lf and his increasing wealth to this
one object; it seemed to him at times almost providential that his
position as a legislator, which he had accepted as a whim or fancy,
should have given him this singular opportunity.

Yet it was not an easy task or an enviable position. He was obliged to
divorce himself from his political party as well as keep clear of the
wild schemes of impractical enthusiasts, too practical "contractors,"
and the still more helpless bigotry of Christian civilizers, who would
have regenerated the Indian with a text which he did not understand
and they were unable to illustrate by example. He had expected the
opposition of lawless frontiersmen and ignorant settlers--as roughly
indicated in the conversation already recorded; indeed he had felt
it difficult to argue his humane theories under the smoking roof of
a raided settler's cabin, whose owner, however, had forgotten his
own repeated provocations, or the trespass of which he was proud. But
Atherly's unaffected and unobtrusive zeal, his fixity of purpose,
his undoubted courage, his self-abnegation, and above all the gentle
melancholy and half-philosophical wisdom of this new missionary, won
him the respect and assistance of even the most callous or the most
skeptical of officials. The Secretary of the Interior had given him
carte blanche; the President trusted him, and it was said had granted
him extraordinary powers. Oddly enough it was only his own Californian
constituency, who had once laughed at what they deemed his early
aristocratic pretensions, who now found fault with his democratic
philanthropy. That a man who had been so well received in England--the
news of his visit to Ashley Grange had been duly recorded--should sink
so low as "to take up with the Injins" of his own country galled their
republican pride. A few of his personal friends regretted that he had
not brought back from England more conservative and fashionable graces,
and had not improved his opportunities. Unfortunately there was no
essentially English policy of trusting aborigines that they knew of.

In his gloomy self-scrutiny he had often wondered if he ought not to
openly proclaim his kinship with the despised race, but he was always
deterred by the thought of his sister and her husband, as well as by the
persistent doubt whether his advocacy of Indian rights with his fellow
countrymen would be as well served by such a course. And here again he
was perplexed by a singul