a rush of recollections that had been long forgotten, of actions
good and bad, the latter seeming the most, hurried, serried, but
distinct through my excited brain; then a thought, bringing a calm
content, that "To every man upon this earth death cometh soon or late;"
and with a fervent resignation of myself to God and to what I believed
to be inevitable; then a lull in the wind, and, after many attempts, we
were able to cross the mouth of the river to the other side--the place
of destination.

In 1869 I left Queen Charlotte Island and returned to Victoria; settled
my business preparatory to joining my family, then at Oberlin, Ohio. It
was not without a measure of regret that I anticipated my departure.
There I had lived more than a decade; where the geniality of the climate
was excelled only by the graciousness of the people; there unreservedly
the fraternal grasp of brotherhood; there I had received social and
political recognition; there my domestic ties had been intensified by
the birth of my children, a warp and woof of consciousness that time
cannot obliterate. Then regret modified, as love of home and country
asserted itself.

"Breathes there a man with soul so dead
Who never to himself hath said:
'This is my native land'--
Whose heart has not within him burned
As homeward footsteps he has turned
From wandering on a foreign strand?"

En route my feelings were peculiar. A decade had passed, fraught with
momentous results in the history of the nation. I had left California
disfranchised and my oath denied in a "court of justice" (?); left my
country to all appearances enveloped in a moral gloom so dense as to
shut out the light of promise for a better civil and political status.
The star of hope glimmered but feebly above the horizon of contumely and
oppression, prophetic of the destruction of slavery and the
enfranchisement of the freedman. I was returning, and on touch of my
country's soil to have a new baptism through the all-pervading genius of
universal liberty. I had left politically ignoble; I was returning
panoplied with the nobility of an American citizen. Hitherto regarded as
a pariah, I had neither rejoiced at its achievement nor sorrowed for
its adversity; now every patriotic pulse beat quicker and heart throb
warmer, on realization that my country gave constitutional guarantee for
the common enjoyment of political and civil liberty, equality before the
law--inspiri