Page:The Overland Monthly, volume 1, issue 1.djvu/38



F in the following story, practical men should be disappointed at finding a vague hinting at a scientific process and only an imperfect sketch of a scientific experiment, I have no explanation or apology to offer. The story is told for the purpose of interesting the reader in the career of a man who was never well understood, and not to illustrate any principle of science. I have a very dim idea of the value of the experiments in chemistry in which the interest of my little sketch chiefly centres, and must disclaim in advance all attempt to give the reader any scientific information whatever.

With the earlier rush of emigration to the State of California, there arrived at Sacramento, then a straggling town of huts and tents, John Barnard, a young physician, full of enthusiasm and hungry for excitement. The young man with his wife, who had but just left her father's home for her husband's, had sailed for California, satisfied that if his excellent qualifications as a medical man brought him no employment, he could turn his ready hand to any of the various callings which the unsettled condition of things in the new El Dorado would be sure to develop and require.

Barnard was a frank, genial young fellow, and I very well remember our first meeting, at which he directly impressed me with his peculiarly winning and attractive manner. He was compactly built, with a broad, roomy forehead, clear-cut but rounded features, a pleasant, mobile mouth, and was gifted, withal, with a magnetic manner of address that was generally considered irresistible, even by matter-of-fact people. As the reader may not be able, otherwise, to understand some things which I want to tell him about my friend Barnard, I desire to give a tolerably minute description of the young physician, whose career afterwards attracted much attention in the State.

I have said that he was frank and direct in his manner, and so he was; yet there was with all his frankness an undefined and dreamy abstraction at times that seemed very much like the air of a mystic. You felt that there was a vein of the supernatural running through all his beliefs. And while no man could be more healthy and vigorous in his mental and moral organization, there was a certain flavor of mystery pervading all his warm and _ hearty nature that perplexed and bothered those who knew him. The man was a study, and those who still recollect his sunny, hopeful face, his pleasant voice and the sincere grasp of his strong hand, will always remember that they never felt that they quite understood why it was that the hearty and genial doctor appeared as though there was at least one chamber in his soul over which, even to his own self-consciousness, there was hung the warning, "No Admittance."

In addition to his studies in medicine, Barnard had early made extensive excursions into the tempting fields of chemistry. He was never weary of experimenting and collating; his fertile genius constantly discovered new combinations and effects from the elements that Nature furnished him, and some of his inventions and intentions were brilliant, if not useful. He laughingly said that his necessities alone prevented him from being an alchemist. If he had not been obliged to provide for his daily bread, he would have spent his life in ransacking Nature's laboratory and