California Sketches, Second Series | Page 9

willing to talk with you, sir, and appreciate your motive, but I
understand my situation. I have committed the unpardonable sin, and I

know there is no hope for me."
With the earnestness excited by intense sympathy, I combated her
conclusion, and felt certain that I could make her see and feel that she
had given way to an illusion. She listened respectfully to all I had to
say, and then said again:
"I know my situation. I denied my Saviour after all his goodness to me,
and he has left me forever."
There was the frozen calmness of utter despair in look and tone. I left
her as I found her.
"I will introduce you to another woman, the opposite of the poor lady
you have just seen. She thinks she is a queen, and is perfectly harmless.
You must be careful to humor her illusion. There she is--let me present
you."
She was a woman of immense size, enormously fat, with broad red face,
and a self-satisfied smirk, dressed in some sort of flaming scarlet stuff,
profusely tinseled all over, making a gorgeously ridiculous effect. She
received me with a mixture of mock dignity and smiling condescension,
and surveying herself admiringly, she asked:
"How do you like my dress?"
It was not the first time that royalty had shown itself not above the little
weaknesses of human nature. On being told that her apparel was indeed
magnificent, she was much pleased, and drew herself up proudly, and
was a picture of ecstatic vanity. Are the real queens as happy? When
they lay aside their royal robes for their grave clothes, will not the
pageantry which was the glory of their lives seem as vain as that of this
tinseled queen of the mad-house? Where is happiness, after all? Is it in
the circumstances, the external conditions? or, is it in the mind? Such
were the thoughts passing through my mind, when a man approached
with a violin. Every eye brightened, and the queen seemed to thrill with
pleasure in every nerve.
"This is the only way we can get some of them to take any exercise.
The music rouses them, and they will dance as long as they are
permitted to do so."
The fiddler struck up a lively tune, and the queen, with marvelous
lightness of step and ogling glances, ambled up to a tall, raw-boned
Methodist preacher, who had come with me, and invited him to dance
with her. The poor parson seemed sadly embarrassed, as her manner

was very pressing, but he awkwardly and confusedly declined, amid the
titters of all present. It was a singular spectacle, that dance of the
mad-women. The most striking figure on the floor was the queen. Her
great size, her brilliant apparel, her astonishing agility, the perfect time
she kept, the bows, the smiles and blandishments, she bestowed on an
imaginary partner, were indescribably ludicrous. Now and then, in her
evolutions, she would cast a momentary reproachful glance at the
ungallant clergyman who had refused to dance with feminine royalty,
and who stood looking on with a sheepish expression of face. He was a
Kentuckian, and lack of gallantry is not a Kentucky trait.
During the session of the Annual Conference at Stockton, in 1859 or
1860, the resident physician invited me to preach to the inmates of the
Asylum on Sunday afternoon. The novelty of the service, which was
announced in the daily papers, attracted a large number of visitors,
among them the greater part of the preachers. The day was one of those
bright, clear, beautiful October days, peculiar to California, that make
you think of heaven. I stood on the steps, and the hundreds of men and
Women stood below me, with their upturned faces. Among them were
old men crushed by sorrow, and old men ruined by vice; aged women
with faces that seemed to plead for pity, women that made you shrink
from their unwomanly gaze; lion-like young men, made for heroes but
caught in the devil's trap and changed into beasts; and boys whose
looks showed that sin had already stamped them with its foul insignia,
and burned into their souls the shame which is to be one of the
elements of its eternal punishment. A less impressible man than I
would have felt moved at the sight of that throng of bruised and broken
creatures. A hymn was read, and when Burnet, Kelsay, Neal, and others
of the preachers, struck up an old tune, voice after voice joined in the
melody until it swelled into a mighty volume of sacred song. I noticed
that the faces of many were wet with tears, and there was an
indescribable pathos in their voices. The pitying God, amid the
rapturous hallelujahs of the heavenly hosts, bent to