346 WILD SCENES AND WILD HUNTERS. 
Wher 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 God! 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—Gop 1s! 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 Rangers, and made this old town their head- 
