Perhaps to superficial criticism Mr. Thompson’s nature was not picturesque nor lovable.  His history, as imparted at dinner, one day, by himself, was practical even in its singularity.  After a hard and wilful youth and maturity,—­in which he had buried a broken-spirited wife, and driven his son to sea,—­he suddenly experienced religion.  “I got it in New Orleans in ’59,” said Mr. Thompson, with the general suggestion of referring to an epidemic.  “Enter ye the narrer gate.  Parse me the beans.”  Perhaps this practical quality upheld him in his apparently hopeless search.  He had no clew to the whereabouts of his runaway son; indeed, scarcely a proof of his present existence.  From his indifferent recollection of the boy of twelve, he now expected to identify the man of twenty-five.

It would seem that he was successful.  How he succeeded was one of the few things he did not tell.  There are, I believe, two versions of the story.  One, that Mr. Thompson, visiting a hospital, discovered his son by reason of a peculiar hymn, chanted by the sufferer, in a delirious dream of his boyhood.  This version, giving as it did wide range to the finer feelings of the heart, was quite popular; and as told by the Rev. Mr. Gushington, on his return from his California tour, never failed to satisfy an audience.  The other was less simple, and, as I shall adopt it here, deserves more elaboration.

It was after Mr. Thompson had given up searching for his son among the living, and had taken to the examination of cemeteries, and a careful inspection of the “cold hic jacets of the dead.”  At this time he was a frequent visitor of “Lone Mountain,”—­a dreary hill-top, bleak enough in its original isolation, and bleaker for the white-faced marbles by which San Francisco anchored her departed citizens, and kept them down in a shifting sand that refused to cover them, and against a fierce and persistent wind that strove to blow them utterly away.  Against this wind the old man opposed a will quite as persistent,—­a grizzled, hard face, and a tall, crape-bound hat drawn tightly over his eyes,—­and so spent days in reading the mortuary inscriptions audibly to himself.  The frequency of Scriptural quotation pleased him, and he was fond of corroborating them by a pocket Bible.  “That’s from Psalms,” he said, one day, to an adjacent grave-digger.  The man made no reply.  Not at all rebuffed, Mr. Thompson at once slid down into the open grave, with a more practical inquiry, “Did you ever, in your profession, come across Char-les Thompson?” “Thompson be d——­d!” said the grave-digger, with great directness.  “Which, if he hadn’t religion, I think he is,” responded the old man, as he clambered out of the grave.