ears, 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.

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. B