m his boyhood hills up to the hills of God.

The typical California politician was Coffroth. The "boys" fondly called
him "Jim" Coffroth. There is no surer sign of popularity than a popular
abbreviation of this sort, unless it is a pet nickname. Coffroth was
from Pennsylvania, where he had gained an inkling of polities and
general literature. He gravitated into California polities by the law of
his nature. He was born for this, having what a friend calls the gift of
popularity. His presence was magnetic; his laugh was contagious; his
enthusiasm irresistible. Nobody ever thought of taking offense at Jim
Coffroth. He could change his politics with impunity without losing a
friend--he never had a personal enemy; but I believe he only made that
experiment once. He went off with the Know-nothings in 1855, and was
elected by them to the State Senate, and was called to preside over
their State Convention. He hastened back to his old party associates,
and at the first convention that met in his county on his return from
the Legislature, he rose and told them how lonesome he had felt while
astray from the old fold, how glad he was to get back, and how humble he
felt, concluding by advising all his late supporters to do as he had
done by taking "a straight chute" for the old party. He ended amid a
storm of applause, was reinstated at once, and was made President of the
next Democratic State Convention. There he was in his glory. His tact
and good humor were infinite, and he held those hundreds of excitable
and explosive men in the hollow of his hand. He would dismiss a
dangerous motion with a witticism so apt that the mover himself would
join in the laugh, and give it up. His broad face in repose was that of
a Quaker, at other times that of a Bacchus. There was a religious streak
in this jolly partisan, and he published several poems that breathed the
sweetest and loftiest religious sentiment. The newspapers were a little
disposed to make a joke of these ebullitions of devotional feeling, but
they now make the light that casts a gleam of brightness upon the
background of his life. I take from an old volume of the Christian
Spectator one of these poems as a literary curiosity. Every man lives
two lives. The rollicking politician, "Jim Coffroth," every Californian
knew; the author of these lines was another man by the same name:

Amid the Silence of the Night. "Behold, he that keepeth Israel shall
neither slumber nor sleep." Psalm