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.