346 WILD SCENES AND WILD HUNTERS. 



"When we would reproduce for other wayfarers the lessons 

 vouchsafed to us, how, in what better way can it be done, than 

 by dragging from under the broken seals of the past, that 

 deep-lined imagery, in the array God stamped it on our life, 

 that brother souls may regard it. 



Perhaps they, too, may see the miracle, and be moved by 

 it as we have been. Though a thousand eyes might look on the 

 same facts, and sneer that you talk of Gro d ! yet there are 

 those with the " gift and faculty divine" who know when to 

 sneer wisely, if they sneer at all ! Such will understand us, 

 when we aver that faith can find "the evidence of things 

 unseen" only as it is mated with the actual. How can it be 

 thought or expressed otherwise ? This necessity for the actual, 

 is the true old Pantheistic element, though modern ethics 

 will be gravely horrified by the profane juxtaposition ! The 

 elder Penates were things, ours are words ; but not the less 

 things for all that, if they be sacred. 



But though this be a "bear story," why may it not convey 

 a lesson of higher import and severer teaching than the name 

 would promise ? Why may it not be made to trace and 

 arrange the progress of incidents which led to a new birth of 

 the spiritual life within me ? Which taught me, raving doubter 

 that I was, through the simplest and most natural means 

 curiously enough presented, indeed that first and most sublime 

 of truths ^-GoD is ! Which has linked the " pathless desola- 

 tion" and " the lowly instrument" forever with my memories 

 of adoring gratitude, of love and awe, and left them to me, 

 the sentient demonstrations, strong as proof of Holy Writ, of a 

 benevolent and active Providence wielding appreciable laws 

 inscrutably on my behalf ! But to return to my narrative. 



A solitary and perilous journey brought me to San Antonio 

 de Bexar, then the extreme frontier post of Texas. On my 

 arrival, I found the company of reckless scamps who called 

 themselves Bangers, and made this old town their head- 



