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;