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.