He paused, with extended arm, gazing upward entranced.  The scene that, followed beggars description.  By a simultaneous impulse all rose to their feet and pressed toward the speaker with awestruck faces, and when Grandmother Bucker, the matriarch of the valley, with luminous face and uplifted eyes, broke into a shout, it swelled into a melodious hurricane that shook the very hills.  He ought to have been a preacher.  So he said to me once: 

“I felt the impulse and heard the call in my early manhood.  I conferred with flesh and blood, and was disobedient to the heavenly vision.  I have had some little success at the bar, on the hustings, and in legislative halls, but how paltry has it been in comparison with the true life and high career that might have been mine!”

He was from the hill-country of North Carolina, and its flavor clung to him to the last.  He had his gloomy moods, but his heart was fresh as a Blue Ridge breeze in May, and his wit bubbled forth like a mountain-spring.  There was no bitterness in his satire.  The very victim of his thrust enjoyed the keenness of the stroke, for there was no poison in the weapon.  At times he seemed inspired, and you thrilled, melted, and soared, under the touches of this Western Coleridge.  He came to my room at the Golden Eagle, in Sacramento City, one night, and left at two o’clock in the morning.  He walked the floor and talked, and it was the grandest monologue I ever listened to.  One part of it I could not forget.  It was with reference to preachers who turn aside from their holy calling to engage in secular pursuits, or in politics.

“It is turning away from angels’ food to feed on garbage.  Think of spending a whole life in contemplating the grandest things, and working for the most glorious ends, instructing the ignorant, consoling the sorrowing, winning the wayward back to duty and to peace, pointing the dying to Him who is the light and the life of men, animating the living to seek from the highest motives a holy life and a sublime destiny!  O it is a life that might draw an angel from the skies!  If there is a special hell for fools, it should be kept for the man who turns aside from a life like this, to trade, or dig the earth, or wrangle in a court of law, or scramble for an office.”

He looked at me as he spoke, with flashing eyes and curled lip.

“That is all true and very fine, Judge, but it sounds just a little peculiar as coming from you.”

“I am the very man to say it, for I am the man who bitterly sees its truth.  Do not make the misstep that I did.  A man might well be willing to live on bread and water, and walk the world afoot, for the privilege of giving all his thoughts to the grandest themes, and all his service to the highest objects.  As a lawyer, my life has been spent in a prolonged quarrel about money, land, houses; cattle, thieving, slandering, murdering, and other villainy.  The little episodes of politics that have given variety