songs. The angels of God
encamped with us last night, and they linger with us this morning. Tarry
with us, ye sinless ones, for this is heaven on earth!"

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