“O Doctor, I am a wonder to myself!  It does seem to me that God has given back to me every good thing I possessed in the bright and blessed past.  It has all come back to me.  I see the light and feel the joy as I did when I first entered the new life.  O it is wonderful!  Doctor, God never gave me up, and I never ceased to yearn for his mercy and love, even in the darkest season of my unhappy life?”

His very face had recovered its old look, and his voice its old tone.  There could be no doubt of this soul had rebloomed in the life of God.

The last night came—­they sent for me with the message,

“Come quickly! he is dying.”

I found him with that look which I have seen on the faces of others who were nearing death—­a radiance and a rapture that awed the beholder.  O solemn, awful mystery of death!  I have stood in its presence in every form of terror and of sweetness, and in every case the thought has been impressed upon me that it was a passage into the Great Realities.

“Doctor,” he said, smiling, and holding my hand; “I had hoped to be with you in your office again, as in the old days—­not as a business arrangement, but just to be with you, and revive old memories, and to live the old life over again.  But that cannot be, and I must wait till we meet in the world of spirits, whither I go before you.  It seems to be growing dark.  I cannot see your face hold my hand.  I am going—­going.  I am on the waves—­on the waves—.”  The radiance was still upon his face, but the hand I held no longer clasped mine-the wasted form was still.  It was the end.  He was launched upon the Infinite Sea for the endless voyage.

The Emperor Norton.

That was his title.  He wore it with an air that was a strange mixture of the mock-heroic and the pathetic.  He was mad on this one point, and strangely shrewd and well-informed on almost every other.  Arrayed in a faded-blue uniform, with brass buttons and epaulettes, wearing a cocked-hat with an eagle’s feather, and at times with a rusty sword at his side, he was a conspicuous figure in the streets of San Francisco, and a regular habitue of all its public places.  In person he was stout, full-chested, though slightly stooped, with a large head heavily coated with bushy black hair, an aquiline nose, and dark gray eyes, whose mild expression added to the benignity of his face.  On the end of his nose grew a tuft of long hairs, which he seemed to prize as a natural mark of royalty, or chieftainship.  Indeed, there was a popular legend afloat that he was of true royal blood—­a stray Bourbon, or something of the sort.  His speech was singularly fluent and elegant.  The Emperor was one of the celebrities that no visitor failed to see.  It is said that his mind was unhinged by a sudden loss of fortune in the early days, by the treachery of a partner in trade.  The sudden blow was deadly, and the quiet, thrifty, affable man of business became a wreck.  By nothing is the inmost