“There was a man,” he would say, “at work on a scaffold of a four-story building in Cincinnati. The scaffolding gave way, and he fell those four stories, and one besides, down into the cellar. Fifteen minutes thereafter he was up again, uninjured, at his work. A week afterward he was walking in front of Alf Burnett’s saloon, stepped on a watermelon-rind, fell, broke his neck, and died instantly.” The narrator would never vouchsafe any explanation. When his hearer, making an application for himself, would accuse our philosopher of fatalism, he would only smile good-naturedly, and go about his duties. It must, indeed, have been a dull penetration that could see nothing better in the old fellow’s story,--especially under the every-day commentary of his uncomplaining life. And I am glad to say others put this larger interpretation upon him and his philosophy, that his own misfortunes had taught him, more than his story, the ways of God are inscrutable; that He is all in all, and that, high or low, successful or broken, we are all alike in His merciful hands. Scarcely three years ago I saw my old friend for the last time. We met in the street at San Francisco, where he then lived, and where he has since died. How well he was known and loved there was in some measure attested by the honorable manner of his burial. There are few printers, at least, in the metropolis of the Pacific who will not remember him, although they may have known nothing more of his personal history than that he was the veteran _attaché_ of Calhoun’s job-rooms. Whatever the straits to which his peculiar misfortune brought him, he never lost that indescribable dignity and courtesy which were a part of his heritage as a born gentleman. Poor old John McCreary! he would have written a better obituary of me than this, and published it in his Palace Journal, if I had chanced to get knocked on the head in some of the riots and perilous fights which we witnessed together at those lawless backwoods landings. * * * * * And this brings me back again to Governor Dorr, who was sore in the face, and more especially in the feelings, for some time after his disastrous attempt to reason with the excited spirits of that Kentucky audience. He could not bear, with any degree of equanimity, the slightest allusion to the day of the marriage in the museum. I cannot remember exactly when the Governor left the Palace, or why, as he was, I have already intimated, ever one of the company. I lean to the opinion that the manager, or his right-hand man, the once famous Van Orden of Dan Rice’s satirical song, kept him on board to be amused by his conversation.