sm. Nature had
denied him no gift of body or mind requisite to success in life; but
there was a fatal weakness in his moral constitution. He was an
inveterate gambler, his large professional earnings going into the
coffers of the faro and monte dealers. His violations of good morals in
other respects were flagrant. He worked hard by day, and gave himself up
to his vices at night. Public opinion was not very exacting in those
days, and his failings were condoned by a people who respected force and
pluck, and made no close inquiries into a man's private life, because it
would have been no easy thing to find one who, on the score of
innocence, was entitled to cast the first stone. Thus he lived from year
to year, increasing his reputation as a lawyer of marked ability, and as
a politician whose eloquence in every campaign was a tower of strength
to his party. His fame spread until it filled the State, and his money
still fed his vices. He never drank, and that cool, keen intellect never
lost its balance, or failed him in any encounter on the hustings on at
the bar. I often met him in public, but he never was known to go inside
a church. Once, when in a street conversation I casually made some
reference to religion, a look of displeasure passed over his face, and
he abruptly left me. I was agreeably surprised when, on more than one
occasion, he sent me a substantial token of goodwill, but I was never
able to analyze the motive that prompted him to do so. This remembrance
softens the feelings with which these lines are penciled. He went to San
Francisco, but there was no change in his life.

"It is the old story," said an acquaintance of whom I made inquiry
concerning him: "he has a large and lucrative practice, and the gamblers
get all he makes. He is getting gray, and he is failing a little. He is
a strange being."

It happened afterward that his office and mine were in the same building
and on the same floor. As we met on the stairs, he would nod to me and
pass on. I noticed that he was indeed "failing." He looked-weary and
sad, and the cold or defiant gleam in his steel-gray eyes, was changed
into a wistful and painful expression that was very pathetic. I did not
dare to invade his reserve with any tender of sympathy. Joyless and
hopeless as he might be, I felt instinctively that he would play out his
drama alone. Perhaps this was a mistake on my part: he may have been
hungry for the word I did not speak. God knows. I w