doubtful if the shame of a public arrest and legal
punishment would have impressed his youthful spirit as much as did this
spiritual examination and trial, in which he himself became accuser.
Howbeit, its effect, though punitive, was also exemplary. He at once
cast off his evil companions; remaining faithful to his conversion, in
spite of their later "backslidings." When, after the Western fashion,
the time came for him to forsake his father's farm and seek a new
"quarter section" on some more remote frontier, he carried into that
secluded, lonely, half-monkish celibacy of pioneer life--which has been
the foundation of so much strong Western character--more than the usual
religious feeling. At once industrious and adventurous, he lived by "the
Word," as he called it, and Nature as he knew it,--tempted by none of
the vices or sentiments of civilization. When he finally joined the
Californian emigration, it was not as a gold-seeker, but as a discoverer
of new agricultural fields; if the hardship was as great and the rewards
fewer, he nevertheless knew that he retained his safer isolation and
independence of spirit. Vice and civilization were to him synonymous
terms; it was the natural condition of the worldly and unregenerate.
Such was the man who chanced to meet "Nell Montgomery, the Pearl of the
Variety Stage," on the Sacramento boat, in one of his forced visits
to civilization. Without knowing her in her profession, her frank
exposition of herself did not startle him; he recognized it, accepted
it, and strove to convert it. And as long as this daughter of Folly
forsook her evil ways for him, it was a triumph in which there was no
shame, and might be proclaimed from the housetop. When his neighbors
thought differently, and avoided them, he saw no inconsistency in
bringing his wife's old friends to divert her: she might in time convert
THEM. He had no more fear of her returning to their ways than he had
of himself "backsliding." Narrow as was his creed, he had none of the
harshness nor pessimism of the bigot. With the keenest self-scrutiny,
his credulity regarding others was touching.

The storm was still raging when he alighted that evening from the up
coach at the trail nearest his house. Although incumbered with a
heavy carpet-bag, he started resignedly on his two-mile tramp without
begrudging the neighborly act of his wife which had deprived him of
his horse. It was "like her" to do these things in her good-humored
a