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.