terms; it was the natural condition of the worldly and unregenerate.
Such was the man who chanced to meet "Nell Montgomery, the Pearl of the
Variety Stage," on the Sacramento boat, in one of his forced visits
to civilization. Without knowing her in her profession, her frank
exposition of herself did not startle him; he recognized it, accepted
it, and strove to convert it. And as long as this daughter of Folly
forsook her evil ways for him, it was a triumph in which there was no
shame, and might be proclaimed from the housetop. When his neighbors
thought differently, and avoided them, he saw no inconsistency in
bringing his wife's old friends to divert her: she might in time convert
THEM. He had no more fear of her returning to their ways than he had
of himself "backsliding." Narrow as was his creed, he had none of the
harshness nor pessimism of the bigot. With the keenest self-scrutiny,
his credulity regarding others was touching.

The storm was still raging when he alighted that evening from the up
coach at the trail nearest his house. Although incumbered with a
heavy carpet-bag, he started resignedly on his two-mile tramp without
begrudging the neighborly act of his wife which had deprived him of
his horse. It was "like her" to do these things in her good-humored
abstraction, an abstraction, however, that sometimes worried him, from
the fear that it indicated some unhappiness with her present lot. He was
longing to rejoin her after his absence of three days, the longest time
they had been separated since their marriage, and he hurried on with
a certain lover-like excitement, quite new to his usually calm and
temperate blood.

Struggling with the storm and darkness, but always with the happy
consciousness of drawing nearer to her in that struggle, he labored on,
finding his perilous way over the indistinguishable trail by certain