"Your old friend D—is at the Golden Eagle hotel. You ought to go and see him."
I went at once. Ascending to the third story, I found his room, and, knocking at the door, a feeble voice bade me enter. I was shocked at the spectacle that met my gaze. Propped in an armchair in the middle of the room, wasted to a skeleton, and of a ghastly pallor, sat the unhappy man. His eyes gleamed with an unnatural brightness, and his features wore a look of intense suffering.
"You have come too late, sir," he said, before I had time to say a word. "You can do me no good now. I have been sitting in this chair three weeks. I could not live a minute in any other position, Hell could not be worse than the tortures I have suffered! I thank you for coming to see me, but you can do me no good—none, none!"
He paused, panting for breath; and then he continued, in a soliloquizing way:
"I played the fool, making a joke of what was no joking matter. It is too late. I can neither think nor pray, if praying would do any good. I can only suffer, suffer, suffer!"
The painful interview soon ended. To every cheerful or hopeful suggestion which I made he gave but the one reply:
"Too late!"
The unspeakable anguish of his look, as his eyes followed me to the door, haunted me for many a day, and the echo of his words, "Too late!" lingered sadly upon my ear. When I saw the announcement of his death, a few days afterward, I asked myself the solemn question, Whether I had dealt faithfully with this lighthearted, gifted man when he was within my reach. His last rook is before me now, as I pencil these lines.
"John A—is dying over on the Portrero, and his family wants you to go over and see him."
It was while I was pastor in San Francisco. A—was a member of my Church, and lived on what was called the Portrero, in the southern part of the city, beyond the Long Bridge. It was after night when I reached the little cottage on the slope above the bay.