Page:California Inter Pocula.djvu/805

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.

I

A COXA' ERTED SINNER. 793

A go(7d doctor helped him through, however, and in time he was convalescent. Then with returning appetite, how he thought of home, and longed for somethino; from his mother's table!

Discharged at last, he walked, or rather, crawled, one morning into the city, ragged, dirty, and without a dollar in money. After walking about some time, weak and fainting, he seated himself upon a step. Matters were getting serious with him. He was not yet fit for work, although he was well enough to leave the hospital; but to earn or make or get his dinner and a place to sleep, he had not the remotest idea how or where. Fortune now smiled on him in a way he least expected. Seated thus, he saw crossing the street one he should know. Could it be possible, Caleb Anderson, his old friend and college mate? *'Cabe!" he shouted. The man turned and looked at him, looked earnestly. He saw it all. Dress, feature, attitude—what volumes were written there to the friend who could read them! Approaching his old comrade, he lifted him up, and drawing his arm within his own he led him away, speaking scarcely a word. The meeting of friends, often under circumstances the most peculiar, each of whom had come to California unknown to the other, if told upon the pages of fiction would be pronounced improbable. Prudon's troubles were over, and he was soon in a position to help others, as he had been helped.

A godless gold-digger strolled into a new methodist church at Forest City one Sunday, and after gazing listlessly about for some time, his attention was at length arrested by the story which the minister told of a miner who had miraculously escaped death on fallino; into a shaft while in a state of intoxication. So impressed was this man by a sense of the danger he had escaped that he immediately sought religion and found it.

"After sitting one hour on the repentant's seat