I had marked his expressive physiognomy among my hearers in the little church in Sonora for some weeks before he made himself known to me.  As I learned afterward, he was weighing the young preacher in his critical balances.  He had a shrewd Scotch face, in which there was a mingling of keenness, benignity, and humor.  His age might be sixty, or it might be more.  He was an old bachelor, and wide guesses are sometimes made as to the ages of that class of men.  They may not live longer than married men, but they do not show the effects of life’s wear and tear so early.  He came to see us one evening.  He fell in love with the mistress of the parsonage, just as he ought to have done, and we were charmed with the quaint old bachelor.  There was a piquancy, a sharp flavor, in his talk that was delightful.  His aphorisms often crystallized a neglected truth in a form all his own.  He was an original character.  There was nothing commonplace about him.  He had his own way of saying and doing every thing.

Society in the mines was limited in that day, and we felt that we had found a real thesaurus in this old man of unique mold.  His visits were refreshing to us, and his plain-spoken criticisms were helpful to me.

He had left the Church because he did not agree with the preachers on some points of Christian ethics, and because they used tobacco.  But he was unhappy on the outside, and finding that my views and habits did not happen to cross his peculiar notions, he came back.  His religious experience was out of the common order.  Bred a Calvinist, of the good old Scotch-Presbyterian type, he had swung away from that faith, and was in danger of rushing into Universalism, or infidelity.  That once famous and much-read little book, “John Nelson’s Journal,” fell into his hands, and changed his whole life.  It led him to Christ, and to the Methodists.  He was a true spiritual child of the unflinching Yorkshire stone-cutter.  Like him he despised half-way measures, and like him he was aggressive in thought and action.  What he liked he loved, what he disliked he hated.  Calvinism he abhorred, and he let no occasion pass for pouring into it the hot shot of his scorn and wrath.  One night I preached from the text, Should it be according to thy mind?

“The first part of your sermon,” he said to me as we passed out of the church, “distressed me greatly.  For a full half hour you preached straight out Calvinism, and I thought you had ruined every thing; but you had left a little slip-gap, and crawled out at the last.”

His ideal of a minister of the gospel was Dr. Keener, whom he knew at New Orleans before coming to California.  He was the first man I ever heard mention Dr. Keener’s name for the episcopacy.  There was much in common between them.  If my eccentric California bachelor friend did not have as strong and cool a head, he had as brave and true a heart as the incisive and chivalrous Louisiana preacher, upon whose head the miter was placed by the suffrage of his brethren at Memphis in 1870.