“What shall I do?  How can I live?  I have lost my all!  O!  O!  O!”

It was the dead man’s wife.  Significant glances and smiles were interchanged by the bystanders.  Approaching the carriage in which the woman was sitting, I laid my hand upon her arm, looked her in the face, and said: 

“Hush!”

She understood me, and not another sound did she utter.  Poor woman!  She was not perhaps as heartless as they thought she was.  There was at least a little remorse in those forced exclamations, when she thought of the dead man in the coffin; but her eyes were dry, and she stopped very short.

Another incident recurs to me that points in a different direction.  One day the most noted gambler in San Francisco called on me with the request that I should attend the funeral of one of his friends, who had died the night before.  A splendid-looking fellow was this knight of the faro-table.  More than six feet in height, with deep chest and perfectly rounded limbs, jet black hair, brilliant black eyes, clear olive complexion, and easy manners, he might have been taken for an Italian nobleman or a Spanish Don.  He had a tinge of Cherokee blood in his veins.  I have noticed that this cross of the white and Cherokee blood often results in producing this magnificent physical development.  I have known a number of women of this lineage, who were very queens in their beauty and carriage.  But this noted gambler was illiterate.  The only book of which he knew or cared much was one that had fifty-two pages, with twelve pictures.  If he had been educated, he might have handled the reins of government, instead of presiding over a nocturnal banking institution.

“Parson, can you come to number—­, on Kearney street, tomorrow at ten o’clock, and give us a few words and a prayer over a friend of mine, who died last night?”

I promised to be there, and he left.

His friend, like himself, had been a gambler.  He was from New York.  He was well educated, gentle in his manners, and a general favorite with the rough and desperate fellows with whom he associated, but with whom he seemed out of place.  The passion for gambling had put its terrible spell on him, and be was helpless in its grasp.  But though he mixed with the crowds that thronged the gambling-hells, he was one of them only in the absorbing passion for play.  There was a certain respect shown him by all that venturesome fraternity.  He went to Frazer River during the gold excitement.  In consequence of exposure and privation in that wild chase after gold, which proved fatal to so many eager adventurers, he contracted pulmonary disease, and came back to San Francisco to die.  He had not a dollar.  His gambler friend took charge of him, placed him in a good boarding-place, hired a nurse for him, and for nearly a year provided for all his wants.

Newton.