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.