husband told how heavy were the blows that had fallen upon this hard and willing worker. The course of ruin in California was fearfully rapid in those days. When a man’s financial supports began to give way, they went with a crash. The movement downward was with a rush that gave no time for putting on the brakes. You were at the bottom, a wreck, almost before you knew it. So it was in this case. Every thing was swept away, a mountain of unpaid debts was piled up, credit was gone, clamor of creditors deafened him, and the gaunt wolf of actual want looked in through the door of the cottage upon the dear wife and little ones. Another shadow, and a yet darker one, settled upon them. The unhappy man had been tampering with the delusion of spiritualism, and his wife had been drawn with him into a partial belief in its vagaries. In their troubles they sought the aid of the “familiar spirits” that peeped and muttered through speaking, writing, and rapping mediums. This kept them in a state of morbid excitement that increased from day to day until they were wrought up to a tension that verged on insanity. The lying spirits; or the frenzy of his own heated brain, turned his thought to death as the only escape from want.

“I see our way out of these troubles, wife,” he said one night, as they sat hand in hand in the bedchamber, where the children were lying asleep. “We will all die together! This has been revealed to me as the solution of all our difficulties. Yes, we will enter the beautiful spirit-world together! This is freedom! It is only getting out of prison. Bright spirits beckon and call us. I am ready.”

There was a gleam of madness in his eyes, and, as he took a pistol from a bureau-drawer, an answering gleam flashed forth from the eyes of the wife, as she said:

“Yes, love, we will all go together. I too am ready.”

The sleeping children were breathing sweetly, unmindful of the horror that the devil was hatching.

“The children first, then you, and then me,” he said, his eye kindling with increasing excitement.

He penciled a short note addressed to one of his old friends, asking him to attend to the burial of the bodies, then they kissed each of the sleeping children, and then—but let the curtain fall on the scene that followed. The seven were found next day lying dead, a bullet through the brain of each, the murderer, by the side of the wife, still holding the weapon of death in his hand, its muzzle against his right temple.

Other pictures of real life and death crowd upon, my mind, among them noble forms and faces that were near and dear to me; but again I hear the appealing voices. The page before me is wet with tears—I cannot see to write.

Father Fisher.

He came to California in 1855. The Pacific Conference was in session at Sacramento. It was announced that the new preacher from Texas would preach at night. The boat was detained in some way, and he just had time to reach the church, where a large and expectant congregation were in waiting. Below medium height, plainly dressed, and with a sort of peculiar shuffling movement as he went down the aisle, he attracted no special notice except for the profoundly reverential manner that never left him anywhere. But the moment he faced his audience and spoke, it was evident to them that a man of mark stood before them. They were magnetized at once, and every eye was fixed upon the strong yet benignant face, the capacious blue eyes, the ample forehead, and massive head, bald on top, with silver locks on either side. His tones in reading the Scripture and the hymns were unspeakably solemn and very musical. The blazing fervor of the prayer that followed was absolutely startling to some of the preachers, who had cooled down under the depressing influence of the moral atmosphere of the country. It almost seemed as if we could hear the rush of the pentecostal wind, and see the tongues of flame. The very house seemed to be rocking on its foundations. By the time the prayer had ended, all were in a glow, and ready for the sermon. The text I do not now call to mind, but the impression made by the sermon remains. I had seen and heard preachers who glowed in the pulpit—this man burned. His words poured forth in a molten flood, his face shone like a furnace heated from within, his large blue eyes flashed with the lightning of impassioned sentiment, and anon swam in pathetic appeal that no heart could resist. Body, brain, and spirit, all seemed to feel the mighty afflatus. His very frame seemed to expand, and the little man who had gone into the pulpit with shuffling step and downcast eyes was transfigured before us. When, with radiant face, upturned eyes, an upward sweep of his arm, and trumpet-voice, he shouted, “Hallelujah to God!” the tide of emotion broke over all barriers, the people rose to their feet, and the church reechoed with their responsive hallelujahs. The new preacher from Texas that night gave some Californians a new idea of evangelical eloquence, and took his place as a burning and a shining light among the ministers of God on the Pacific Coast.

“He is the man we want for San Francisco!” exclaimed the impulsive B. T. Crouch, who had kindled into a generous enthusiasm under that marvelous discourse.

He was sent to San Francisco. He was one of a company of preachers who have successively had charge of the Southern Methodist Church in that wondrous city inside the Golden Gate—Boring, Evans, Fisher, Fitzgerald, Gober, Brown, Bailey, Wood, Miller, Ball, Hoss, Chamberlin, Mahon, Tuggle, Simmons, Henderson. There was an almost unlimited diversity of temperament, culture, and gifts among these men; but they all had a similar experience in this, that San Francisco gave them new revelations of human nature and of themselves. Some went away crippled and scarred, some sad, some broken; but perhaps in the Great Day it may be found that for each and all there was a hidden blessing in the heart-throes of a service that seemed to demand that they should sow in bitter tears, and know no joyful reaping this side of the grave. O my brothers, who have felt the fires of that furnace heated seven times hotter than usual, shall we not in the resting-place beyond the river realize that these fires burned out of us the dross that we did not know was in our souls? The bird that comes out of the tempest with broken wing may henceforth take a lowlier flight, but will be safer because it ventures no more into the region of storms.

Fisher did not succeed in San Francisco, because he could not get a hearing. A little handful would meet him on Sunday mornings in one of the upper-rooms of the old City Hall, and listen to sermons that sent them away in a religious glow, but he had no leverage for getting at the masses. He was no adept in the methods by which the modern sensational preacher compels the attention of the novelty-loving crowds in our cities. An evangelist in every fiber of his being, he chafed under the limitations of his charge in San Francisco, and from time to time he would make a dash into the country, where, at camp-meetings and on other special occasions, he preached the gospel with a power that broke many a sinner’s heart, and with a persuasiveness that brought many a wanderer back to the Good Shepherd’s fold. His bodily energy, like his religious zeal, was unflagging. It seemed little less than a miracle that he could, day after day, make such vast expenditure of nervous energy without exhaustion. He put all his strength into every sermon and exhortation, whether addressed to admiring and weeping thousands at a great camp-meeting, or to a dozen or less “standbys” at the Saturday-morning service of a quarterly-meeting.

He had his trials and crosses. Those who knew him intimately learned to expect his mightiest pulpit efforts when the shadow on his face and the unconscious sigh showed that he was passing through the waters and crying to God out of the depths. In such experiences, the strong man is revealed and gathers new strength; the weak one goes under. But his strength was more than mere natural force of will, it was the strength of a mighty faith in God—that unseen force by which the saints work righteousness, subdue kingdoms, escape the violence of fire, and stop the mouths of lions.

As a flame of fire, Fisher itinerated all over California and Oregon, kindling a blaze of revival in almost every place he touched. He was mighty in the Scriptures, and seemed to know the Book by heart. His was no rose-water theology. He believed in a hell, and pictured it in Bible language with a vividness and awfulness that thrilled the stoutest sinner’s heart; he believed in heaven, and spoke of it in such a way that it seemed that with him faith had already changed to sight. The gates of pearl, the crystal river, the shining ranks of the white-robed throngs, their songs swelling as the sound of many waters, the holy love and rapture of the glorified hosts of the redeemed, were made to pass in panoramic procession before the listening multitudes until the heaven he pictured seemed to be a present reality. He lived in the atmosphere of the supernatural; the spirit-world was to him most real.

“I have been out of the body,” he said to me one day. The words were spoken softly, and his countenance, always grave in its aspect, deepened in its solemnity of expression as he spoke.

“How was that?” I inquired.

“It was in Texas. I was returning from a quarterly-meeting where I had preached one Sunday morning with great liberty and with unusual effect. The horses attached to my vehicle became frightened, and ran away. They were wholly beyond control, plunging down the road at a fearful speed, when, by a slight turn to one side, the wheel struck a large log. There was a concussion, and then a blank. The next thing I knew I was floating in the air above the road. I saw every thing as plainly as I see your face at this moment. There lay my body in the road, there lay the log, and there were the trees, the fence, the fields, and every thing, perfectly natural. My motion, which had been upward, was arrested, and as, poised in the air, I looked at my body lying there in the road so still, I felt a strong desire to go back to it, and found myself sinking toward it. The next thing I knew I was lying in the road where I had been thrown out, with a number of friends about me, some holding up my head, others chafing my hands, or looking on with pity or alarm. Yes, I was out of the body for a little, and I know there is a spirit-world.”

His voice had sunk into a sort of whisper, and the tears were in his eyes. I was strangely thrilled. Both of us were silent for a time, as if we heard the echoes of voices, and saw the beckonings of shadowy hands from that Other World which sometimes seems so far away, and yet is so near to each one of us.

Surely you heaven, where angels see God’s face, Is not so distant as we deem From this low earth. ’Tis but a little space, ’Tis but a veil the winds might blow aside; Yes, this all that us of earth divide From the bright dwellings of the glorified, The land of which I dream.

But it was no dream to this man of mighty faith, the windows of whose soul opened at all times Godward. To him immortality was a demonstrated fact, an experience. He had been out of the body.

Intensity was his dominating quality. He wrote verses, and whatever they may have lacked of the subtle element that marks poetical genius, they were full of his ardent personality and devotional abandon. He compounded medicines whose virtues, backed by his own unwavering faith, wrought wondrous cures. On several occasions he accepted challenge to polemic battle, and his opponents found in him a fearless warrior, whose onset was next to irresistible. In these discussions it was no uncommon thing for his arguments to close with such bursts of spiritual power that the doctrinal duel would end in a great religious excitement, bearing disputants and hearers away on mighty tides of feeling that none could resist.

I saw in the Texas Christian Advocate an incident, related by Dr. F. A. Mood, that gives a good idea of what Fisher’s eloquence was when in full tide:

“About ten years ago,” says Dr. M., “when the train from Houston, on the Central Railroad, on one occasion reached Hempstead, it was peremptorily brought to a halt. There was a strike among the employees of the road, on what was significantly called by the strikers ‘The Death-warrant.’ The road, it seems, had required all of their employees to sign a paper renouncing all claims to moneyed reparation in case of their bodily injury while in the service of the road. The excitement incident to a strike was at its height at Hempstead when our train reached there. The tracks were blocked with trains that had been stopped as they arrived from the different branches of the road, and the employees were gathered about in groups, discussing the situation—the passengers peering around with hopeless curiosity. When our train stopped, the conductor told us that we would have to lie over all night, and many of the passengers left to find accommodations in the hotels of the town. It was now night, when a man came into the car and exclaimed, ‘The strikers are tarring and feathering a poor wretch out here, who has taken sides with the road—come out and see it!’ Nearly every one in the car hastened out. I had risen, when a gentleman behind me gently pulled my coat, and said to me, ‘Sit down a moment.’ He went on to say: ‘I judge, sir, you are a clergyman; and I advise you to remain here. You may be put to much inconvenience by having to appear as a witness; in a mob of that sort, too, there is no telling what may follow.’ I thanked him, and resumed my seat. He then asked me to what denomination I belonged, and upon my telling him I was a Methodist preacher, he asked eagerly and promptly if I had ever met a Methodist preacher in Texas by the name of Fisher, describing accurately the appearance of our glorified brother. Upon my telling him I knew him well, he proceeded to give the following incident. I give it as nearly as I can in his own words. Said he:

“‘I am a Californian, have practiced law for years in that State, and, at the time I allude to, was district judge. I was holding court at [I cannot now recall the name of the town he mentioned], and on Saturday was told that a Methodist camp-meeting was being held a few miles from town. I determined to visit it, and reached the place of meeting in good time to hear the great preacher of the occasion—Father Fisher. The meeting was held in a river canyon. The rocks towered hundreds of feet on either side, rising over like an arch. Through the ample space over which the rocks hung the river flowed, furnishing abundance of cool water, while a pleasant breeze fanned a shaded spot. A great multitude had assembled—hundreds of very hard cases, who had gathered there, like myself, for the mere novelty of the thing. I am not a religious man —never have been thrown under religious influences. I respect religion, and respect its teachers, but have been very little in contact with religious things. At the appointed time, the preacher rose. He was small, with white hair combed back from his forehead, and he wore a venerable beard. I do not know much about the Bible, and I cannot quote from his text, but he preached on the Judgment. I tell you, sir, I have heard eloquence at the bar and on the hustings, but I never heard such eloquence as that old preacher gave us that day. At the last, when he described the multitudes calling on the rocks and mountains to fall on them, I instinctively looked up to the arching rocks above me. Will you believe it, sir?—as I looked up, to my horror I saw the walls of the canyon swaying as if they were coming together! Just then the preacher called on all that needed mercy to kneel down. I recollect he said something like this: “‘Every knee shall bow, and every tongue shall confess;’ and you might as well do it now as then.” The whole multitude fell on their knees—every one of them. Although I had never done so before, I confess to you, sir, I got down on my knees. I did not want to be buried right then and there by those rocks that seemed to be swaying to destroy me. The old man prayed for us; it was a wonderful prayer! I want to see him once more; where will I be likely to find him?’

“When he had closed his narrative, I said to him: ‘Judge, I hope you have bowed frequently since that day.’ ‘Alas! no, sir,’ he replied; ‘not much; but depend upon it, Father Fisher is a wonderful orator—he made me think that day that the walls of the canyon were falling.’”

He went back to Texas, the scene of his early labors and triumphs, to die. His evening sky was not cloudless—he suffered much—but his sunset was calm and bright; his waking in the Morning Land was glorious. If it was at that short period of silence spoken of in the Apocalypse, we may be sure it was broken when Fisher went in.

Jack White.

The only thing white about him was his name. He was a Piute Indian, and Piutes are neither white nor pretty. There is only one being in human shape uglier than a Piute “buck”—and that is a Piute squaw. One I saw at the Sink of the Humboldt haunts me yet. Her hideous face, begrimed with dirt and smeared with yellow paint, bleared and leering eyes, and horrid long, flapping breasts—ugh! it was a sight to make one feel sick. A degraded woman is the saddest spectacle on earth. Shakespeare knew what he was doing when he made the witches in Macbeth of the feminine gender. But as you look at them you almost forget that these Piute hags are women—they seem a cross between brute and devil. The unity of the human race is a fact which I accept; but some of our brothers and sisters are far gone from original loveliness. If Eve could see these Piute women, she would not be in a hurry to claim them as her daughters; and Adam would feel like disowning some of his sons. As it appears to me, however, these repulsive savages furnish an argument in support of two fundamental facts of Christianity. One fact is, God did indeed make of one blood all the nations of the earth; the other is the fact of the fall and depravity of the human race. This unspeakable ugliness of these Indians is owing to their evil living. Dirty as they are, the little Indian children are not at all repulsive in expression. A boy of ten years, who stood half-naked, shivering in the wind, with his bow and arrows, had well-shaped features and a pleasant expression of countenance, with just a little of the look of animal cunning that belongs to all wild tribes. The ugliness grows on these Indians fearfully fast when it sets in. The brutalities of the lives they lead stamp themselves on their faces; and no other animal on earth equals in ugliness the animal called man, when he is nothing but an animal.

There was a mystery about Jack White’s early life. He was born in the sagebrush desert beyond the Sierras, and, like all Indian babies, doubtless had a hard time at the outset. A Christian’s pig or puppy is as well cared for as a Piute papoose. Jack was found in a deserted Indian camp in the mountains. He had been left to die, and was taken charge of by the kind hearted John M. White, who was then digging for gold in the Northern mines. He and his good Christian wife had mercy on the little Indian boy that looked up at them so pitifully with his wondering black eyes. At first he had the frightened and bewildered look of a captured wild creature, but he soon began to be more at ease. He acquired the English language slowly, and never did lose the peculiar accent of his tribe. The miners called him Jack White, not knowing any other name for him.

Moving to the beautiful San Ramon Valley, not far from the Bay of San Francisco, the Whites took Jack with them. They taught him the leading doctrines and facts of the Bible, and made him useful in domestic service. He grew and thrived. Broad-shouldered, muscular, and straight as an arrow, Jack was admired for his strength and agility by the white boys with whom he was brought into contact. Though not quarrelsome, he had a steady courage that, backed by his great strength, inspired respect and insured good treatment from them. Growing up amid these influences, his features were softened into a civilized expression, and his tawny face was not unpleasing. The heavy under-jaw and square forehead gave him an appearance of hardness which was greatly relieved by the honest look out of his eyes, and the smile which now and then would slowly creep over his face, like the movement of the shadow of a thin cloud on a calm day in summer. An Indian smiles deliberately, and in a dignified way—at least Jack did.

I first knew Jack at Santa Rosa, of which beautiful town his patron, Mr. White, was then the marshal. Jack came to my Sunday-school, and was taken into a class of about twenty boys taught by myself. They were the noisy element of the school, ranging from ten to fifteen years of age —too large to show the docility of the little lads, but not old enough to have attained the self-command and self-respect that come later in life. Though he was much older than any of them, and heavier than his teacher, this class suited Jack. The white boys all liked him, and he liked me. We had grand times with that class. The only way to keep them in order was to keep them very busy. The plan of having them answer in concert was adopted with decided results. It kept them awake and the whole school with them, for California boys have strong lungs. Twenty boys speaking all at once, with eager excitement and flashing eyes, waked the drowsiest drone in the room. A gentle hint was given now and then to take a little lower key. In these lessons, Jack’s deep guttural tones came in with marked effect, and it was delightful to see how he enjoyed it all. And the singing made his swarthy features glow with pleasure, though he rarely joined in it, having some misgiving as to the melody of his voice.

The truths of the gospel took strong hold of Jack’s mind, and his inquiries indicated a deep interest in the matter of religion. I was therefore not surprised when, during a protracted-meeting in the town, Jack became one of the converts; but there was surprise and delight among the brethren at the class-meeting when Jack rose in his place and told what great thing the Lord had done for him, dwelling with special emphasis on the words, “I am happy, because I know Jesus takes my sins away—I know he takes my sins away.” His voice melted into softness, and a tear trickled down his cheek as he spoke; and when Dan Duncan, the leader, crossed over the room and grasped his hand in a burst of joy, there was a glad chorus of rejoicing Methodists over Jack White, the Piute convert.

Jack never missed a service at the church, and in the social-meetings he never failed to tell the story of his newborn joy and hope, and always with thrilling effect, as he repeated with trembling voice, “I am happy, because I know Jesus takes my sins away.” Sin was a reality with Jack, and the pardon of sin the most wonderful of all facts. He never tired of telling it; it opened a new world to him, a world of light and joy. Jack White in the class-meeting or prayer-meeting, with beaming face, and moistened eyes, and softened voice, telling of the love of Jesus, seemed almost of a different race from the wretched Piutes of the Sierras and sagebrush.

Jack’s baptism was a great event. It was by immersion, the first baptism of the kind I ever performed—and almost the last. Jack had been talked to on the subject by some zealous brethren of another “persuasion,” who magnified that mode, and though he was willing to do as I advised in the matter, he was evidently a little inclined to the more spectacular way of receiving the ordinance. Mrs. White suggested that it might save future trouble, and “spike a gun.” So Jack, with four others, was taken down to Santa Rosa Creek, that went rippling and sparkling along the southern edge of the town, and duly baptized in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. A great crowd covered the bridge just below, and the banks of the stream; and when Wesley Mock, the Asaph of Santa Rosa Methodism, struck up—

O happy day that fixed my choice
   On thee, my Saviour and my God,

and the chorus—

Happy day, happy day, when
   Jesus washed my sins away,

was swelled by hundreds of voices, it was a glad moment for Jack White and all of us. Religiously it was a warm time; but the water was very cold, it being one of the chilliest days I ever felt in that genial climate.

“You were rather awkward, Brother Fitzgerald, in immersing those persons,” said my stalwart friend, Elder John McCorkle, of the “Christian” or Campbellite Church, who had critically but not unkindly watched the proceedings from the bridge. “If you will send for me the next time, I will do it for you,” he added, pleasantly.

I fear it was awkwardly done, for the water was very cold, and a shivering man cannot be very graceful in his movements. I would have done better in a baptistery, with warm water and a rubber suit. But of all the persons I have welcomed into the Church during my ministry, the reception of no one has given use more joy than that of Jack White, the Piute Indian.

Jack’s heart yearned for his own people. He wanted to tell them of Jesus, who could take away their sins; and perhaps his Indian instinct made him long for the freedom of the hills.

“I am going to my people,” he said to me; “I want to tell them of Jesus. You will pray for me?” he added, with a quiver in his voice and a heaving chest.

He went away, and I have never seen him since. Where he is now, I know not. I trust I may meet him on Mount Sion, with the harpers harping with their harps, and singing, as it were, a new song before the throne.

Postscript.—Since this Sketch was penciled, the Rev. C. Y. Rankin, in a note dated Santa Rosa, California, August 3, 1880, says: “Mrs. White asked me to send you word of the peaceful death of Jack White (Indian). He died trusting in Jesus.”

The Rabbi.

Seated in his library, enveloped in a faded figured gown, a black velvet cap on his massive head, there was an Oriental look about him that arrested your attention at once. Power and gentleness, childlike simplicity, and scholarliness, were curiously mingled in this man. His library was a reflex of its owner. In it were books that the great public libraries of the world could not match—black-letter folios that were almost as old as the printing art, illuminated volumes that were once the pride and joy of men who had been in their graves many generations, rabbinical lore, theology, magic, and great volumes of Hebrew literature that looked, when placed beside a modern book, like an old ducal palace alongside a gingerbread cottage of today. I do not think he ever felt at home amid the hurry and rush of San Francisco. He could not adjust himself to the people. He was devout, and they were intensely worldly. He thundered this sentence from the teacher’s desk in the synagogue one morning: “O ye Jews of San Francisco, you have so fully given yourselves up to material things that you are losing the very instinct of immortality. Your only idea of religion is to acquire the Hebrew language, and you don’t know that!” His port and voice were like those of one of the old Hebrew prophets. Elijah himself was not more fearless. Yet, how deep was his love for his race! Jeremiah was not more tender when he wept for the slain of the daughter of his people. His reproofs were resented, and he had a taste of persecution; but the Jews of San Francisco understood him at last. The poor and the little children knew him from the start. He lived mostly among his books, and in his school for poor children, whom he taught without charge. His habits were so simple and his bodily wants so few that it cost him but a trifle to live. When the synagogue frowned on him, he was as independent as Elijah at the brook Cherith. It is hard to starve a man to whom crackers and water are a royal feast.

His belief in God and in the supernatural was startlingly vivid. The Voice that spoke from Sinai was still audible to him, and the Arm that delivered Israel he saw still stretched out over the nations. The miracles of the Old Testament were as real to him as the premiership of Disraeli, or the financiering of the Rothschilds. There was, at the same time, a vein of rationalism that ran through his thought and speech. We were speaking one day on the subject of miracles, and, with his usual energy of manner, he said:

“There was no need of any literal angel to shut the mouths of the lions to save Daniel; the awful holiness of the prophet was enough. There was so much of God in him that the savage creatures submitted to him as they did to unsinning Adam. Man’s dominion over nature was broken by sin, but in the golden age to come it will be restored. A man in full communion with God wields a divine power in every sphere that he touches.”

His face glowed as he spoke, and his voice was subdued into a solemnity of tone that told how his reverent and adoring soul was thrilled with this vision of the coming glory of redeemed humanity.

He knew the New Testament by heart, as well as the Old. The sayings of Jesus were often on his lips.

One day, in a musing, half-soliloquizing way, I heard him say:

“It is wonderful, wonderful! a Hebrew peasant from the hills of Galilee, without learning, noble birth, or power, subverts all the philosophies of the world, and makes himself the central figure of all history. It is wonderful!”

He half whispered the words, and his eyes had the introspective look of a man who is thinking deeply.

He came to see me at our cottage on Post street one morning before breakfast. In grading a street, a house in which I had lived and had the ill luck to own, on Pine street, had been undermined, and toppled over into the street below, falling on the slate-roof and breaking all to pieces. He came to tell me of it, and to extend his sympathy.

“I thought I would come first, so you might get the bad news from a friend rather than a stranger. You have lost a house; but it is a small matter. Your little boy there might have put out his eye with a pair of scissors, or he might have swallowed a pin and lost his life. There are many things constantly taking place that are harder to bear than the loss of a house.”

Many other wise words did the Rabbi speak, and before he left I felt that a house was indeed a small thing to grieve over.

He spoke with charming freedom and candor of all sorts of people.

“Of Christians, the Unitarians have the best heads, and the Methodists the best hearts. The Roman Catholics hold the masses, because they give their people plenty of form. The masses will never receive truth in its simple essence; they must have it in a way that will make it digestible and assimilable, just as their, stomachs demand bread, and meats, and fruits, not their extracts or distilled essences, for daily food. As to Judaism, it is on the eve of great changes. What these changes will be I know not, except that I am sure the God of our fathers will fulfill his promise to Israel. This generation will probably see great things.”

“Do you mean the literal restoration of the Jews to Palestine?”

He looked at me with an intense gaze, and hastened not to answer. At last he spoke slowly:

“When the perturbed elements of religious thought crystallize into clearness and enduring forms, the chosen people will be one of the chief factors in reaching that final solution of the problems which convulse this age.”

He was one of the speakers at the great Mortara indignation-meeting in San Francisco. The speech of the occasion was that of Colonel Baker, the orator who went to Oregon, and in a single campaign magnetized the Oregonians so completely by his splendid eloquence that, passing by all their old party leaders, they sent him to the United States Senate. No one who heard Baker’s peroration that night will ever forget it. His dark eyes blazed, his form dilated, and his voice was like a bugle in battle.

“They tell us that the Jew is accursed of God. This has been the plea of the bloody tyrants and robbers that oppressed and plundered them during the long ages of their exile and agony. But the Almighty God executes his own judgments. Woe to him who presumes to wield his thunderbolts! They fall in blasting, consuming vengeance upon his own head. God deals with his chosen people in judgment; but he says to men, Touch them at your peril! They that spoil them shall be for a spoil; they that carried them away captive shall themselves go into captivity. The Assyrian smote the Jew, and where is the proud Assyrian Empire? Rome ground them under her iron heel, and where is the empire of the Caesars? Spain smote the Jew, and where is her glory? The desert sands cover the site of Babylon the Great. The power that hurled the hosts of Titus against the holy city Jerusalem was shivered to pieces. The banners of Spain, that floated in triumph over half the world, and fluttered in the breezes of every sea, is now the emblem of a glory that is gone, and the ensign of a power that has waned. The Jews are in the hands of God. He has dealt with them in judgment, but they are still the children of promise. The day of their long exile shall end, and they will return to Zion with songs and everlasting joy upon their heads!”

The words were something like these, but who could picture Baker’s oratory? As well try to paint a storm in the tropics. Real thunder and lightning cannot be put on canvas.

The Rabbi made a speech, and it was the speech of a man who had come from his books and prayers. He made a tender appeal for the mother and father of the abducted Jewish boy, and argued the question as calmly, and in as sweet a spirit, as if he had been talking over an abstract question in his study. The vast crowd looked upon that strange figure with a sort of pleased wonder, and the Rabbi seemed almost unconscious of their presence. He was as free from self-consciousness as a little child, and many a Gentile heart warmed that night to the simple-hearted sage who stood before them pleading for the rights of human nature.

The old man was often very sad. In such moods he would come round to our cottage on Post street, and sit with us until late at night, unburdening his aching heart, and relaxing by degrees into a playfulness that was charming from its very awkwardness. He would bring little picture-books for the children, pat them on their heads, and praise them. They were always glad to see him, and would nestle round him lovingly. We all loved him, and felt glad in the thought that he left our little circle lighter at heart. He lived alone. Once, when I playfully spoke to him of matrimony, he laughed quietly, and said:

“No, no—my books and my poor schoolchildren are enough for me.”

He died suddenly and alone. He had been out one windy night visiting the poor, came home sick, and before morning was in that world of spirits which was so real to his faith, and for which he longed. He left his little fortune of a few thousand dollars to the poor of his native village of Posen, in Poland. And thus passed from California-life Dr. Julius Eckman, the Rabbi.

My Mining Speculation.

“I Believe the Lord has put me in the way of making a competency for my old age,” said the dear old Doctor, as he seated himself in the armchair reserved for him at the cottage at North Beach.

“How?” I asked.

“I met a Texas man today, who told me of the discovery of an immensely rich silver mining district in Deep Spring Valley, Mono county, and he says he can get me in as one of the owners.”

I laughingly made some remark expressive of incredulity. The honest and benignant face of the old Doctor showed that he was a little nettled.

“I have made full inquiry, and am sure this is no mere speculation. The stock will not be put upon the market, and will not be assessable. They propose to make me a trustee, and the owners, limited in number, will have entire control of the property. But I will not he hasty in the matter. I will make it a subject of prayer for twenty-four hours, and then if there be no adverse indications I will go on with it.”

The next day I met the broad-faced Texan, and was impressed by him as the old Doctor had been.

It seemed a sure thing. An old prospector had been equipped and sent out by a few gentlemen, and he had found outcroppings of silver in a range of hills extending not less than three miles. Assays had been made of the ores, and they were found to be very rich. All the timber and waterpower of Deep Spring Valley had been taken up for the company under the general and local preemption and mining laws. It was a big thing. The beauty of the whole arrangement was that no “mining sharps” were to be let in; we were to manage it ourselves, and reap all the profits.

We went into it, the old Doctor and I, feeling deeply grateful to the broad-faced Texan, who had so kindly given us the chance. I was made a trustee, and began to have a decidedly business feeling as such. At the meetings of “the board,” my opinions were frequently called for, and were given with great gravity. The money was paid for the shares I had taken, and the precious evidences of ownership were carefully put in a place of safety. A mill was built near the richest of the claims, and the assays were good. There were delays, and more money was called for, and sent up. The assays were still good, and the reports from our superintendent were glowing. “The biggest thing in the history of California mining,” he wrote; and when the secretary read his letter to the board, there was a happy expression on each face.

At this point I began to be troubled. It seemed, from reasonable ciphering, that I should soon be a millionaire. It made me feel solemn and anxious. I lay awake at night, praying that I might not be spoiled by my good fortune. The scriptures that speak of the deceitfulness of riches were called to mind, and I rejoiced with trembling. Many beneficent enterprises were planned, principally in the line of endowing colleges, and paying church-debts. (I had had an experience in this line.) There were further delays, and more money was called for. The ores were rebellious, and our “process” did not suit them. Fryborg and Deep Spring Valley were not the same. A new superintendent—one that understood rebellious ores—was employed at a higher salary. He reported that all was right, and that we might expect “big news” in a few days, as he proposed to crush about seventy tons of the best rock, “by a new and improved process.”

The board held frequent meetings, and in view of the nearness of great results did not hesitate to meet the requisitions made for further outlays of money. They resolved to pursue a prudent but vigorous policy in developing the vast property when the mill should be fairly in operation.

All this time I felt an undercurrent of anxiety lest I might sustain spiritual loss by my sudden accession to great wealth, and continued to fortify myself with good resolutions.

As a matter of special caution, I sent for a parcel of the ore, and had a private assay made of it. The assay was good.

The new superintendent notified us that on a certain date we might look for a report of the result of the first great crushing and cleanup of the seventy tons of rock. The day came. On Kearny street I met one of the stockholders—a careful Presbyterian brother, who loved money. He had a solemn look, and was walking slowly, as if in deep thought. Lifting his eyes as we met, he saw me, and spoke:

“It is lead!”

“What is lead?”

“Our silver mine in Deep Spring Valley.”

Yes; from the seventy tons of rock we got eleven dollars in silver, and about fifty pounds of as good lead as was ever molded into bullets.

The board held a meeting the next evening. It was a solemn one. The fifty-pound bar of lead was placed in the midst, and was eyed reproachfully. I resigned my trusteeship, and they saw me not again. That was my first and last mining speculation. It failed somehow—but the assays were all very good.

Mike Reese.

I had business with him, and went at a business hour. No introduction was needed, for he had been my landlord, and no tenant of his ever had reason to complain that he did not get a visit from him, in person or by proxy, at least once a month. He was a punctual man—as a collector of what was due him. Seeing that he was intently engaged, I paused and looked at him. A man of huge frame, with enormous hands and feet, massive head, receding forehead, and heavy cerebral development, full sensual lips, large nose, and peculiar eyes that seemed at the same time to look through you and to shrink from your gaze—he was a man at whom a stranger would stop in the street to get a second gaze. There he sat at his desk, too much absorbed to notice my entrance. Before him lay a large pile of one-thousand-dollar United States Government bonds, and he was clipping off the coupons. That face! it was a study as he sat using the big pair of scissors. A hungry boy in the act of taking into his mouth a ripe cherry, a mother gazing down into the face of her pretty sleeping child, a lover looking into the eyes of his charmer, are but faint figures by which to express the intense pleasure he felt in his work. But there was also a feline element in his joy—his handling of those bonds was somewhat like a cat toying with its prey. When at length he raised his head, there was a fierce gleam in his eye and a flush in his face. I had come upon a devotee engaged in worship. This was Mike Reese, the miser and millionaire. Placing his huge left-hand on the pile of bonds, he gruffly returned my salutation,

“Good morning.”

He turned as he spoke, and east a look of scrutiny into my face which said plain enough that he wanted me to make known my business with him at once.

I told him what was wanted. At the request of the official board of the Minna-street Church I had come to ask him to make a contribution toward the payment of its debt.

“O yes; I was expecting you. They all come to me. Father Gallagher, of the Catholic Church, Dr. Wyatt, of the Episcopal Church, and all the others, have been here. I feel friendly to the Churches, and I treat all alike—it won’t do for me to be partial—I don’t give to any!”

That last clause was an anticlimax, dashing my hopes rudely; but I saw he meant it, and left. I never heard of his departing from the rule of strict impartiality he had laid down for himself.

We met at times at a restaurant on Clay street. He was a hearty feeder, and it was amusing to see how skillfully in the choice of dishes and the thoroughness with which he emptied them he could combine economy with plenty. On several of these occasions, when we chanced to sit at the same table, I proposed to pay for both of us, and he quickly assented, his hard, heavy features lighting up with undisguised pleasure at the suggestion, as he shambled out of the room amid the smiles of the company present, most of whom knew him as a millionaire, and me as a Methodist preacher.

He had one affair of the heart. Cupid played a prank on him that was the occasion of much merriment in the San Francisco newspapers, and of much grief to him. A widow was his enslaver and tormentor—the old story. She sued him for breach of promise of marriage. The trial made great fun for the lawyers, reporters, and the amused public generally; but it was no fun for him. He was mulcted for six thousand dollars and costs of the suit. It was during the time I was renting one of his offices on Washington street. I called to see him, wishing to have some repairs made. His clerk met me in the narrow hall, and there was a mischievous twinkle in his eye as he said:

“You had better come another day—the old man has just paid that judgment in the breach of promise case, and he is in a bad way.”

Hearing our voices, he said,

“Who is there?—come in.”

I went in, and found him sitting leaning on his desk, the picture of intense wretchedness. He was all unstrung, his jaw fallen, and a most pitiful face met mine as he looked up and said, in a broken voice,

“Come some other day—I can do no business today; I am very unwell.”

He was indeed sick—sick at heart. I felt sorry for him. Pain always excites my pity, no matter what may be its cause. He was a miser, and the payment of those thousands of dollars was like tearing him asunder. He did not mind the jibes of the newspapers, but the loss of the money was almost killing. He had not set his heart on popularity, but cash.

He had another special trouble, but with a different sort of ending. It was discovered by a neighbor of his that, by some mismeasurement of the surveyors, he (Reese) had built the wall of one of his immense business houses on Front street six inches beyond his own proper line, taking in just so much of that neighbor’s lot. Not being on friendly terms with Reese, his neighbor made a peremptory demand for the removal of the wall, or the payment of a heavy price for the ground. Here was misery for the miser. He writhed in mental agony, and begged for easier terms, but in vain. His neighbor would not relent. The business men of the vicinity rather enjoyed the situation, humorously watching the progress of the affair. It was a case of diamond cut diamond, both parties bearing the reputation of being hard men to deal with. A day was fixed for Reese to give a definite answer to his neighbor’s demand, with notice that, in case of his noncompliance, suit against him would be begun at once. The day came, and with it a remarkable change in Reese’s tone. He sent a short note to his enemy breathing profanity and defiance.

“What is the matter?” mused the puzzled citizen; “Reese has made some discovery that makes him think he has the upper-hand, else he would not talk this way.”

And he sat and thought. The instinct of this class of men where money is involved is like a miracle.

“I have it!” he suddenly exclaimed; “Reese has the same hold on me that I have on him.”

Reese happened to be the owner of another lot adjoining that of his enemy, on the other side. It occurred to him that, as all these lots were surveyed at the same time by the same party, it was most likely that as his line had gone six inches too far on the one side, his enemy’s had gone as much too far on the other. And so it was. He had quietly a survey made of the premises, and he chuckled with inward joy to find that he held this winning card in the unfriendly game. With grim politeness the neighbors exchanged deeds for the two half feet of ground, and their war ended. The moral of this incident is for him who hath wit enough to see it.

For several seasons he came every morning to North Beach to take sea-baths. Sometimes he rode his well-known white horse, but oftener he walked. He bathed in the open sea, making, as one expressed it, twenty-five tents out of the Pacific Ocean, by avoiding the bathhouse. Was this the charm that drew him forth so early? It not seldom chanced that we walked downtown together. At times he was quite communicative, speaking of himself in a way that was peculiar. It seems he had thoughts of marrying before his episode with the widow.

“Do you think a young girl of twenty could love an old man like me?” he asked me one day, as we were walking along the street.

I looked at his huge and ungainly bulk, and into his animal face, and made no direct answer. Love! Six millions of dollars is a great sum. Money may buy youth and beauty, but love does not come at its call. God’s highest gifts are free; only the second-rate things can be bought with money. Did this sordid old man yearn for pure human love amid his millions? Did such a dream cast a momentary glamour over a life spent in raking among the muck-heaps? If so, it passed away, for he never married.

He understood his own case. He knew in what estimation he was held by the public, and did not conceal his scorn for its opinion.

“My love of money is a disease. My saving and hoarding as I do is irrational, and I know it. It pains me to pay five cents for a streetcar ride, or a quarter of a dollar for a dinner. My pleasure in accumulating property is morbid, but I have felt it from the time I was a foot peddler in Charlotte, Campbell, and Pittsylvania counties, in Virginia, until now. It is a sort of insanity, and it is incurable; but it is about as good a form of madness as any, and all the world is mad in some, fashion.”

This was the substance of what he said of himself when in one of his moods of free speech, and it gave me a new idea of human nature—a man whose keen and penetrating brain could subject his own consciousness to a cool and correct analysis, seeing clearly the folly which he could not resist. The autobiography of such a man might furnish a curious psychological study, and explain the formation and development in society of those moral monsters called misers. Nowhere in literature has such a character been fully portrayed, though Shakespeare and George Eliot have given vivid touches of some of its features.

He always retained a kind feeling for the South, over whose hills he had borne his peddler’s pack when a youth. After the war, two young ex-Confederate soldiers came to San Francisco to seek their fortunes. A small room adjoining my office was vacant, and the brothers requested me to secure it for them as cheap as possible. I applied to Reese, telling him who the young men were, and describing their broken and impecunious condition.

“Tell them to take the room free of rent—but it ought to bring five dollars a month.”

It took a mighty effort, and he sighed as he spoke the words. I never heard of his acting similarly in any other case, and I put this down to his credit, glad to know that there was a warm spot in that mountain of mud and ice. A report of this generous act got afloat in the city, and many were the inquiries I received as to its truth. There was general incredulity.

His health failed, and he crossed the seas. Perhaps he wished to visit his native hills in Germany, which he had last seen when a child. There he died, leaving all his millions to his kindred, save a bequest of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars to the University of California. What were his last thoughts, what was his final verdict concerning human life, I know not. Empty-handed he entered the world of spirits, where, the film fallen from his vision, he saw the Eternal Realities. What amazement must have followed his awakening!

Uncle Nolan.

He was black and ugly; but it was an ugliness that did not disgust or repel you. His face had a touch both of the comic and the pathetic. His mouth was very wide, his lips very thick and the color of a ripe damson, blue-black; his nose made up in width what it lacked in elevation; his ears were big, and bent forward; his eyes were a dull white, on a very dark ground; his wool was white and thick. His age might be anywhere along from seventy onward. A black man’s age, like that of a horse, becomes dubious after reaching a certain stage.

He came to the class-meeting in the Pine-street Church, in San Francisco, one Sabbath morning. He asked leave to speak, which was granted.

“Bredren, I come here sometime ago, from Vicksburg, Mississippi, where I has lived forty year, or more. I heered dar was a culud church up on de hill, an’ I thought I’d go an’ washup wid’em. I went dar three or fo’ Sundays, but I foun’ deir ways didn’t suit me, an’ my ways didn’t suit dem. Dey was Yankees’ niggers, an’ [proudly] I’s a Southern man myself. Sumbody tole me dar was a Southern Church down here on Pine street, an’ I thought I’d cum an’ look in. Soon ’s I got inside de church, an’ look roun’ a minit, I feels at home. Dey look like home-folks; de preacher preach like home-folks; de people sing like home-folks. Yer see, chillan, I’se a Southern man myself [emphatically], and I’se a Southern Methodis’. Dis is de Church I was borned in, an’ dis is de Church I was rarred in, an’ [with great energy] dis is de Church which de Scripter says de gates ob hell shall not prevail ag’in it! [“Amen!” from Father Newman and others.] When dey heerd I was comin’ to dis Church, some ob ’em got arter me ’bout it. Dey say dis Church was a enemy to de black people, and dat dey was in favor ob slavery. I tole ’em de Scripter said, ‘Love your enemies,’ an’ den I took de Bible an’ read what it says about slavery—I can read some, chillun Servants, obey yer masters in all things, not wid eye-service, as men-pleasers, but as unto de Lord;’ and so on. But, bless yer souls, chillun, dey wouldn’t lis’en to dat —so I foun’ out dey was abberlishem niggers, an’ I lef’ ’em.!”

Yes, he left them, and came to us. I received him into the Church in due form, and with no little eclat, he being the only son of Ham on our roll of members in San Francisco. He stood firm to his Southern Methodist colors under a great pressure.

“Yer ought ter be killed fer goin’ ter dat Southern Church,” said one of his colored acquaintances one day, as they met in the street.

“Kill me, den,” said Uncle Nolan, with proud humility; “kill me, den; yer can’t cheat me out ob many days, nohow.”

He made a living, and something over, by rag-picking at North Beach and elsewhere, until the Chinese entered into competition with him, and then it was hard times for Uncle Nolan. His eyesight partially failed him, and it was pitiful to see him on the beach, his threadbare garments fluttering in the wind, groping amid the rubbish for rags, or shuffling along the streets with a huge sack on his back, and his old felt hat tied under his nose with a string, picking his way carefully to spare his swollen feet, which were tied up with bagging and woolens. His religious fervor never cooled; I never heard him complain. He never ceased to be joyously thankful for two things—his freedom and his religion. But, strange as it may seem, he was a pro-slavery man to the last. Even after the war, he stood to his opinion.

“Dem niggers in de South thinks dey is free, but dey ain’t. ’Fore it’s all ober, all dat ain’t dead will be glad to git back to deir masters,” he would say.

Yet he was very proud of his own freedom, and took the utmost care of his free-papers. He had no desire to resume his former relation to the peculiar and patriarchal institution. He was not the first philosopher who has had one theory for his fellows, and another for himself.

Uncle Nolan would talk of religion by the hour. He never tired of that theme. His faith was simple and strong, but, like most of his race, he had a tinge of superstition. He was a dreamer of dreams, and he believed in them. Here is one which he recited to me. His weird manner, and low, chanting tone, I must leave to the imagination of the reader:

Uncle Nolan’s Dream.

A tall black man came along, an’ took me by de arm, an’ tole me he had come for me. I said:

“What yer want wid me?”

“I come to carry yer down into de darkness.”

“What for?”

“Cause you didn’t follow de Lord.”

Wid dat, he pulled me ‘long de street till he come to a big black house, de biggest house an’ de thickest walls I eber seed. We went in a little do’, an’ den he took me down a long sta’rs in de dark, till we come to a big do’; we went inside, an’ den de big black man locked de do’ behin’ us. An’ so we kep’ on, goin’ down, an’ goin’ down, an’ goin’ down, an’ he kep’ lockin’ dem big iron do’s behin’ us, an’ all de time it was pitch dark, so I couldn’t see him, but he still hel’ on ter me. At las’ we stopped, an’ den he started to go ‘way. He locked de do’ behin’ him, an’ I heerd him goin’ up de steps de way we come, lockin’ all de do’s behin’ him as he went. I tell you, dat was dreafful when I heerd dat big key turn on de outside, an’ me ‘way down, down, down dar in de dark all alone, an’ no chance eber to git out! An’ I knowed it was ’cause I didn’t foller de Lord. I felt roun’ de place, an’ dar was nothin’ but de thick walls an’ de great iron do’. Den I sot down an’ cried, ‘cause I knowed I was a los’ man. Dat was de same as hell [his voice sinking into a whisper], an’ all de time I knowed I was dar, ’cause I hadn’t follered de Lord. Bymeby somethin’ say, “Pray.” Somethin’ keep sayin’, “Pray.” Den I drap on my knees an’ prayed. I tell you, no man eber prayed harder ’n I did! I prayed, an’ prayed, an’ prayed! What’s dat? Dar’s somebody a-comin’ down dem steps; dey ’s unlockin’ de do’; an’ de fus’ thing I knowed, de place was all lighted up bright as day, an’ a white-faced man stood by me, wid a crown on his head, an’ a golden key in his han’. Somehow, I knowed it was Jesus, an’ right den I waked up all of a tremble, an’ knowed it was a warnin’ dat I mus’ foller de Lord. An’, bless Jesus, I has been follerin’ him fifty year since I had dat dream.

In his prayers, and class-meeting and love-feast talks, Uncle Nolan showed a depth of spiritual insight truly wonderful, and the effects of these talks were frequently electrical. Many a time have I seen the Pine-street brethren and sisters rise from their knees, at the close of one of his prayers, melted into tears, or thrilled to religious rapture, by the power of his simple faith, and the vividness of his sanctified imagination.

He held to his pro-slavery views and guarded his own freedom-papers to the last; and when he died, in 1875, the last colored Southern Methodist in California was transferred from the Church militant to the great company that no man can number, gathered out of every nation, and tribe, and kindred, on the earth.

Buffalo Jones.

That is what the boys called him. His real Christian name was Zachariah. The way he got the name he went by was this: He was a Methodist, and prayed in public. He was excitable, and his lungs were of extraordinary power. When fully aroused, his voice sounded, it was said, like the bellowing of a whole herd of buffaloes. It had peculiar reverberations —rumbling, roaring, shaking the very roof of the sanctuary, or echoing among the hills when let out at its utmost strength at a camp-meeting. This is why they called him Buffalo Jones. It was his voice. There never was such another. In Ohio he was a blacksmith and a fighting man. He had whipped every man who would fight him, in a whole tier of counties. He was converted after the old way; that is to say, he was “powerfully” converted. A circuit-rider preached the sermon that converted him. His anguish was awful. The midnight hour found him in tears. The Ohio forest resounded with his cries for mercy. When he found peace, it swelled into rapture. He joined the Church militant among the Methodists, and he stuck to them, quarreled with them, and loved them, all his life. He had many troubles, and gave much trouble to many people. The old Adam died hard in the fighting blacksmith. His pastor, his family, his friends, his fellow-members in the Church, all got a portion of his wrath in due season, if they swerved a hair-breadth from the straight-line of duty as he saw it. I was his pastor, and I never had a truer friend, or a severer censor. One Sunday morning he electrified my congregation, at the close of the sermon, by rising in his place and making a personal application of a portion of it to individuals present, and insisting on their immediate expulsion from the Church. He had another side to his character, and at times was as tender as a woman. He acted as class-leader. In his melting moods he moved every eye to tears, as he passed round among the brethren and sisters, weeping, exhorting, and rejoicing. At such times, his great voice softened into a pathos that none could resist, and swept the chords of sympathy with resistless power. But when his other mood was upon him, he was fearful. He scourged the unfaithful with a whip of fire. He would quote with a singular fluency and aptness every passage of Scripture that blasted hypocrites, reproved the lukewarm, or threatened damnation to the sinner. At such times his voice sounded like the shout of a warrior in battle, and the timid and wondering hearers looked as if they were in the midst of the thunder and lightning of a tropical storm. I remember the shock he gave a quiet and timid lady whom I had persuaded to remain for the class-meeting after service. Fixing his stern and fiery gaze upon her, and knitting his great bushy eyebrows, he thundered the question:

“Sister, do you ever pray?”

The startled woman nearly sprang from her seat in a panic as she stammered hurriedly,

“Yes, sir; yes, sir.”

She did not attend his class-meeting again.

At a camp-meeting he was present, and in one of his bitterest moods. The meeting was not conducted in a way to suit him. He was grim, critical, and contemptuous, making no concealment of his dissatisfaction. The preaching displeased him particularly. He groaned, frowned, and in other ways showed his feelings. At length he could stand it no longer. A young brother had just closed a sermon of a mild and persuasive kind, and no sooner had he taken his seat than the old man arose. Looking forth upon the vast audience, and then casting a sharp and scornful glance at the preachers in and around “the stand,” he said:

“You preachers of these days have no gospel in you. You remind me of a man going into his barnyard early in the morning to feed his stock. He has a basket on his arm, and here come the horses nickering, the cows lowing, the calves and sheep bleating, the hogs squealing, the turkeys gobbling, the hens clucking, and the roosters crowing. They all gather round him, expecting to be fed, and lo, his basket is empty! You take texts, and you preach, but you have no gospel. Your baskets are empty.”

Here he darted a defiant glance at the astonished preachers, and then, turning to one, he added in a milder and patronizing tone:

“You, Brother Sim, do preach a little gospel in your basket there is one little nubbin!”

Down he sat, leaving the brethren to meditate on what he had said. The silence that followed was deep.

At one time his conscience became troubled about the use of tobacco, and he determined to quit. This was the second great struggle of his life. He was running a sawmill in the foothills at the time, and lodged in a little cabin near by.

Suddenly deprived of the stimulant to which it had so long been accustomed, his nervous system was wrought up to a pitch of frenzy. He would rush from the cabin, climb along the hill-side, run leaping from rock to rock, now and then screaming like a maniac. Then he would rush back to the cabin, seize a plug of tobacco, smell it, rub it against his lips, and away he would go again. He smelt, but never tasted it again.

“I was resolved to conquer, and by the grace of God I did,” he said.

That was a great victory for the fighting blacksmith.

When a melodeon was introduced into the church, he was sorely grieved and furiously angry. He argued against it, he expostulated, he protested, he threatened, he staid away from church. He wrote me a letter, in which he expressed his feelings thus:

San Jose, 1860.

Dear Brother:—They have got the devil into the church now! Put your foot on its tail and it squeals.

Z. Jones.

This was his figurative way of putting it. I was told that he had, on a former occasion, dealt with the question in a more summary way, by taking his ax and splitting a melodeon to pieces.

Neutrality in politics was, of course, impossible to such a man. In the civil war his heart was with the South. He gave up when Stonewall Jackson was killed.

“It is all over—the praying man is gone,” he said; and he sobbed like a child. From that day he had no hope for the Confederacy, though once or twice, when feeling ran high, he expressed a readiness to use carnal weapons in defense of his political principles. For all his opinions on the subject he found support from the Bible, which he read and studied with unwearying diligence. He took its words literally on all occasions, and the Old Testament history had a wonderful charm for him. He would have been ready to hew any modern Agag in pieces before the Lord.

He finally found his way to the Insane Asylum. The reader has already seen how abnormal was his mind, and will not be surprised that his storm-tossed soul lost its rudder at last. But mid all its veerings he never lost sight of the Star that had shed its light upon his checkered path of life. He raved, and prayed, and wept, by turns. The horrors of mental despair would be followed by gleams of seraphic joy. When one of his stormy moods was upon him, his mighty voice could be heard above all the sounds of that sad and pitiful company of broken and wrecked souls. The old class-meeting instinct and habit showed itself in his semi-lucid intervals. He would go round among the patients questioning them as to their religious feeling and behavior in true class-meeting style. Dr. Shurtleff one day overheard a colloquy between him and Dr. Rogers, a freethinker and reformer, whose vagaries had culminated in his shaving close one side of his immense whiskers, leaving the other side in all its flowing amplitude. Poor fellow! Pitiable as was his case, he made a ludicrous figure walking the streets of San Francisco half shaved, and defiant of the wonder and ridicule he excited. The ex-class-leader’s voice was earnest and loud, as he said:

“Now, Rogers, you must pray. If you will get down at the feet of Jesus, and confess your sins, and ask him to bless you, he will hear you, and give you peace. But if you won’t do it,” he continued, with growing excitement and kindling anger at the thought, “you are the most infernal rascal that ever lived, and I’ll beat you into a jelly!”

The good Doctor had to interfere at this point, for the old man was in the very act of carrying out his threat to punish Rogers bodily, on the bare possibility that he would not pray as he was told to do. And so that extemporized class-meeting came to an abrupt end.

“Pray with me,” he said to me the last time I saw him at the Asylum. Closing the door of the little private office, we knelt side by side, and the poor old sufferer, bathed in tears, and docile as a little child, prayed to the once suffering, once crucified, but risen and interceding Jesus. When he arose from his knees his eyes were wet, and his face showed that there was a great calm within. We never met again. He went home to die. The storms that had swept his soul subsided, the light of reason was rekindled, and the light of faith burned brightly; and in a few weeks he died in great peace, and another glad voice joined in the anthems of the blood-washed millions in the city of God.

Tod Robinson.

The image of this man of many moods and brilliant genius that rises most distinctly to my mind is that connected with a little prayer-meeting in the Minna-street Church, San Francisco, one Thursday night. His thin silver locks, his dark flashing eye, his graceful pose, and his musical voice, are before me. His words I have not forgotten, but their electric effect must forever be lost to all except the few who heard them.

“I have been taunted with the reproach that it was only after I was a broken and disappointed man in my worldly hopes and aspirations that I turned to religion. The taunt is just”—here he bowed his head, and paused with deep emotion “the taunt is just. I bow my head in shame, and take the blow. My earthly hopes have faded and fallen one after another. The prizes that dazzled my imagination have eluded my grasp. I am a broken, gray-haired man, and I bring to my God only the remnant of a life. But, brethren, it is this very thought that fills me with joy and gratitude at this moment—the thought that when all else fails God takes us up. Just when we need him most, and most feel our need of him, he lifts us up out of the depths where we had groveled, and presses us to his Fatherly heart. This is the glory of Christianity. The world turns from us when we fail and fall; then it is that the Lord draws higher. Such a religion must be from God, for its principles are God-like. It does not require much skill or power to steer a ship into port when her timbers are sound, her masts all rigged, and her crew at their posts; but the pilot that can take an old hulk, rocking on the stormy waves, with its masts torn away, its rigging gone, its planks loose and leaking, and bring it safe to harbor, that is the pilot for me. Brethren, I am that hulk; and Jesus is that Pilot!”

“Glory be to Jesus!” exclaimed Father Newman; as the speaker, with swimming eyes, radiant face, and heaving chest, sunk into his seat. I never heard any thing finer from mortal lips, but it seems cold to me as I read it here. Oratory cannot be put on paper.

He was present once at a camp-meeting, at the famous Toll-gate Camp-ground, in Santa Clara Valley, near the city of San Jose. It was Sabbath morning, just such a one as seldom dawns on this earth. The brethren and sisters were gathered around “the stand” under the live-oaks for a speaking-meeting. The morning glory was on the summits of the Santa Cruz Mountains that sloped down to the sacred spot, the lovely valley smiled under a sapphire sky, the birds hopped from twig to twig of the overhanging branches that scarcely quivered in the still air, and seemed to peer inquiringly into the faces of the assembled worshipers. The bugle-voice of Bailey led in a holy song, and Simmons led in prayer that touched the eternal throne. One after another, gray-haired men and saintly women told when and how they began the new life far away on the old hills they would never see again, and how they had been led and comforted in their pilgrimage. Young disciples, in the flush of their first love, and the rapture of newborn hope, were borne out on a tide of resistless feeling into that ocean whose waters encircle the universe. The radiance from the heavenly hills was reflected from the consecrated encampment, and the angels of God hovered over the spot. Judge Robinson rose to his feet, and stepped into the altar, the sunlight at that moment falling upon his face. Every voice was hushed, as, with the orator’s indefinable magnetism, he drew every eye upon him. The pause was thrilling. At length he spoke:

“This is a mount of transfiguration. The transfiguration is on hill and valley, on tree and shrub, on grass and flower, on earth and sky. It is on your faces that shine like the face of Moses when he came down from the awful mount where be met Jehovah face to face. The same light is on your faces, for here is God’s shekinah. This is the gate of heaven. I see its shining hosts, I hear the melody of its songs. The angels of God encamped with us last night, and they linger with us this morning. Tarry with us, ye sinless ones, for this is heaven on earth!”

He paused, with extended arm, gazing upward entranced. The scene that, followed beggars description. By a simultaneous impulse all rose to their feet and pressed toward the speaker with awestruck faces, and when Grandmother Bucker, the matriarch of the valley, with luminous face and uplifted eyes, broke into a shout, it swelled into a melodious hurricane that shook the very hills. He ought to have been a preacher. So he said to me once:

“I felt the impulse and heard the call in my early manhood. I conferred with flesh and blood, and was disobedient to the heavenly vision. I have had some little success at the bar, on the hustings, and in legislative halls, but how paltry has it been in comparison with the true life and high career that might have been mine!”

He was from the hill-country of North Carolina, and its flavor clung to him to the last. He had his gloomy moods, but his heart was fresh as a Blue Ridge breeze in May, and his wit bubbled forth like a mountain-spring. There was no bitterness in his satire. The very victim of his thrust enjoyed the keenness of the stroke, for there was no poison in the weapon. At times he seemed inspired, and you thrilled, melted, and soared, under the touches of this Western Coleridge. He came to my room at the Golden Eagle, in Sacramento City, one night, and left at two o’clock in the morning. He walked the floor and talked, and it was the grandest monologue I ever listened to. One part of it I could not forget. It was with reference to preachers who turn aside from their holy calling to engage in secular pursuits, or in politics.

“It is turning away from angels’ food to feed on garbage. Think of spending a whole life in contemplating the grandest things, and working for the most glorious ends, instructing the ignorant, consoling the sorrowing, winning the wayward back to duty and to peace, pointing the dying to Him who is the light and the life of men, animating the living to seek from the highest motives a holy life and a sublime destiny! O it is a life that might draw an angel from the skies! If there is a special hell for fools, it should be kept for the man who turns aside from a life like this, to trade, or dig the earth, or wrangle in a court of law, or scramble for an office.”

He looked at me as he spoke, with flashing eyes and curled lip.

“That is all true and very fine, Judge, but it sounds just a little peculiar as coming from you.”

“I am the very man to say it, for I am the man who bitterly sees its truth. Do not make the misstep that I did. A man might well be willing to live on bread and water, and walk the world afoot, for the privilege of giving all his thoughts to the grandest themes, and all his service to the highest objects. As a lawyer, my life has been spent in a prolonged quarrel about money, land, houses; cattle, thieving, slandering, murdering, and other villainy. The little episodes of politics that have given variety to my career have only shown me the baseness of human nature, and the pettiness of human ambition. There are men who will fill these places and do this work, and who want and will choose nothing better. Let them have all the good they can get out of such things. But the minister of the gospel who comes down from the height of his high calling to engage in this scramble, does that which makes devils laugh and angels weep.”

This was the substance of what he said on this point. I have never forgotten it. I am glad he came to my room that night. What else he said I cannot write, but the remembrance of it is like to that of a melody that lingers in my soul when the music has ceased.

“I thank you for your sermon today—you never told a single lie.”

This was his remark at the close of a service in Minna street one Sunday.

“What is the meaning of that remark?”

That the exaggerations of the pulpit repel thousands from the truth. Moderation of statement is a rare excellence. A deep spiritual insight enables a religious teacher to shade his meanings where it is required. Deep piety is genius for the pulpit. Mediocrity in native endowments, conjoined with spiritual stolidity in the pulpit, does more harm than all the open apostles of infidelity combined. They take the divinity out of religion and kill the faith of those who hear them. None but inspired men should stand in the pulpit. Religion is not in the intellect merely. The world by wisdom cannot know God. The attempt to find out God by the intellect has always been, and always must be, the completest of failures. Religion is the sphere of the supernatural, and stands not in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God. It has often happened that men of the first order of talent and the highest culture have been converted by the preaching of men of weak intellect and limited education, but who were directly taught of God, and had drunk deep from the fount of living truth in personal experience of the blessed power of Christian faith. It was through the intellect that the devil seduced the first pair. When we rest in the intellect only, we miss God. With the heart only can man believe unto righteousness. The evidence that satisfies is based on consciousness. Consciousness is the satisfying demonstration.

“Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him. But God hath revealed them unto us by his Spirit. They can be revealed in no other way.”

Here was the secret he had learned, and that had brought a new joy and glory into his life as it neared the sunset. The great change dated from a dark and rainy night as he walked home in Sacramento City. Not more tangible to Saul of Tarsus was the vision, or more distinctly audible the voice that spoke to him on the way to Damascus, than was the revelation of Jesus Christ to this lawyer of penetrating intellect, large and varied reading, and sharp perception of human folly and weakness. It was a case of conversion in the fullest and divinest sense. He never fell from the wonder-world of grace to which he had been lifted. His youth seemed to be renewed, and his life had rebloomed, and its winter was turned into spring, under the touch of Him who maketh all things new. He was a new man, and he lived in a new world. He never failed to attend the class-meetings, and in his talks there the flashes of his genius set religious truths in new lights, and the little band of Methodists were treated to bursts of fervid eloquence, such as might kindle the listening thousands of metropolitan churches into admiration, or melt them into tears. On such occasions I could not help regretting anew that the world had lost what this man might have wrought had his path in life taken a different direction at the start. He died suddenly, and when in the city of Los Angeles I read the telegram announcing his death, I felt, mingled with the pain at the loss of a friend, exultation that before there was any reaction in his religious life his mighty soul had found a congenial home amid the supernal glories and sublime joys of the world of spirits. The moral of this man’s life will be seen by him for whom this imperfect Sketch has been penciled.