Briefly, misfortune had brought him to despair, and well nigh unsettled reason. Hard-hearted treatment had filled him with hatred to his kind. He had even been tempted to self-destruction, and later to commit robbery. His brain, as he expressed it, was "all in a whirl, and his heart hard as stone." "Ah," said I, "you have been all wrong in your feelings—you have neglected one thing most needful for you in your circumstances." "What is that?" he asked. "It is that which your sainted wife found help in,—'prayer.' I also have seen sorrow, and have found it an unfailing refuge." "Oh," said he, vehemently, "that I could pray!" Commending to him the case of the publican and the thief on the cross, I added, "One anciently said, 'I am poor and needy, yet "the Lord" thinketh upon me!' If you seek him, he will be found of you, he will sustain you. And he will hear your cries, and open before you, I doubt not, a door of deliverance as it regards your temporal necessities. Will you not thus go to him and trust him?" Then advising him to keep away from the miasma of the Mississippi and from the large towns, and seek a shelter till he was well among the kind-hearted prairie farmers, and placing in his hand something to help him on his way, we parted. —————— "That's a dangerous operation," said one, passing, as some months after the incidents just narrated I chanced at a village fifty miles inland, and stood watching a group of men engaged in raising a "liberty pole." It was of great height, and no little enthusiasm attended its erection, for the place had just been made the county-seat, after a spirited contest with rival aspirants for the honor. Being a stranger I could share little in the general joy, but was more concerned for the lives of those who pulled at the ropes by which the huge piece of timber was being elevated, than for the future of the town. Awkwardly enough, it seemed to me, was the raising managed by the gray-haired leader of the enterprise, and as the pole swayed now this way, now that, I shuddered. But a sudden "hurrah" told that the feat was accomplished and I was turning away relieved, when a man touched me, and said,— "Excuse me, sir, but I believe we have met before." It was my stranger acquaintance of the Landing. I had observed him, as among the most active in the raising; but in his new garb and new bearing did not recognize him. I had no time to reply to his greeting, ere he grasped my hand and said, tearfully,— "I took your advice and have been prospered—been blessed;" and, pointing to a building just in sight, "there's my shop—I am a saved man!"