“Henry, were you ever a slave?”

“Yes, sah; in Mizzoory,” said Henry, showing his white teeth.

“Did you ever get your free-papers?”

“Yes, sah—­got ’em now.”

“Well, I have got mine—­let’s shake hands.”

And the Bishop and Henry had quite a handshaking over this mutual experience.  Henry enjoyed it greatly, as his frequent chucklings evinced while the Judge’s fine bays were trotting along the Alameda.

(I linger on the word Alameda as I write it.  It is at least one beneficent trace of the early Jesuit Fathers who founded the San Jose and Santa Clara missions a hundred years ago.  They planted an avenue of willows the entire three miles, and in that rich, moist soil the trees have grown until their trunks are of enormous size, and their branches, overarching the highway with their dense shade, make a drive of unequaled beauty and pleasantness.  The horse-cars have now taken away much of its romance, but in the early days it was famous for moonlight drives and their concomitants and consequences.  A long-limbed four-year-old California colt gave me a romantic touch of a different sort, nearly the last time I was on the Alameda, by running away with the buggy, and breaking it and me—­almost—­to pieces.  I am reminded of it by the pain in my crippled right-shoulder as I write these lines in July, 1881.  But still I say, Blessings on the memory of the Fathers who planted the willows on the Alameda!)

An intimation was given the Bishop that if he wanted the name of the false-swearer who had caused him to be arrested he could have it.

“No, I don’t want to know his name,” said he; “it will do me no good to know it.  May God pardon his sin, as I do most heartily!”

A really strong preacher preaches a great many sermons, each of which the hearers claim to be the greatest sermon of his life.  I have heard of at least a half dozen “greatest” sermons by Bascom and Pierce, and other noted pulpit orators.  But I heard one sermon by Kavanaugh that was probably indeed his master-effort.  It had a history.  When the Bishop started to Oregon, in 1863, I placed in his hands Bascom’s Lectures, which, strange to say, he had never read.  Of these Lectures the elder Dr. Bond said “they would be the colossal pillars of Bascom’s fame when his printed sermons were forgotten.”  Those Lectures wonderfully anticipated the changing phases of the materialistic infidelity developed since his day, and applied to them the reductio ad absurdum with relentless and resistless power.  On his return from Oregon, Kavanaugh met and presided over the Annual Conference at San Jose.  One of his old friends, who was troubled with skeptical thoughts of the materialistic sort, requested him to preach a sermon for his special benefit.  This request, and the previous reading of the Lectures, directed his mind to the topic suggested with intense earnestness.  The result was, as I shall always think, the sermon of a lifetime.