He could not stay long at a place, being a confirmed wanderer.  He left Sonora, and I lost sight of him.  Retaining. a very kindly feeling for this gentle-spirited and pleasant adventurer, I was loth thus to lose all trace of him.  Meeting a friend one day, on J Street, in the city of Sacramento, he said: 

“Your old friend D—­is at the Golden Eagle hotel.  You ought to go and see him.”

I went at once.  Ascending to the third story, I found his room, and, knocking at the door, a feeble voice bade me enter.  I was shocked at the spectacle that met my gaze.  Propped in an armchair in the middle of the room, wasted to a skeleton, and of a ghastly pallor, sat the unhappy man.  His eyes gleamed with an unnatural brightness, and his features wore a look of intense suffering.

“You have come too late, sir,” he said, before I had time to say a word.  “You can do me no good now.  I have been sitting in this chair three weeks.  I could not live a minute in any other position, Hell could not be worse than the tortures I have suffered!  I thank you for coming to see me, but you can do me no good—­none, none!”

He paused, panting for breath; and then he continued, in a soliloquizing way: 

“I played the fool, making a joke of what was no joking matter.  It is too late.  I can neither think nor pray, if praying would do any good.  I can only suffer, suffer, suffer!”

The painful interview soon ended.  To every cheerful or hopeful suggestion which I made he gave but the one reply: 

“Too late!”

The unspeakable anguish of his look, as his eyes followed me to the door, haunted me for many a day, and the echo of his words, “Too late!” lingered sadly upon my ear.  When I saw the announcement of his death, a few days afterward, I asked myself the solemn question, Whether I had dealt faithfully with this lighthearted, gifted man when he was within my reach.  His last rook is before me now, as I pencil these lines.

“John A—­is dying over on the Portrero, and his family wants you to go over and see him.”

It was while I was pastor in San Francisco.  A—­was a member of my Church, and lived on what was called the Portrero, in the southern part of the city, beyond the Long Bridge.  It was after night when I reached the little cottage on the slope above the bay.

“He is dying and delirious,” said a member of the family, as I entered the room where the sick man lay.  His wife, a woman of peculiar traits and great religious fervor, and a large number of children and grandchildren, were gathered in the dying man’s chamber and the adjoining rooms.  The sick man—­a man of large and powerful frame—­was restlessly tossing and roving his limbs, muttering incoherent words, with now and then a burst of uncanny laughter.  When shaken, he would open his eyes for an instant, make some meaningless ejaculation, and then they would close again.  The wife was very anxious that he should have a lucid interval while I was there.