On another occasion, some years afterwards, when I was Judge of the Supreme Court of the State and he was the clerk of the court, there was a good deal of complaint against Harvey Lee, the reporter of the court, who was appointed to the office by Governor Weller.  I believe that Lee was instrumental, but of this I am not certain, in getting a law passed which took the appointment of the reporter from the court and gave it to the Governor.  He was an inferior lawyer, and, of course, had very little practice.  The appointment, therefore, to which a fair salary was attached, was eagerly sought by him.  His reports, however, were so defective that an effort was made by the judges to get the law repealed and have the appointment restored to the court.  This led to a bitter feeling on his part towards the judges, and in a conversation with Mr. Fairfax he gave vent to it in violent language.  Mr. Fairfax resented the attack and an altercation ensued, when Lee, who carried a sword-cane, drew the sword and ran it into Fairfax’s body.  Fortunately it entered the chest above the heart.  Withdrawing the sword Lee made a second lunge at Fairfax, which the latter partially avoided so as to receive only a flesh wound in the side.  By this time Fairfax had drawn his pistol and covered the body of Lee, as he was raising his sword for a third thrust.  Lee, seeing the pistol, stepped back and threw up his arms exclaiming, “I am unarmed”—­though he had only that moment withdrawn his sword from the body of Fairfax, and it was then dripping with blood.  “Shoot the damned scoundrel,” cried the latter’s friend, Samuel B. Smith, then standing by his side.  But Fairfax did not shoot.  Looking at Lee, whose body was covered with his pistol, while the blood was trickling from his own person, he said, “You are an assassin! you have murdered me!  I have you in my power! your life is in my hands!” And gazing on him, he added, “But for the sake of your poor sick wife and children I will spare you.”  He thereupon uncocked his pistol and handed it to his friend, into whose arms he fell fainting.  He had known the wife of Lee when a young girl; and, afterwards, in speaking of the affair to a friend, he said, “I thought my wife would be a widow before sundown, and I did not wish to leave the world making another.”  All California rang with the story of this heroic act.  It has its parallel only in the self-abnegation of the dying hero on the battle-field, who put away from his parched lips the cup of water tendered to him, and directed that it be given to a wounded soldier suffering in agony by his side, saying, “His need is greater than mine.”

During the war his sympathies, as was the case with most Southerners in California, were with his people in Virginia.  He told me on one occasion that he could not but wish they would succeed; but, he said; “Though I am a Virginian by birth, I have adopted California, and whilst I live in a State which has taken her stand with the Northern people, I cannot in honor do anything, and I will not, to weaken her attachment to the Union.  If my health were good I should leave the State and return to Virginia and give my services to her; but, as that is impossible, I shall remain in California, and, whilst here, will not be false to her by anything I do or say.”