Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV. MISSIONARY LIFE CONTINUED. On Saturday, January 5, 1850, at 7 o'clock A. M., I embarked on the steamer Senator for Sacramento City, a distance of one hundred and twenty-five miles. As we ascended the Sacramento River we saw a large band of elk. They ran along the bank of the river in our direction several hundred yards, seeming as desirous to look at us as we were to look at them. On the sharp crack of a rifle in the hands of one of our passengers they changed their course, and gave us a wider berth, and soon disappeared in their own wild woods. A buck elk, with a head of full-grown horns, leaping over the hills, is a majestic looking animal. Arriving in Sacramento City at 7 o'clock P. M., I was conducted by a stranger through one vast mud-hole of nearly half a mile to the house of Dr. Grove W. Deal. I had known the doctor well in Baltimore, and loved him much; saw him about a year before embark for California in the schooner Sovereign, via Panama, and often, during a tedious voyage round Cape Horn, comforted myself with SACRAMENTO OITT. the anticipated joy of meeting him on my arrival in San Francisco. This, however, was the first sight I had got of him in California. The doctor, I had learned, had done a great deal of faithful preaching "under the oak" in Sacramento City; and prior to Brother Owen's arrival, exercised a shepherd's care over the "few sheep in the wilderness." He had also succeeded well in his practice as a physician, besides some good trading " strikes," so that I did not find him in a tent, nearly up to his knees in mud, like most of his neighbors, but occupying one of the best houses in the city. It was a small, two-story frame-house, rough boards outside, and canvas lining inside. The first floor was occupied as a store, owned by the...