Part 11

"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.