Page:A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains (1879).djvu/326

 cited with deep feeling. It was altogether very quiet and peaceful. He repeated to me several poems of great merit which he had composed, and told me much more about his life. I knew that no one else could or would speak to him as I could, and for the last time I urged upon him the necessity of a reformation in his life, beginning with the giving up of whisky, going so far as to tell him that I despised a man of his intellect for being a slave to such a vice. "Too late! too late!" he always answered, "for such a change." Ay, too late. He shed tears quietly. "It might have been once," he said. Ay, might have been. He has excellent sense for every one but himself, and, as I have seen him with a single exception, a gentleness, propriety, and considerateness of manner surprising in any man, but especially so in a man associating only with the rough men of the West. As I looked at him, I felt a pity such as I never before felt for a human being. My thought at the moment was, Will not our Father in heaven, "who spared not His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all," be far more pitiful? For the time a desire for self-respect, better aspirations, and even hope itself, entered his dark life; and he said, suddenly, that he had made up his mind to give up whisky and his reputation as a desperado. But it is "too late." A little before twelve the dance was over, and I got to the crowded little bedroom, which