o himself as well as to the California public. The day
before he left for Washington City, I met him in the street, and as we
parted I held his hand a moment, and said:

"Your friends will watch your career with hope and with fear."

He knew what I meant, and said, quickly:

"I understand you. You are afraid that I will yield to my weakness for
strong drink. But you may be sure I will play the man, and California
shall have no cause to blush on my account."

That was his fatal weakness. No one, looking upon his pale, scholarly
face, and noting his faultlessly neat apparel, and easy, graceful
manners, would have thought of such a thing. Yet he was a--I falter in
writing it--a drunkard. At times he drank deeply and madly. When half
intoxicated he was almost as brilliant as Hamlet, and as rollicking as
Falstaff. It was said that even when fully drunk his splendid intellect
never entirely gave way.

"McDougall commands as much attention in the Senate when drunk as any
other Senator does when sober," said a Congressman in Washington in
1866. It is said that his great speech on the question of
"confiscation," at the beginning of the war, was delivered when he was
in a state of semi-intoxication. Be that as it may, it exhausted the
whole question, and settled the policy of the Government.

"No one will watch your senatorial career with more friendly interest
than myself; and if you will abstain wholly from all strong drink, we
shall all, be proud of you, I know."

"Not a drop will I touch, my friend; and I'll make you proud of me."

He spoke feelingly, and I think there was a moisture about his eye as he
pressed my hand and walked away.

I never saw him again. For the first few months he wrote to me often,
and then his letters came at longer intervals, and then they ceased. And
then the newspapers disclosed the shameful secret California's brilliant
Senator was a drunkard. The temptations of the Capital were too strong
for him. He went down into the black waters a complete wreck. He
returned to the old home of his boyhood in New Jersey to die. I learned
that he was lucid and penitent at the last. They brought his body back
to San Francisco to be buried, and when at his funeral the words "I know
that my Redeemer liveth," in clear soprano, rang through the vaulted
cathedral like a peal of triumph, I indulged the hope that the spirit of
my gifted and fated friend had, through the mercy of the Friend of
sinners, gone fro