icial criticism Mr. Thompson's nature was not
picturesque nor lovable. His history, as imparted at dinner, one day, by
himself, was practical even in its singularity. After a hard and wilful
youth and maturity,--in which he had buried a broken-spirited wife, and
driven his son to sea,--he suddenly experienced religion. "I got it in
New Orleans in '59," said Mr. Thompson, with the general suggestion
of referring to an epidemic. "Enter ye the narrer gate. Parse me the
beans." Perhaps this practical quality upheld him in his apparently
hopeless search. He had no clew to the whereabouts of his runaway son;
indeed, scarcely a proof of his present existence. From his indifferent
recollection of the boy of twelve, he now expected to identify the man
of twenty-five.

It would seem that he was successful. How he succeeded was one of the
few things he did not tell. There are, I believe, two versions of the
story. One, that Mr. Thompson, visiting a hospital, discovered his son
by reason of a peculiar hymn, chanted by the sufferer, in a delirious
dream of his boyhood. This version, giving as it did wide range to the
finer feelings of the heart, was quite popular; and as told by the Rev.
Mr. Gushington, on his return from his California tour, never failed to
satisfy an audience. The other was less simple, and, as I shall adopt it
here, deserves more elaboration.

It was after Mr. Thompson had given up searching for his son among the
living, and had taken to the examination of cemeteries, and a careful
inspection of the "cold hic jacets of the dead." At this time he was a
frequent visitor of "Lone Mountain,"--a dreary hill-top, bleak enough in
its original isolation, and bleaker for the white-faced marbles by which
San Francisco anchored her departed citizens, and kept them down in
a shifting sand that refused to cover them, and against a fierce and
persistent wind that strove to blow them utterly away. Against this wind
the old man opposed a will quite as persistent,--a grizzled, hard face,
and a tall, crape-bound hat drawn tightly over his eyes,--and so spent
days in reading the mortuary inscriptions audibly to himself. The
frequency of Scriptural quotation pleased him, and he was fond of
corroborating them by a pocket Bible. "That's from Psalms," he said,
one day, to an adjacent grave-digger. The man made no reply. Not at all
rebuffed, Mr. Thompson at once slid down into the open grave, with a
more practical inquiry, "Did you eve