So, the freight on these bars probably averaged something more than $25

each. Small shippers paid two per cent. There were three stages a day,

each way, and I have seen the out-going stages carry away a third of a

ton of bullion each, and more than once I saw them divide a two-ton lot

and take it off. However, these were extraordinary events. [Mr.

Valentine, Wells Fargo’s agent, has handled all the bullion shipped

through the Virginia office for many a month. To his memory—which is

excellent—we are indebted for the following exhibit of the company’s

business in the Virginia office since the first of January, 1862: From

January 1st to April 1st, about $270,000 worth of bullion passed through

that office, during the next quarter, $570,000; next quarter, $800,000;

next quarter, $956,000; next quarter, $1,275,000; and for the quarter

ending on the 30th of last June, about $1,600,000. Thus in a year and a

half, the Virginia office only shipped $5,330,000 in bullion. During the

year 1862 they shipped $2,615,000, so we perceive the average shipments

have more than doubled in the last six months. This gives us room to

promise for the Virginia office $500,000 a month for the year 1863

(though perhaps, judging by the steady increase in the business, we are

under estimating, somewhat). This gives us $6,000,000 for the year. Gold

Hill and Silver City together can beat us—we will give them $10,000,000.

To Dayton, Empire City, Ophir and Carson City, we will allow an

aggregate of $8,000,000, which is not over the mark, perhaps, and may

possibly be a little under it. To Esmeralda we give $4,000,000. To Reese

River and Humboldt $2,000,000, which is liberal now, but may not be

before the year is out. So we prognosticate that the yield of bullion

this year will be about $30,000,000. Placing the number of mills in the

Territory at one hundred, this gives to each the labor of producing

$300,000 in bullion during the twelve months. Allowing them to run three

hundred days in the year (which none of them more than do), this makes

their work average $1,000 a day. Say the mills average twenty tons of

rock a day and this rock worth $50 as a general thing, and you have the

actual work of our one hundred mills figured down “to a spot”—$1,000 a

day each, and $30,000,000 a year in the aggregate.—_Enterprise_. [A

considerable over estimate—M. T.]]

Two tons of silver bullion would be in the neighborhood of forty bars,

and the freight on it over $1,000. Each coach always carried a deal of

ordinary express matter beside, and also from fifteen to twenty

passengers at from $25 to $30 a head. With six stages going all the

time, Wells, Fargo and Co.’s Virginia City business was important and

lucrative.

All along under the centre of Virginia and Gold Hill, for a couple of

miles, ran the great Comstock silver lode—a vein of ore from fifty to

_eighty_ feet thick between its solid walls of rock—a vein as wide as

some of New York’s streets. I will remind the reader that in

Pennsylvania a coal vein only eight feet wide is considered ample.

Virginia was a busy city of streets and houses above ground. Under it

was another busy city, down in the bowels of the earth, where a great

population of men thronged in and out among an intricate maze of tunnels

and drifts, flitting hither and thither under a winking sparkle of

lights, and over their heads towered a vast web of interlocking timbers

that held the walls of the gutted Comstock apart. These timbers were as

large as a man’s body, and the framework stretched upward so far that no

eye could pierce to its top through the closing gloom. It was like

peering up through the clean-picked ribs and bones of some colossal

skeleton. Imagine such a framework two miles long, sixty feet wide, and

higher than any church spire in America. Imagine this stately lattice-

work stretching down Broadway, from the St. Nicholas to Wall street, and

a Fourth of July procession, reduced to pigmies, parading on top of it

and flaunting their flags, high above the pinnacle of Trinity steeple.

One can imagine that, but he cannot well imagine what that forest of

timbers cost, from the time they were felled in the pineries beyond

Washoe Lake, hauled up and around Mount Davidson at atrocious rates of

freightage, then squared, let down into the deep maw of the mine and

built up there. Twenty ample fortunes would not timber one of the

greatest of those silver mines. The Spanish proverb says it requires a

gold mine to “run” a silver one, and it is true. A beggar with a silver

mine is a pitiable pauper indeed if he cannot sell.

379.jpg (47K)

I spoke of the underground Virginia as a city. The Gould and Curry is

only one single mine under there, among a great many others; yet the

Gould and Curry’s streets of dismal drifts and tunnels were five miles

in extent, altogether, and its population five hundred miners. Taken as

a whole, the underground city had some thirty miles of streets and a

population of five or six thousand. In this present day some of those

populations are at work from twelve to sixteen hundred feet under

Virginia and Gold Hill, and the signal-bells that tell them what the

superintendent above ground desires them to do are struck by telegraph

as we strike a fire alarm. Sometimes men fall down a shaft, there, a

thousand feet deep. In such cases, the usual plan is to hold an inquest.

380.jpg (161K)

If you wish to visit one of those mines, you may walk through a tunnel

about half a mile long if you prefer it, or you may take the quicker

plan of shooting like a dart down a shaft, on a small platform. It is

like tumbling down through an empty steeple, feet first. When you reach

the bottom, you take a candle and tramp through drifts and tunnels where

throngs of men are digging and blasting; you watch them send up tubs

full of great lumps of stone—silver ore; you select choice specimens

from the mass, as souvenirs; you admire the world of skeleton timbering;

you reflect frequently that you are buried under a mountain, a thousand

feet below daylight; being in the bottom of the mine you climb from

“gallery” to “gallery,” up endless ladders that stand straight up and

down; when your legs fail you at last, you lie down in a small box-car

in a cramped “incline” like a half-up-ended sewer and are dragged up to

daylight feeling as if you are crawling through a coffin that has no end

to it. Arrived at the top, you find a busy crowd of men receiving the

ascending cars and tubs and dumping the ore from an elevation into long

rows of bins capable of holding half a dozen tons each; under the bins

are rows of wagons loading from chutes and trap-doors in the bins, and

down the long street is a procession of these wagons wending toward the

silver mills with their rich freight. It is all “done,” now, and there

you are. You need never go down again, for you have seen it all. If you

have forgotten the process of reducing the ore in the mill and making

the silver bars, you can go back and find it again in my Esmeralda

chapters if so disposed.

Of course these mines cave in, in places, occasionally, and then it is

worth one’s while to take the risk of descending into them and observing

the crushing power exerted by the pressing weight of a settling

mountain. I published such an experience in the Enterprise, once, and

from it I will take an extract:

AN HOUR IN THE CAVED MINES.—We journeyed down into the Ophir mine,

yesterday, to see the earthquake. We could not go down the deep incline,

because it still has a propensity to cave in places. Therefore we

traveled through the long tunnel which enters the hill above the Ophir

office, and then by means of a series of long ladders, climbed away down

from the first to the fourth gallery. Traversing a drift, we came to the

Spanish line, passed five sets of timbers still uninjured, and found the

earthquake. Here was as complete a chaos as ever was seen—vast masses of

earth and splintered and broken timbers piled confusedly together, with

scarcely an aperture left large enough for a cat to creep through.

Rubbish was still falling at intervals from above, and one timber which

had braced others earlier in the day, was now crushed down out of its

former position, showing that the caving and settling of the tremendous

mass was still going on. We were in that portion of the Ophir known as

the “north mines.” Returning to the surface, we entered a tunnel leading

into the Central, for the purpose of getting into the main Ophir.

Descending a long incline in this tunnel, we traversed a drift or so,

and then went down a deep shaft from whence we proceeded into the fifth

gallery of the Ophir. From a side-drift we crawled through a small hole

and got into the midst of the earthquake again—earth and broken timbers

mingled together without regard to grace or symmetry. A large portion of

the second, third and fourth galleries had caved in and gone to

destruction—the two latter at seven o’clock on the previous evening.

At the turn-table, near the northern extremity of the fifth gallery, two

big piles of rubbish had forced their way through from the fifth

gallery, and from the looks of the timbers, more was about to come.

These beams are solid—eighteen inches square; first, a great beam is

laid on the floor, then upright ones, five feet high, stand on it,

supporting another horizontal beam, and so on, square above square, like

the framework of a window. The superincumbent weight was sufficient to

mash the ends of those great upright beams fairly into the solid wood of

the horizontal ones three inches, compressing and bending the upright

beam till it curved like a bow. Before the Spanish caved in, some of

their twelve-inch horizontal timbers were compressed in this way until

they were only five inches thick! Imagine the power it must take to

squeeze a solid log together in that way. Here, also, was a range of

timbers, for a distance of twenty feet, tilted six inches out of the

perpendicular by the weight resting upon them from the caved galleries

above. You could hear things cracking and giving way, and it was not

pleasant to know that the world overhead was slowly and silently sinking

down upon you. The men down in the mine do not mind it, however.

Returning along the fifth gallery, we struck the safe part of the Ophir

incline, and went down it to the sixth; but we found ten inches of water

there, and had to come back. In repairing the damage done to the

incline, the pump had to be stopped for two hours, and in the meantime

the water gained about a foot. However, the pump was at work again, and

the flood-water was decreasing. We climbed up to the fifth gallery again

and sought a deep shaft, whereby we might descend to another part of the

sixth, out of reach of the water, but suffered disappointment, as the

men had gone to dinner, and there was no one to man the windlass. So,

having seen the earthquake, we climbed out at the _Union_ incline and

tunnel, and adjourned, all dripping with candle grease and perspiration,

to lunch at the Ophir office.

During the great flush year of 1863, Nevada [claims to have] produced

$25,000,000 in bullion—almost, if not quite, a round million to each

thousand inhabitants, which is very well, considering that she was

without agriculture and manufactures. Silver mining was her sole

productive industry.

[Since the above was in type, I learn from an official source that the

above figure is too high, and that the yield for 1863 did not exceed

$20,000,000.] However, the day for large figures is approaching; the

Sutro Tunnel is to plow through the Comstock lode from end to end, at a

depth of two thousand feet, and then mining will be easy and

comparatively inexpensive; and the momentous matters of drainage, and

hoisting and hauling of ore will cease to be burdensome. This vast work

will absorb many years, and millions of dollars, in its completion; but

it will early yield money, for that desirable epoch will begin as soon

as it strikes the first end of the vein. The tunnel will be some eight

miles long, and will develop astonishing riches. Cars will carry the ore

through the tunnel and dump it in the mills and thus do away with the

present costly system of double handling and transportation by mule

teams. The water from the tunnel will furnish the motive power for the

mills. Mr. Sutro, the originator of this prodigious enterprise, is one

of the few men in the world who is gifted with the pluck and

perseverance necessary to follow up and hound such an undertaking to its

completion. He has converted several obstinate Congresses to a deserved

friendliness toward his important work, and has gone up and down and to

and fro in Europe until he has enlisted a great moneyed interest in it

there.

CHAPTER LIII.

Every now and then, in these days, the boys used to tell me I ought to

get one Jim Blaine to tell me the stirring story of his grandfather’s

old ram—but they always added that I must not mention the matter unless

Jim was drunk at the time—just comfortably and sociably drunk. They kept

this up until my curiosity was on the rack to hear the story. I got to

haunting Blaine; but it was of no use, the boys always found fault with

his condition; he was often moderately but never satisfactorily drunk. I

never watched a man’s condition with such absorbing interest, such

anxious solicitude; I never so pined to see a man uncompromisingly drunk

before. At last, one evening I hurried to his cabin, for I learned that

this time his situation was such that even the most fastidious could

find no fault with it—he was tranquilly, serenely, symmetrically

drunk—not a hiccup to mar his voice, not a cloud upon his brain thick

enough to obscure his memory. As I entered, he was sitting upon an empty

powder-keg, with a clay pipe in one hand and the other raised to command

silence. His face was round, red, and very serious; his throat was bare

and his hair tumbled; in general appearance and costume he was a

stalwart miner of the period. On the pine table stood a candle, and its

dim light revealed “the boys” sitting here and there on bunks, candle-

boxes, powder-kegs, etc. They said:

“Sh—! Don’t speak—he’s going to commence.”

384.jpg (53K)

THE STORY OF THE OLD RAM.

I found a seat at once, and Blaine said:

‘I don’t reckon them times will ever come again. There never was a more

bullier old ram than what he was. Grandfather fetched him from

Illinois—got him of a man by the name of Yates—Bill Yates—maybe you

might have heard of him; his father was a deacon—Baptist—and he was a

rustler, too; a man had to get up ruther early to get the start of old

Thankful Yates; it was him that put the Greens up to jining teams with

my grandfather when he moved west.

‘Seth Green was prob’ly the pick of the flock; he married a

Wilkerson—Sarah Wilkerson—good cretur, she was—one of the likeliest

heifers that was ever raised in old Stoddard, everybody said that knowed

her. She could heft a bar’l of flour as easy as I can flirt a flapjack.

And spin? Don’t mention it! Independent? Humph! When Sile Hawkins come a

browsing around her, she let him know that for all his tin he couldn’t

trot in harness alongside of _her_. You see, Sile Hawkins was—no, it

warn’t Sile Hawkins, after all—it was a galoot by the name of Filkins—I

disremember his first name; but he _was_ a stump—come into pra’r meeting

drunk, one night, hooraying for Nixon, becuz he thought it was a

primary; and old deacon Ferguson up and scooted him through the window

and he lit on old Miss Jefferson’s head, poor old filly.

385.jpg (52K)

She was a good soul—had a glass eye and used to lend it to old Miss

Wagner, that hadn’t any, to receive company in; it warn’t big enough,

and when Miss Wagner warn’t noticing, it would get twisted around in the

socket, and look up, maybe, or out to one side, and every which way,

while t’ other one was looking as straight ahead as a spy-glass.

“Grown people didn’t mind it, but it most always made the children cry,

it was so sort of scary. She tried packing it in raw cotton, but it

wouldn’t work, somehow—the cotton would get loose and stick out and look

so kind of awful that the children couldn’t stand it no way.

386.jpg (26K)

She was always dropping it out, and turning up her old dead-light on the

company empty, and making them oncomfortable, becuz _she_ never could

tell when it hopped out, being blind on that side, you see. So somebody

would have to hunch her and say, “Your game eye has fetched loose. Miss

Wagner dear”—and then all of them would have to sit and wait till she

jammed it in again—wrong side before, as a general thing, and green as a

bird’s egg, being a bashful cretur and easy sot back before company. But

being wrong side before warn’t much difference, anyway; becuz her own

eye was sky-blue and the glass one was yaller on the front side, so

whichever way she turned it it didn’t match nohow.

‘Old Miss Wagner was considerable on the borrow, she was. When she had a

quilting, or Dorcas S’iety at her house she gen’ally borrowed Miss

Higgins’s wooden leg to stump around on; it was considerable shorter

than her other pin, but much _she_ minded that. She said she couldn’t

abide crutches when she had company, becuz they were so slow; said when

she had company and things had to be done, she wanted to get up and hump

herself. She was as bald as a jug, and so she used to borrow Miss

Jacops’s wig—Miss Jacops was the coffin-peddler’s wife—a ratty old

buzzard, he was, that used to go roosting around where people was sick,

waiting for ’em; and there that old rip would sit all day, in the shade,

on a coffin that he judged would fit the can’idate; and if it was a slow

customer and kind of uncertain, he’d fetch his rations and a blanket

along and sleep in the coffin nights. He was anchored out that way, in

frosty weather, for about three weeks, once, before old Robbins’s place,

waiting for him; and after that, for as much as two years, Jacops was

not on speaking terms with the old man, on account of his disapp’inting

him. He got one of his feet froze, and lost money, too, becuz old

Robbins took a favorable turn and got well.

387.jpg (61K)

The next time Robbins got sick, Jacops tried to make up with him, and

varnished up the same old coffin and fetched it along; but old Robbins

was too many for him; he had him in, and ’peared to be powerful weak; he

bought the coffin for ten dollars and Jacops was to pay it back and

twenty-five more besides if Robbins didn’t like the coffin after he’d

tried it. And then Robbins died, and at the funeral he bursted off the

lid and riz up in his shroud and told the parson to let up on the

performances, becuz he could _not_ stand such a coffin as that. You see

he had been in a trance once before, when he was young, and he took the

chances on another, cal’lating that if he made the trip it was money in

his pocket, and if he missed fire he couldn’t lose a cent. And by George

he sued Jacops for the rhino and got jedgment; and he set up the coffin

in his back parlor and said he ’lowed to take his time, now. It was

always an aggravation to Jacops, the way that miserable old thing acted.

He moved back to Indiany pretty soon—went to Wellsville—Wellsville was

the place the Hogadorns was from. Mighty fine family. Old Maryland

stock. Old Squire Hogadorn could carry around more mixed licker, and

cuss better than most any man I ever see. His second wife was the widder

Billings—she that was Becky Martin; her dam was deacon Dunlap’s first

wife. Her oldest child, Maria, married a missionary and died in grace—et

up by the savages. They et _him_, too, poor feller—biled him. It warn’t

the custom, so they say, but they explained to friends of his’n that

went down there to bring away his things, that they’d tried missionaries

every other way and never could get any good out of ’em—and so it

annoyed all his relations to find out that that man’s life was fooled

away just out of a dern’d experiment, so to speak. But mind you, there

ain’t anything ever reely lost; everything that people can’t understand

and don’t see the reason of does good if you only hold on and give it a

fair shake; Prov’dence don’t fire no blank ca’tridges, boys. That there

missionary’s substance, unbeknowns to himself, actu’ly converted every

last one of them heathens that took a chance at the barbacue. Nothing

ever fetched them but that. Don’t tell _me_ it was an accident that he

was biled. There ain’t no such a thing as an accident.

388.jpg (43K)

‘When my uncle Lem was leaning up agin a scaffolding once, sick, or

drunk, or suthin, an Irishman with a hod full of bricks fell on him out

of the third story and broke the old man’s back in two places. People

said it was an accident. Much accident there was about that. He didn’t

know what he was there for, but he was there for a good object. If he

hadn’t been there the Irishman would have been killed. Nobody can ever

make me believe anything different from that. Uncle Lem’s dog was there.

Why didn’t the Irishman fall on the dog? Becuz the dog would a seen him

a coming and stood from under. That’s the reason the dog warn’t

appinted. A dog can’t be depended on to carry out a special providence.

Mark my words it was a put-up thing. Accidents don’t happen, boys. Uncle

Lem’s dog—I wish you could a seen that dog. He was a reglar shepherd—or

ruther he was part bull and part shepherd—splendid animal; belonged to

parson Hagar before Uncle Lem got him. Parson Hagar belonged to the

Western Reserve Hagars; prime family; his mother was a Watson; one of

his sisters married a Wheeler; they settled in Morgan county, and he got

nipped by the machinery in a carpet factory and went through in less

than a quarter of a minute; his widder bought the piece of carpet that

had his remains wove in, and people come a hundred mile to ’tend the

funeral. There was fourteen yards in the piece.

‘She wouldn’t let them roll him up, but planted him just so—full length.

The church was middling small where they preached the funeral, and they

had to let one end of the coffin stick out of the window. They didn’t

bury him—they planted one end, and let him stand up, same as a monument.

And they nailed a sign on it and put—put on—put on it—“sacred to—the m-

e-m-o-r-y—of fourteen y-a-r-d-s—of three-ply—car—pet—containing all

that was—m-o-r-t-a-l—of—of—W-i-l-l-i-a-m—W-h-e—“’

389.jpg (111K)

Jim Blaine had been growing gradually drowsy and drowsier—his head

nodded, once, twice, three times—dropped peacefully upon his breast, and

he fell tranquilly asleep. The tears were running down the boys’

cheeks—they were suffocating with suppressed laughter—and had been from

the start, though I had never noticed it. I perceived that I was “sold.”

I learned then that Jim Blaine’s peculiarity was that whenever he

reached a certain stage of intoxication, no human power could keep him

from setting out, with impressive unction, to tell about a wonderful

adventure which he had once had with his grandfather’s old ram—and the

mention of the ram in the first sentence was as far as any man had ever

heard him get, concerning it. He always maundered off, interminably,

from one thing to another, till his whisky got the best of him and he

fell asleep. What the thing was that happened to him and his

grandfather’s old ram is a dark mystery to this day, for nobody has ever

yet found out.

390.jpg (64K)

CHAPTER LIV.

Of course there was a large Chinese population in Virginia—it is the

case with every town and city on the Pacific coast. They are a harmless

race when white men either let them alone or treat them no worse than

dogs; in fact they are almost entirely harmless anyhow, for they seldom

think of resenting the vilest insults or the cruelest injuries. They are

quiet, peaceable, tractable, free from drunkenness, and they are as

industrious as the day is long. A disorderly Chinaman is rare, and a

lazy one does not exist. So long as a Chinaman has strength to use his

hands he needs no support from anybody; white men often complain of want

of work, but a Chinaman offers no such complaint; he always manages to

find something to do. He is a great convenience to everybody—even to the

worst class of white men, for he bears the most of their sins, suffering

fines for their petty thefts, imprisonment for their robberies, and

death for their murders. Any white man can swear a Chinaman’s life away

in the courts, but no Chinaman can testify against a white man. Ours is

the “land of the free”—nobody denies that—nobody challenges it. [Maybe

it is because we won’t let other people testify.] As I write, news comes

that in broad daylight in San Francisco, some boys have stoned an

inoffensive Chinaman to death, and that although a large crowd witnessed

the shameful deed, no one interfered.

There are seventy thousand (and possibly one hundred thousand) Chinamen

on the Pacific coast. There were about a thousand in Virginia. They were

penned into a “Chinese quarter”—a thing which they do not particularly

object to, as they are fond of herding together. Their buildings were of

wood; usually only one story high, and set thickly together along

streets scarcely wide enough for a wagon to pass through. Their quarter

was a little removed from the rest of the town. The chief employment of

Chinamen in towns is to wash clothing. They always send a bill, like

this below, pinned to the clothes. It is mere ceremony, for it does not

enlighten the customer much.

392.jpg (12K)

Their price for washing was $2.50 per dozen—rather cheaper than white

people could afford to wash for at that time. A very common sign on the

Chinese houses was: “See Yup, Washer and Ironer”; “Hong Wo, Washer”;

“Sam Sing & Ah Hop, Washing.” The house servants, cooks, etc., in

California and Nevada, were chiefly Chinamen. There were few white

servants and no Chinawomen so employed. Chinamen make good house

servants, being quick, obedient, patient, quick to learn and tirelessly

industrious. They do not need to be taught a thing twice, as a general

thing. They are imitative. If a Chinaman were to see his master break up

a centre table, in a passion, and kindle a fire with it, that Chinaman

would be likely to resort to the furniture for fuel forever afterward.

393.jpg (42K)

All Chinamen can read, write and cipher with easy facility—pity but all

our petted _voters_ could. In California they rent little patches of

ground and do a deal of gardening. They will raise surprising crops of

vegetables on a sand pile. They waste nothing. What is rubbish to a

Christian, a Chinaman carefully preserves and makes useful in one way or

another. He gathers up all the old oyster and sardine cans that white

people throw away, and procures marketable tin and solder from them by

melting. He gathers up old bones and turns them into manure. In

California he gets a living out of old mining claims that white men have

abandoned as exhausted and worthless—and then the officers come down on

him once a month with an exorbitant swindle to which the legislature has

given the broad, general name of “foreign” mining tax, but it is usually

inflicted on no foreigners but Chinamen. This swindle has in some cases

been repeated once or twice on the same victim in the course of the same

month—but the public treasury was not additionally enriched by it,

probably.

Chinamen hold their dead in great reverence—they worship their departed

ancestors, in fact. Hence, in China, a man’s front yard, back yard, or

any other part of his premises, is made his family burying ground, in

order that he may visit the graves at any and all times. Therefore that

huge empire is one mighty cemetery; it is ridged and wringled from its

centre to its circumference with graves—and inasmuch as every foot of

ground must be made to do its utmost, in China, lest the swarming

population suffer for food, the very graves are cultivated and yield a

harvest, custom holding this to be no dishonor to the dead. Since the

departed are held in such worshipful reverence, a Chinaman cannot bear

that any indignity be offered the places where they sleep. Mr.

Burlingame said that herein lay China’s bitter opposition to railroads;

a road could not be built anywhere in the empire without disturbing the

graves of their ancestors or friends.

A Chinaman hardly believes he could enjoy the hereafter except his body

lay in his beloved China; also, he desires to receive, himself, after

death, that worship with which he has honored his dead that preceded

him. Therefore, if he visits a foreign country, he makes arrangements to

have his bones returned to China in case he dies; if he hires to go to a

foreign country on a labor contract, there is always a stipulation that

his body shall be taken back to China if he dies; if the government

sells a gang of Coolies to a foreigner for the usual five-year term, it

is specified in the contract that their bodies shall be restored to

China in case of death. On the Pacific coast the Chinamen all belong to

one or another of several great companies or organizations, and these

companies keep track of their members, register their names, and ship

their bodies home when they die. The See Yup Company is held to be the

largest of these. The Ning Yeong Company is next, and numbers eighteen

thousand members on the coast. Its headquarters are at San Francisco,

where it has a costly temple, several great officers (one of whom keeps

regal state in seclusion and cannot be approached by common humanity),

and a numerous priesthood. In it I was shown a register of its members,

with the dead and the date of their shipment to China duly marked. Every

ship that sails from San Francisco carries away a heavy freight of

Chinese corpses—or did, at least, until the legislature, with an

ingenious refinement of Christian cruelty, forbade the shipments, as a

neat underhanded way of deterring Chinese immigration. The bill was

offered, whether it passed or not. It is my impression that it passed.

There was another bill—it became a law—compelling every incoming

Chinaman to be vaccinated on the wharf and pay a duly appointed quack

(no decent doctor would defile himself with such legalized robbery) ten

dollars for it. As few importers of Chinese would want to go to an

expense like that, the law-makers thought this would be another heavy

blow to Chinese immigration.

What the Chinese quarter of Virginia was like—or, indeed, what the

Chinese quarter of any Pacific coast town was and is like—may be

gathered from this item which I printed in the Enterprise while

reporting for that paper:

CHINATOWN.—Accompanied by a fellow reporter, we made a trip through our

Chinese quarter the other night. The Chinese have built their portion of

the city to suit themselves; and as they keep neither carriages nor

wagons, their streets are not wide enough, as a general thing, to admit

of the passage of vehicles. At ten o’clock at night the Chinaman may be

seen in all his glory. In every little cooped-up, dingy cavern of a hut,

faint with the odor of burning Josh-lights and with nothing to see the

gloom by save the sickly, guttering tallow candle, were two or three

yellow, long-tailed vagabonds, coiled up on a sort of short truckle-bed,

smoking opium, motionless and with their lustreless eyes turned inward

from excess of satisfaction—or rather the recent smoker looks thus,

immediately after having passed the pipe to his neighbor—for opium-

smoking is a comfortless operation, and requires constant attention. A

lamp sits on the bed, the length of the long pipe-stem from the smoker’s

mouth; he puts a pellet of opium on the end of a wire, sets it on fire,

and plasters it into the pipe much as a Christian would fill a hole with

putty; then he applies the bowl to the lamp and proceeds to smoke—and

the stewing and frying of the drug and the gurgling of the juices in the

stem would well-nigh turn the stomach of a statue. John likes it,

though; it soothes him, he takes about two dozen whiffs, and then rolls

over to dream, Heaven only knows what, for we could not imagine by

looking at the soggy creature. Possibly in his visions he travels far

away from the gross world and his regular washing, and feast on

succulent rats and birds’-nests in Paradise.

Mr. Ah Sing keeps a general grocery and provision store at No. 13 Wang

street. He lavished his hospitality upon our party in the friendliest

way. He had various kinds of colored and colorless wines and brandies,

with unpronouncable names, imported from China in little crockery jugs,

and which he offered to us in dainty little miniature wash-basins of

porcelain. He offered us a mess of birds’-nests; also, small, neat

sausages, of which we could have swallowed several yards if we had

chosen to try, but we suspected that each link contained the corpse of a

mouse, and therefore refrained. Mr. Sing had in his store a thousand

articles of merchandise, curious to behold, impossible to imagine the

uses of, and beyond our ability to describe.

His ducks, however, and his eggs, we could understand; the former were

split open and flattened out like codfish, and came from China in that

shape, and the latter were plastered over with some kind of paste which

kept them fresh and palatable through the long voyage.

We found Mr. Hong Wo, No. 37 Chow-chow street, making up a lottery

scheme—in fact we found a dozen others occupied in the same way in

various parts of the quarter, for about every third Chinaman runs a

lottery, and the balance of the tribe “buck” at it. “Tom,” who speaks

faultless English, and used to be chief and only cook to the

_Territorial Enterprise_, when the establishment kept bachelor’s hall

two years ago, said that “Sometime Chinaman buy ticket one dollar hap,

ketch um two tree hundred, sometime no ketch um anything; lottery like

one man fight um seventy—may-be he whip, may-be he get whip heself,

welly good.”

396.jpg (69K)

However, the percentage being sixty-nine against him, the chances are,

as a general thing, that “he get whip heself.” We could not see that

these lotteries differed in any respect from our own, save that the

figures being Chinese, no ignorant white man might ever hope to succeed

in telling “t’other from which;” the manner of drawing is similar to

ours.

Mr. See Yup keeps a fancy store on Live Fox street. He sold us fans of

white feathers, gorgeously ornamented; perfumery that smelled like

Limburger cheese, Chinese pens, and watch-charms made of a stone

unscratchable with steel instruments, yet polished and tinted like the

inner coat of a sea-shell. As tokens of his esteem, See Yup presented

the party with gaudy plumes made of gold tinsel and trimmed with

peacocks’ feathers.

We ate chow-chow with chop-sticks in the celestial restaurants; our

comrade chided the moon-eyed damsels in front of the houses for their

want of feminine reserve; we received protecting Josh-lights from our

hosts and “dickered” for a pagan God or two. Finally, we were impressed

with the genius of a Chinese book-keeper; he figured up his accounts on

a machine like a gridiron with buttons strung on its bars; the different

rows represented units, tens, hundreds and thousands. He fingered them

with incredible rapidity—in fact, he pushed them from place to place as

fast as a musical professor’s fingers travel over the keys of a piano.

They are a kindly disposed, well-meaning race, and are respected and

well treated by the upper classes, all over the Pacific coast. No

Californian _gentleman or lady_ ever abuses or oppresses a Chinaman,

under any circumstances, an explanation that seems to be much needed in

the East. Only the scum of the population do it—they and their children;

they, and, naturally and consistently, the policemen and politicians,

likewise, for these are the dust-licking pimps and slaves of the scum,

there as well as elsewhere in America.

397.jpg (76K)

CHAPTER LV.

I began to get tired of staying in one place so long.

There was no longer satisfying variety in going down to Carson to report

the proceedings of the legislature once a year, and horse-races and

pumpkin-shows once in three months; (they had got to raising pumpkins

and potatoes in Washoe Valley, and of course one of the first

achievements of the legislature was to institute a ten-thousand-dollar

Agricultural Fair to show off forty dollars’ worth of those pumpkins

in—however, the territorial legislature was usually spoken of as the

“asylum”). I wanted to see San Francisco. I wanted to go somewhere. I

wanted—I did not know _what_ I wanted. I had the “spring fever” and

wanted a change, principally, no doubt. Besides, a convention had framed

a State Constitution; nine men out of every ten wanted an office; I

believed that these gentlemen would “treat” the moneyless and the

irresponsible among the population into adopting the constitution and

thus well-nigh killing the country (it could not well carry such a load

as a State government, since it had nothing to tax that could stand a

tax, for undeveloped mines could not, and there were not fifty developed

ones in the land, there was but little realty to tax, and it did seem as

if nobody was ever going to think of the simple salvation of inflicting

a money penalty on murder). I believed that a State government would

destroy the “flush times,” and I wanted to get away. I believed that the

mining stocks I had on hand would soon be worth $100,000, and thought if

they reached that before the Constitution was adopted, I would sell out

and make myself secure from the crash the change of government was going

to bring. I considered $100,000 sufficient to go home with decently,

though it was but a small amount compared to what I had been expecting

to return with. I felt rather down-hearted about it, but I tried to

comfort myself with the reflection that with such a sum I could not fall

into want. About this time a schoolmate of mine whom I had not seen

since boyhood, came tramping in on foot from Reese River, a very

allegory of Poverty. The son of wealthy parents, here he was, in a

strange land, hungry, bootless, mantled in an ancient horse-blanket,

roofed with a brimless hat, and so generally and so extravagantly

dilapidated that he could have “taken the shine out of the Prodigal Son

himself,” as he pleasantly remarked.

399.jpg (43K)

He wanted to borrow forty-six dollars—twenty-six to take him to San

Francisco, and twenty for something else; to buy some soap with, maybe,

for he needed it. I found I had but little more than the amount wanted,

in my pocket; so I stepped in and borrowed forty-six dollars of a banker

(on twenty days’ time, without the formality of a note), and gave it

him, rather than walk half a block to the office, where I had some

specie laid up. If anybody had told me that it would take me two years

to pay back that forty-six dollars to the banker (for I did not expect

it of the Prodigal, and was not disappointed), I would have felt

injured. And so would the banker.

I wanted a change. I wanted variety of some kind. It came. Mr. Goodman

went away for a week and left me the post of chief editor. It destroyed

me. The first day, I wrote my “leader” in the forenoon. The second day,

I had no subject and put it off till the afternoon. The third day I put

it off till evening, and then copied an elaborate editorial out of the

“American Cyclopedia,” that steadfast friend of the editor, all over

this land. The fourth day I “fooled around” till midnight, and then fell

back on the Cyclopedia again. The fifth day I cudgeled my brain till

midnight, and then kept the press waiting while I penned some bitter

personalities on six different people. The sixth day I labored in

anguish till far into the night and brought forth—nothing. The paper

went to press without an editorial. The seventh day I resigned. On the

eighth, Mr. Goodman returned and found six duels on his hands—my

personalities had borne fruit.

Nobody, except he has tried it, knows what it is to be an editor. It is

easy to scribble local rubbish, with the facts all before you; it is

easy to clip selections from other papers; it is easy to string out a

correspondence from any locality; but it is unspeakable hardship to

write editorials. _Subjects_ are the trouble—the dreary lack of them, I

mean. Every day, it is drag, drag, drag—think, and worry and suffer—all

the world is a dull blank, and yet the editorial columns _must_ be

filled. Only give the editor a _subject_, and his work is done—it is no

trouble to write it up; but fancy how you would feel if you had to pump

your brains dry every day in the week, fifty-two weeks in the year. It

makes one low spirited simply to think of it. The matter that each

editor of a daily paper in America writes in the course of a year would

fill from four to eight bulky volumes like this book! Fancy what a

library an editor’s work would make, after twenty or thirty years’

service. Yet people often marvel that Dickens, Scott, Bulwer, Dumas,

etc., have been able to produce so many books. If these authors had

wrought as voluminously as newspaper editors do, the result would be

something to marvel at, indeed. How editors can continue this tremendous

labor, this exhausting consumption of brain fibre (for their work is

creative, and not a mere mechanical laying-up of facts, like reporting),

day after day and year after year, is incomprehensible. Preachers take

two months’ holiday in midsummer, for they find that to produce two

sermons a week is wearing, in the long run. In truth it must be so, and

is so; and therefore, how an editor can take from ten to twenty texts

and build upon them from ten to twenty painstaking editorials a week and

keep it up all the year round, is farther beyond comprehension than

ever. Ever since I survived my week as editor, I have found at least one

pleasure in any newspaper that comes to my hand; it is in admiring the

long columns of editorial, and wondering to myself how in the mischief

he did it!

Mr. Goodman’s return relieved me of employment, unless I chose to become

a reporter again. I could not do that; I could not serve in the ranks

after being General of the army. So I thought I would depart and go

abroad into the world somewhere. Just at this juncture, Dan, my

associate in the reportorial department, told me, casually, that two

citizens had been trying to persuade him to go with them to New York and

aid in selling a rich silver mine which they had discovered and secured

in a new mining district in our neighborhood. He said they offered to

pay his expenses and give him one third of the proceeds of the sale. He

had refused to go. It was the very opportunity I wanted. I abused him

for keeping so quiet about it, and not mentioning it sooner. He said it

had not occurred to him that I would like to go, and so he had

recommended them to apply to Marshall, the reporter of the other paper.

I asked Dan if it was a good, honest mine, and no swindle. He said the

men had shown him nine tons of the rock, which they had got out to take

to New York, and he could cheerfully say that he had seen but little

rock in Nevada that was richer; and moreover, he said that they had

secured a tract of valuable timber and a mill-site, near the mine. My

first idea was to kill Dan. But I changed my mind, notwithstanding I was

so angry, for I thought maybe the chance was not yet lost. Dan said it

was by no means lost; that the men were absent at the mine again, and

would not be in Virginia to leave for the East for some ten days; that

they had requested him to do the talking to Marshall, and he had

promised that he would either secure Marshall or somebody else for them

by the time they got back; he would now say nothing to anybody till they

returned, and then fulfil his promise by furnishing me to them.

It was splendid. I went to bed all on fire with excitement; for nobody

had yet gone East to sell a Nevada silver mine, and the field was white

for the sickle. I felt that such a mine as the one described by Dan

would bring a princely sum in New York, and sell without delay or

difficulty. I could not sleep, my fancy so rioted through its castles in

the air. It was the “blind lead” come again.

Next day I got away, on the coach, with the usual eclat attending

departures of old citizens,—for if you have only half a dozen friends

out there they will make noise for a hundred rather than let you seem to

go away neglected and unregretted—and Dan promised to keep strict watch

for the men that had the mine to sell.

The trip was signalized but by one little incident, and that occurred

just as we were about to start. A very seedy looking vagabond passenger

got out of the stage a moment to wait till the usual ballast of silver

bricks was thrown in. He was standing on the pavement, when an awkward

express employee, carrying a brick weighing a hundred pounds, stumbled

and let it fall on the bummer’s foot. He instantly dropped on the ground

and began to howl in the most heart-breaking way. A sympathizing crowd

gathered around and were going to pull his boot off; but he screamed

louder than ever and they desisted; then he fell to gasping, and between

the gasps ejaculated “Brandy! for Heaven’s sake, brandy!” They poured

half a pint down him, and it wonderfully restored and comforted him.

Then he begged the people to assist him to the stage, which was done.

The express people urged him to have a doctor at their expense, but he

declined, and said that if he only had a little brandy to take along

with him, to soothe his paroxyms of pain when they came on, he would be

grateful and content. He was quickly supplied with two bottles, and we

drove off. He was so smiling and happy after that, that I could not

refrain from asking him how he could possibly be so comfortable with a

crushed foot.

403.jpg (72K)

“Well,” said he, “I hadn’t had a drink for twelve hours, and hadn’t a

cent to my name. I was most perishing—and so, when that duffer dropped

that hundred-pounder on my foot, I see my chance. Got a cork leg, you

know!” and he pulled up his pantaloons and proved it.

He was as drunk as a lord all day long, and full of chucklings over his

timely ingenuity.

One drunken man necessarily reminds one of another. I once heard a

gentleman tell about an incident which he witnessed in a Californian

bar- room. He entitled it “Ye Modest Man Taketh a Drink.” It was nothing

but a bit of acting, but it seemed to me a perfect rendering, and worthy

of Toodles himself. The modest man, tolerably far gone with beer and

other matters, enters a saloon (twenty-five cents is the price for

anything and everything, and specie the only money used) and lays down a

half dollar; calls for whiskey and drinks it; the bar-keeper makes

change and lays the quarter in a wet place on the counter; the modest

man fumbles at it with nerveless fingers, but it slips and the water

holds it; he contemplates it, and tries again; same result; observes

that people are interested in what he is at, blushes; fumbles at the

quarter again—blushes—puts his forefinger carefully, slowly down, to

make sure of his aim—pushes the coin toward the bar-keeper, and says

with a sigh:

404.jpg (120K)

“(’_ic_)Gimme a cigar!”

Naturally, another gentleman present told about another drunken man. He

said he reeled toward home late at night; made a mistake and entered the

wrong gate; thought he saw a dog on the stoop; and it was—an iron one.

He stopped and considered; wondered if it was a dangerous dog; ventured

to say “Be (hic) begone!” No effect. Then he approached warily, and

adopted conciliation; pursed up his lips and tried to whistle, but

failed; still approached, saying, “Poor dog!—doggy, doggy, doggy!—poor

doggy-dog!” Got up on the stoop, still petting with fond names; till

master of the advantages; then exclaimed, “Leave, you thief!”—planted a

vindictive kick in his ribs, and went head-over-heels overboard, of

course. A pause; a sigh or two of pain, and then a remark in a

reflective voice:

“Awful solid dog. What could he ben eating? (’ic!) Rocks, p’raps. Such

animals is dangerous.—’ At’s what I say—they’re dangerous. If a

man—(’ic!)—if a man wants to feed a dog on rocks, let him _feed_ him on

rocks; ’at’s all right; but let him keep him at _home_—not have him

layin’ round promiscuous, where (’ic!) where people’s liable to stumble

over him when they ain’t noticin’!”

It was not without regret that I took a last look at the tiny flag (it

was thirty-five feet long and ten feet wide) fluttering like a lady’s

handkerchief from the topmost peak of Mount Davidson, two thousand feet

above Virginia’s roofs, and felt that doubtless I was bidding a

permanent farewell to a city which had afforded me the most vigorous

enjoyment of life I had ever experienced. And this reminds me of an

incident which the dullest memory Virginia could boast at the time it

happened must vividly recall, at times, till its possessor dies. Late

one summer afternoon we had a rain shower.

That was astonishing enough, in itself, to set the whole town buzzing,

for it only rains (during a week or two weeks) in the winter in Nevada,

and even then not enough at a time to make it worth while for any

merchant to keep umbrellas for sale. But the rain was not the chief

wonder. It only lasted five or ten minutes; while the people were still

talking about it all the heavens gathered to themselves a dense

blackness as of midnight. All the vast eastern front of Mount Davidson,

over-looking the city, put on such a funereal gloom that only the

nearness and solidity of the mountain made its outlines even faintly

distinguishable from the dead blackness of the heavens they rested

against. This unaccustomed sight turned all eyes toward the mountain;

and as they looked, a little tongue of rich golden flame was seen waving

and quivering in the heart of the midnight, away up on the extreme

summit! In a few minutes the streets were packed with people, gazing

with hardly an uttered word, at the one brilliant mote in the brooding

world of darkness. It flicked like a candle-flame, and looked no larger;

but with such a background it was wonderfully bright, small as it was.

It was the flag!—though no one suspected it at first, it seemed so like

a supernatural visitor of some kind—a mysterious messenger of good

tidings, some were fain to believe. It was the nation’s emblem

transfigured by the departing rays of a sun that was entirely palled

from view; and on no other object did the glory fall, in all the broad

panorama of mountain ranges and deserts. Not even upon the staff of the

flag—for that, a needle in the distance at any time, was now untouched

by the light and undistinguishable in the gloom. For a whole hour the

weird visitor winked and burned in its lofty solitude, and still the

thousands of uplifted eyes watched it with fascinated interest. How the

people were wrought up! The superstition grew apace that this was a

mystic courier come with great news from the war—the poetry of the idea

excusing and commending it—and on it spread, from heart to heart, from

lip to lip and from street to street, till there was a general impulse

to have out the military and welcome the bright waif with a salvo of

artillery!

406.jpg (72K)

And all that time one sorely tried man, the telegraph operator sworn to

official secrecy, had to lock his lips and chain his tongue with a

silence that was like to rend them; for he, and he only, of all the

speculating multitude, knew the great things this sinking sun had seen

that day in the east—Vicksburg fallen, and the Union arms victorious at

Gettysburg!

But for the journalistic monopoly that forbade the slightest revealment

of eastern news till a day after its publication in the California

papers, the glorified flag on Mount Davidson would have been saluted and

re-saluted, that memorable evening, as long as there was a charge of

powder to thunder with; the city would have been illuminated, and every

man that had any respect for himself would have got drunk,—as was the

custom of the country on all occasions of public moment. Even at this

distant day I cannot think of this needlessly marred supreme opportunity

without regret. What a time we might have had!

407.jpg (12K)

CHAPTER LVI.

We rumbled over the plains and valleys, climbed the Sierras to the

clouds, and looked down upon summer-clad California. And I will remark

here, in passing, that all scenery in California requires _distance_ to

give it its highest charm. The mountains are imposing in their sublimity

and their majesty of form and altitude, from any point of view—but one

must have distance to soften their ruggedness and enrich their tintings;

a Californian forest is best at a little distance, for there is a sad

poverty of variety in species, the trees being chiefly of one monotonous

family—redwood, pine, spruce, fir—and so, at a near view there is a

wearisome sameness of attitude in their rigid arms, stretched downward

and outward in one continued and reiterated appeal to all men to

“Sh!—don’t say a word!—you might disturb somebody!” Close at hand, too,

there is a reliefless and relentless smell of pitch and turpentine;

there is a ceaseless melancholy in their sighing and complaining

foliage; one walks over a soundless carpet of beaten yellow bark and

dead spines of the foliage till he feels like a wandering spirit bereft

of a footfall; he tires of the endless tufts of needles and yearns for

substantial, shapely leaves; he looks for moss and grass to loll upon,

and finds none, for where there is no bark there is naked clay and dirt,

enemies to pensive musing and clean apparel. Often a grassy plain in

California, is what it should be, but often, too, it is best

contemplated at a distance, because although its grass blades are tall,

they stand up vindictively straight and self-sufficient, and are

unsociably wide apart, with uncomely spots of barren sand between.

One of the queerest things I know of, is to hear tourists from “the

States” go into ecstasies over the loveliness of “ever-blooming

California.” And they always do go into that sort of ecstasies. But

perhaps they would modify them if they knew how old Californians, with

the memory full upon them of the dust-covered and questionable summer

greens of Californian “verdure,” stand astonished, and filled with

worshipping admiration, in the presence of the lavish richness, the

brilliant green, the infinite freshness, the spend-thrift variety of

form and species and foliage that make an Eastern landscape a vision of

Paradise itself. The idea of a man falling into raptures over grave and

sombre California, when that man has seen New England’s meadow-expanses

and her maples, oaks and cathedral-windowed elms decked in summer

attire, or the opaline splendors of autumn descending upon her forests,

comes very near being funny—would be, in fact, but that it is so

pathetic. No land with an unvarying climate can be very beautiful. The

tropics are not, for all the sentiment that is wasted on them. They seem

beautiful at first, but sameness impairs the charm by and by. _Change_

is the handmaiden Nature requires to do her miracles with. The land that

has four well-defined seasons, cannot lack beauty, or pall with

monotony. Each season brings a world of enjoyment and interest in the

watching of its unfolding, its gradual, harmonious development, its

culminating graces—and just as one begins to tire of it, it passes away

and a radical change comes, with new witcheries and new glories in its

train. And I think that to one in sympathy with nature, each season, in

its turn, seems the loveliest.

409.jpg (49K)

San Francisco, a truly fascinating city to live in, is stately and

handsome at a fair distance, but close at hand one notes that the

architecture is mostly old-fashioned, many streets are made up of

decaying, smoke-grimed, wooden houses, and the barren sand-hills toward

the outskirts obtrude themselves too prominently. Even the kindly

climate is sometimes pleasanter when read about than personally

experienced, for a lovely, cloudless sky wears out its welcome by and

by, and then when the longed for rain does come it _stays_. Even the

playful earthquake is better contemplated at a dis—

However there are varying opinions about that.

The climate of San Francisco is mild and singularly equable. The

thermometer stands at about seventy degrees the year round. It hardly

changes at all. You sleep under one or two light blankets Summer and

Winter, and never use a mosquito bar. Nobody ever wears Summer clothing.

You wear black broadcloth—if you have it—in August and January, just the

same. It is no colder, and no warmer, in the one month than the other.

You do not use overcoats and you do not use fans. It is as pleasant a

climate as could well be contrived, take it all around, and is doubtless

the most unvarying in the whole world. The wind blows there a good deal

in the summer months, but then you can go over to Oakland, if you

choose—three or four miles away—it does not blow there. It has only

snowed twice in San Francisco in nineteen years, and then it only

remained on the ground long enough to astonish the children, and set

them to wondering what the feathery stuff was.

410.jpg (53K)

During eight months of the year, straight along, the skies are bright

and cloudless, and never a drop of rain falls. But when the other four

months come along, you will need to go and steal an umbrella. Because

you will require it. Not just one day, but one hundred and twenty days

in hardly varying succession. When you want to go visiting, or attend

church, or the theatre, you never look up at the clouds to see whether

it is likely to rain or not—you look at the almanac. If it is Winter, it

_will_ rain—and if it is Summer, it _won’t_ rain, and you cannot help

it. You never need a lightning-rod, because it never thunders and it

never lightens. And after you have listened for six or eight weeks,

every night, to the dismal monotony of those quiet rains, you will wish

in your heart the thunder _would_ leap and crash and roar along those

drowsy skies once, and make everything alive—you will wish the prisoned

lightnings _would_ cleave the dull firmament asunder and light it with a

blinding glare for _one_ little instant. You would give _anything_ to

hear the old familiar thunder again and see the lightning strike

somebody. And along in the Summer, when you have suffered about four

months of lustrous, pitiless sunshine, you are ready to go down on your

knees and plead for rain—hail—snow—thunder and lightning—anything to

break the monotony—you will take an earthquake, if you cannot do any

better. And the chances are that you’ll get it, too.

San Francisco is built on sand hills, but they are prolific sand hills.

They yield a generous vegetation. All the rare flowers which people in

“the States” rear with such patient care in parlor flower-pots and

green-houses, flourish luxuriantly in the open air there all the year

round. Calla lilies, all sorts of geraniums, passion flowers, moss

roses—I do not know the names of a tenth part of them. I only know that

while New Yorkers are burdened with banks and drifts of snow,

Californians are burdened with banks and drifts of flowers, if they only

keep their hands off and let them grow. And I have heard that they have

also that rarest and most curious of all the flowers, the beautiful

Espiritu Santo, as the Spaniards call it—or flower of the Holy

Spirit—though I thought it grew only in Central America—down on the

Isthmus. In its cup is the daintiest little facsimile of a dove, as pure

as snow. The Spaniards have a superstitious reverence for it. The

blossom has been conveyed to the States, submerged in ether; and the

bulb has been taken thither also, but every attempt to make it bloom

after it arrived, has failed.

I have elsewhere spoken of the endless Winter of Mono, California, and

but this moment of the eternal Spring of San Francisco. Now if we travel

a hundred miles in a straight line, we come to the eternal Summer of

Sacramento. One never sees Summer-clothing or mosquitoes in San

Francisco—but they can be found in Sacramento. Not always and

unvaryingly, but about one hundred and forty-three months out of twelve

years, perhaps. Flowers bloom there, always, the reader can easily

believe—people suffer and sweat, and swear, morning, noon and night, and

wear out their stanchest energies fanning themselves. It gets hot there,

but if you go down to Fort Yuma you will find it hotter. Fort Yuma is

probably the hottest place on earth. The thermometer stays at one

hundred and twenty in the shade there all the time—except when it varies

and goes higher. It is a U.S. military post, and its occupants get so

used to the terrific heat that they suffer without it. There is a

tradition (attributed to John Phenix [It has been purloined by fifty

different scribblers who were too poor to invent a fancy but not ashamed

to steal one.—M. T.]) that a very, very wicked soldier died there, once,

and of course, went straight to the hottest corner of perdition,—and the

next day he _telegraphed back for his blankets._ There is no doubt about

the truth of this statement—there can be no doubt about it. I have seen

the place where that soldier used to board. In Sacramento it is fiery

Summer always, and you can gather roses, and eat strawberries and ice-

cream, and wear white linen clothes, and pant and perspire, at eight or

nine o’clock in the morning, and then take the cars, and at noon put on

your furs and your skates, and go skimming over frozen Donner Lake,

seven thousand feet above the valley, among snow banks fifteen feet

deep, and in the shadow of grand mountain peaks that lift their frosty

crags ten thousand feet above the level of the sea.

413.jpg (94K)

There is a transition for you! Where will you find another like it in

the Western hemisphere? And some of us have swept around snow-walled

curves of the Pacific Railroad in that vicinity, six thousand feet above

the sea, and looked down as the birds do, upon the deathless Summer of

the Sacramento Valley, with its fruitful fields, its feathery foliage,

its silver streams, all slumbering in the mellow haze of its enchanted

atmosphere, and all infinitely softened and spiritualized by distance—a

dreamy, exquisite glimpse of fairyland, made all the more charming and

striking that it was caught through a forbidden gateway of ice and snow,

and savage crags and precipices.

CHAPTER LVII.

It was in this Sacramento Valley, just referred to, that a deal of the

most lucrative of the early gold mining was done, and you may still see,

in places, its grassy slopes and levels torn and guttered and disfigured

by the avaricious spoilers of fifteen and twenty years ago. You may see

such disfigurements far and wide over California—and in some such

places, where only meadows and forests are visible—not a living

creature, not a house, no stick or stone or remnant of a ruin, and not a

sound, not even a whisper to disturb the Sabbath stillness—you will find

it hard to believe that there stood at one time a fiercely-flourishing

little city, of two thousand or three thousand souls, with its

newspaper, fire company, brass band, volunteer militia, bank, hotels,

noisy Fourth of July processions and speeches, gambling hells crammed

with tobacco smoke, profanity, and rough-bearded men of all nations and

colors, with tables heaped with gold dust sufficient for the revenues of

a German principality—streets crowded and rife with business—town lots

worth four hundred dollars a front foot—labor, laughter, music, dancing,

swearing, fighting, shooting, stabbing—a bloody inquest and a man for

breakfast every morning—_everything_ that delights and adorns

existence—all the appointments and appurtenances of a thriving and

prosperous and promising young city,—and _now_ nothing is left of it all

but a lifeless, homeless solitude. The men are gone, the houses have

vanished, even the _name_ of the place is forgotten. In no other land,

in modern times, have towns so absolutely died and disappeared, as in

the old mining regions of California.

It was a driving, vigorous, restless population in those days. It was a

_curious_ population. It was the _only_ population of the kind that the

world has ever seen gathered together, and it is not likely that the

world will ever see its like again. For observe, it was an assemblage of

two hundred thousand _young_ men—not simpering, dainty, kid-gloved

weaklings, but stalwart, muscular, dauntless young braves, brimful of

push and energy, and royally endowed with every attribute that goes to

make up a peerless and magnificent manhood—the very pick and choice of

the world’s glorious ones. No women, no children, no gray and stooping

veterans,—none but erect, bright-eyed, quick-moving, strong-handed young

giants—the strangest population, the finest population, the most gallant

host that ever trooped down the startled solitudes of an unpeopled land.

And where are they now? Scattered to the ends of the earth—or

prematurely aged and decrepit—or shot or stabbed in street affrays—or

dead of disappointed hopes and broken hearts—all gone, or nearly

all—victims devoted upon the altar of the golden calf—the noblest

holocaust that ever wafted its sacrificial incense heavenward. It is

pitiful to think upon.

It was a splendid population—for all the slow, sleepy, sluggish-brained

sloths staid at home—you never find that sort of people among

pioneers—you cannot build pioneers out of that sort of material. It was

that population that gave to California a name for getting up astounding

enterprises and rushing them through with a magnificent dash and daring

and a recklessness of cost or consequences, which she bears unto this

day—and when she projects a new surprise, the grave world smiles as

usual, and says “Well, that is California all over.”

But they were rough in those times! They fairly reveled in gold, whisky,

fights, and fandangoes, and were unspeakably happy. The honest miner

raked from a hundred to a thousand dollars out of his claim a day, and

what with the gambling dens and the other entertainments, he hadn’t a

cent the next morning, if he had any sort of luck. They cooked their own

bacon and beans, sewed on their own buttons, washed their own

shirts—blue woollen ones; and if a man wanted a fight on his hands

without any annoying delay, all he had to do was to appear in public in

a white shirt or a stove-pipe hat, and he would be accommodated. For

those people hated aristocrats. They had a particular and malignant

animosity toward what they called a “biled shirt.”

It was a wild, free, disorderly, grotesque society! _Men_—only swarming

hosts of stalwart _men_—nothing juvenile, nothing feminine, visible

anywhere!

In those days miners would flock in crowds to catch a glimpse of that

rare and blessed spectacle, a woman! Old inhabitants tell how, in a

certain camp, the news went abroad early in the morning that a woman was

come! They had seen a calico dress hanging out of a wagon down at the

camping-ground—sign of emigrants from over the great plains. Everybody

went down there, and a shout went up when an actual, bona fide dress was

discovered fluttering in the wind! The male emigrant was visible. The

miners said:

“Fetch her out!”

He said: “It is my wife, gentlemen—she is sick—we have been robbed of

money, provisions, everything, by the Indians—we want to rest.”

“Fetch her out! We’ve got to see her!”

“But, gentlemen, the poor thing, she—”

“FETCH HER OUT!”

416.jpg (87K)

He “fetched her out,” and they swung their hats and sent up three

rousing cheers and a tiger; and they crowded around and gazed at her,

and touched her dress, and listened to her voice with the look of men

who listened to a _memory_ rather than a present reality—and then they

collected twenty-five hundred dollars in gold and gave it to the man,

and swung their hats again and gave three more cheers, and went home

satisfied.

Once I dined in San Francisco with the family of a pioneer, and talked

with his daughter, a young lady whose first experience in San Francisco

was an adventure, though she herself did not remember it, as she was

only two or three years old at the time. Her father said that, after

landing from the ship, they were walking up the street, a servant

leading the party with the little girl in her arms. And presently a huge

miner, bearded, belted, spurred, and bristling with deadly weapons—just

down from a long campaign in the mountains, evidently&mdashbarred the

way, stopped the servant, and stood gazing, with a face all alive with

gratification and astonishment. Then he said, reverently:

417.jpg (58K)

“Well, if it ain’t a child!” And then he snatched a little leather sack

out of his pocket and said to the servant:

“There’s a hundred and fifty dollars in dust, there, and I’ll give it to

you to let me kiss the child!”

That anecdote is _true_.

But see how things change. Sitting at that dinner-table, listening to

that anecdote, if I had offered double the money for the privilege of

kissing the same child, I would have been refused. Seventeen added years

have far more than doubled the price.

And while upon this subject I will remark that once in Star City, in the

Humboldt Mountains, I took my place in a sort of long, post-office

single file of miners, to patiently await my chance to peep through a

crack in the cabin and get a sight of the splendid new sensation—a

genuine, live Woman! And at the end of half of an hour my turn came, and

I put my eye to the crack, and there she was, with one arm akimbo, and

tossing flap-jacks in a frying-pan with the other.

And she was one hundred and sixty-five [Being in calmer mood, now, I

voluntarily knock off a hundred from that.—M.T.] years old, and hadn’t a

tooth in her head.

418.jpg (28K)

CHAPTER LVIII.

For a few months I enjoyed what to me was an entirely new phase of

existence—a butterfly idleness; nothing to do, nobody to be responsible

to, and untroubled with financial uneasiness. I fell in love with the

most cordial and sociable city in the Union. After the sage-brush and

alkali deserts of Washoe, San Francisco was Paradise to me. I lived at

the best hotel, exhibited my clothes in the most conspicuous places,

infested the opera, and learned to seem enraptured with music which

oftener afflicted my ignorant ear than enchanted it, if I had had the

vulgar honesty to confess it. However, I suppose I was not greatly worse

than the most of my countrymen in that. I had longed to be a butterfly,

and I was one at last. I attended private parties in sumptuous evening

dress, simpered and aired my graces like a born beau, and polked and

schottisched with a step peculiar to myself—and the kangaroo. In a word,

I kept the due state of a man worth a hundred thousand dollars

(prospectively,) and likely to reach absolute affluence when that

silver- mine sale should be ultimately achieved in the East. I spent

money with a free hand, and meantime watched the stock sales with an

interested eye and looked to see what might happen in Nevada.

420.jpg (49K)

Something very important happened. The property holders of Nevada voted

against the State Constitution; but the folks who had nothing to lose

were in the majority, and carried the measure over their heads. But

after all it did not immediately look like a disaster, though

unquestionably it was one I hesitated, calculated the chances, and then

concluded not to sell. Stocks went on rising; speculation went mad;

bankers, merchants, lawyers, doctors, mechanics, laborers, even the very

washerwomen and servant girls, were putting up their earnings on silver

stocks, and every sun that rose in the morning went down on paupers

enriched and rich men beggared. What a gambling carnival it was! Gould

and Curry soared to six thousand three hundred dollars a foot! And

then—all of a sudden, out went the bottom and everything and everybody

went to ruin and destruction! The wreck was complete.

The bubble scarcely left a microscopic moisture behind it. I was an

early beggar and a thorough one. My hoarded stocks were not worth the

paper they were printed on. I threw them all away. I, the cheerful idiot

that had been squandering money like water, and thought myself beyond

the reach of misfortune, had not now as much as fifty dollars when I

gathered together my various debts and paid them. I removed from the

hotel to a very private boarding house. I took a reporter’s berth and

went to work. I was not entirely broken in spirit, for I was building

confidently on the sale of the silver mine in the east. But I could not

hear from Dan. My letters miscarried or were not answered.

One day I did not feel vigorous and remained away from the office. The

next day I went down toward noon as usual, and found a note on my desk

which had been there twenty-four hours. It was signed “Marshall”—the

Virginia reporter—and contained a request that I should call at the

hotel and see him and a friend or two that night, as they would sail for

the east in the morning. A postscript added that their errand was a big

mining speculation! I was hardly ever so sick in my life. I abused

myself for leaving Virginia and entrusting to another man a matter I

ought to have attended to myself; I abused myself for remaining away

from the office on the one day of all the year that I should have been

there. And thus berating myself I trotted a mile to the steamer wharf

and arrived just in time to be too late. The ship was in the stream and

under way.

421.jpg (20K)

I comforted myself with the thought that may be the speculation would

amount to nothing—poor comfort at best—and then went back to my slavery,

resolved to put up with my thirty-five dollars a week and forget all

about it.

A month afterward I enjoyed my first earthquake. It was one which was

long called the “great” earthquake, and is doubtless so distinguished

till this day. It was just after noon, on a bright October day. I was

coming down Third street. The only objects in motion anywhere in sight

in that thickly built and populous quarter, were a man in a buggy behind

me, and a street car wending slowly up the cross street. Otherwise, all

was solitude and a Sabbath stillness. As I turned the corner, around a

frame house, there was a great rattle and jar, and it occurred to me

that here was an item!—no doubt a fight in that house. Before I could

turn and seek the door, there came a really terrific shock; the ground

seemed to roll under me in waves, interrupted by a violent joggling up

and down, and there was a heavy grinding noise as of brick houses

rubbing together. I fell up against the frame house and hurt my elbow. I

knew what it was, now, and from mere reportorial instinct, nothing else,

took out my watch and noted the time of day; at that moment a third and

still severer shock came, and as I reeled about on the pavement trying

to keep my footing, I saw a sight! The entire front of a tall four-story

brick building in Third street sprung outward like a door and fell

sprawling across the street, raising a dust like a great volume of

smoke! And here came the buggy—overboard went the man, and in less time

than I can tell it the vehicle was distributed in small fragments along

three hundred yards of street.

422.jpg (87K)

One could have fancied that somebody had fired a charge of chair-rounds

and rags down the thoroughfare. The street car had stopped, the horses

were rearing and plunging, the passengers were pouring out at both ends,

and one fat man had crashed half way through a glass window on one side

of the car, got wedged fast and was squirming and screaming like an

impaled madman. Every door, of every house, as far as the eye could

reach, was vomiting a stream of human beings; and almost before one

could execute a wink and begin another, there was a massed multitude of

people stretching in endless procession down every street my position

commanded. Never was solemn solitude turned into teeming life quicker.

423a.jpg (38K)

Of the wonders wrought by “the great earthquake,” these were all that

came under my eye; but the tricks it did, elsewhere, and far and wide

over the town, made toothsome gossip for nine days.

The destruction of property was trifling—the injury to it was wide-

spread and somewhat serious.

423b.jpg (37K)

The “curiosities” of the earthquake were simply endless. Gentlemen and

ladies who were sick, or were taking a siesta, or had dissipated till a

late hour and were making up lost sleep, thronged into the public

streets in all sorts of queer apparel, and some without any at all. One

woman who had been washing a naked child, ran down the street holding it

by the ankles as if it were a dressed turkey. Prominent citizens who

were supposed to keep the Sabbath strictly, rushed out of saloons in

their shirt-sleeves, with billiard cues in their hands. Dozens of men

with necks swathed in napkins, rushed from barber-shops, lathered to the

eyes or with one cheek clean shaved and the other still bearing a hairy

stubble. Horses broke from stables, and a frightened dog rushed up a

short attic ladder and out on to a roof, and when his scare was over had

not the nerve to go down again the same way he had gone up.

A prominent editor flew down stairs, in the principal hotel, with

nothing on but one brief undergarment—met a chambermaid, and exclaimed:

“Oh, what _shall_ I do! Where shall I go!”

She responded with naive serenity:

“If you have no choice, you might try a clothing-store!”

424.jpg (63K)

A certain foreign consul’s lady was the acknowledged leader of fashion,

and every time she appeared in anything new or extraordinary, the ladies

in the vicinity made a raid on their husbands’ purses and arrayed

themselves similarly. One man who had suffered considerably and growled

accordingly, was standing at the window when the shocks came, and the

next instant the consul’s wife, just out of the bath, fled by with no

other apology for clothing than—a bath-towel! The sufferer rose superior

to the terrors of the earthquake, and said to his wife:

“Now that is something _like_! Get out your towel my dear!”

425 (40K)

The plastering that fell from ceilings in San Francisco that day, would

have covered several acres of ground. For some days afterward, groups of

eyeing and pointing men stood about many a building, looking at long

zig- zag cracks that extended from the eaves to the ground. Four feet of

the tops of three chimneys on one house were broken square off and

turned around in such a way as to completely stop the draft.

A crack a hundred feet long gaped open six inches wide in the middle of

one street and then shut together again with such force, as to ridge up

the meeting earth like a slender grave. A lady sitting in her rocking

and quaking parlor, saw the wall part at the ceiling, open and shut

twice, like a mouth, and then drop the end of a brick on the floor like

a tooth. She was a woman easily disgusted with foolishness, and she

arose and went out of there. One lady who was coming down stairs was

astonished to see a bronze Hercules lean forward on its pedestal as if

to strike her with its club. They both reached the bottom of the flight

at the same time,—the woman insensible from the fright. Her child, born

some little time afterward, was club-footed. However—on second

thought,—if the reader sees any coincidence in this, he must do it at

his own risk.

The first shock brought down two or three huge organ-pipes in one of the

churches. The minister, with uplifted hands, was just closing the

services. He glanced up, hesitated, and said:

“However, we will omit the benediction!”—and the next instant there was

a vacancy in the atmosphere where he had stood.

After the first shock, an Oakland minister said:

“Keep your seats! There is no better place to die than this”—

And added, after the third:

“But outside is good enough!” He then skipped out at the back door.

426.jpg (40K)

Such another destruction of mantel ornaments and toilet bottles as the

earthquake created, San Francisco never saw before. There was hardly a

girl or a matron in the city but suffered losses of this kind. Suspended

pictures were thrown down, but oftener still, by a curious freak of the

earthquake’s humor, they were whirled completely around with their faces

to the wall! There was great difference of opinion, at first, as to the

course or direction the earthquake traveled, but water that splashed out

of various tanks and buckets settled that. Thousands of people were made

so sea-sick by the rolling and pitching of floors and streets that they

were weak and bed-ridden for hours, and some few for even days

afterward.—Hardly an individual escaped nausea entirely.

The queer earthquake—episodes that formed the staple of San Francisco

gossip for the next week would fill a much larger book than this, and so

I will diverge from the subject.

By and by, in the due course of things, I picked up a copy of the

Enterprise one day, and fell under this cruel blow:

NEVADA MINES IN NEW YORK.—G. M. Marshall, Sheba Hurs and Amos H. Rose,

who left San Francisco last July for New York City, with ores from mines

in Pine Wood District, Humboldt County, and on the Reese River range,

have disposed of a mine containing six thousand feet and called the Pine

Mountains Consolidated, for the sum of $3,000,000. The stamps on the

deed, which is now on its way to Humboldt County, from New York, for

record, amounted to $3,000, which is said to be the largest amount of

stamps ever placed on one document. A working capital of $1,000,000 has

been paid into the treasury, and machinery has already been purchased

for a large quartz mill, which will be put up as soon as possible. The

stock in this company is all full paid and entirely unassessable. The

ores of the mines in this district somewhat resemble those of the Sheba

mine in Humboldt. Sheba Hurst, the discoverer of the mines, with his

friends corralled all the best leads and all the land and timber they

desired before making public their whereabouts. Ores from there, assayed

in this city, showed them to be exceedingly rich in silver and

gold—silver predominating. There is an abundance of wood and water in

the District. We are glad to know that New York capital has been

enlisted in the development of the mines of this region. Having seen the

ores and assays, we are satisfied that the mines of the District are

very valuable—anything but wild-cat.

Once more native imbecility had carried the day, and I had lost a

million! It was the “blind lead” over again.

Let us not dwell on this miserable matter. If I were inventing these

things, I could be wonderfully humorous over them; but they are too true

to be talked of with hearty levity, even at this distant day. [True, and

yet not exactly as given in the above figures, possibly. I saw Marshall,

months afterward, and although he had plenty of money he did not claim

to have captured an entire million. In fact I gathered that he had not

then received $50,000. Beyond that figure his fortune appeared to

consist of uncertain vast expectations rather than prodigious

certainties. However, when the above item appeared in print I put full

faith in it, and incontinently wilted and went to seed under it.]

Suffice it that I so lost heart, and so yielded myself up to repinings

and sighings and foolish regrets, that I neglected my duties and became

about worthless, as a reporter for a brisk newspaper. And at last one of

the proprietors took me aside, with a charity I still remember with

considerable respect, and gave me an opportunity to resign my berth and

so save myself the disgrace of a dismissal.

CHAPTER LIX.

For a time I wrote literary screeds for the Golden Era. C. H. Webb had

established a very excellent literary weekly called the Californian, but

high merit was no guaranty of success; it languished, and he sold out to

three printers, and Bret Harte became editor at $20 a week, and I was

employed to contribute an article a week at $12. But the journal still

languished, and the printers sold out to Captain Ogden, a rich man and a

pleasant gentleman who chose to amuse himself with such an expensive

luxury without much caring about the cost of it. When he grew tired of

the novelty, he re-sold to the printers, the paper presently died a

peaceful death, and I was out of work again. I would not mention these

things but for the fact that they so aptly illustrate the ups and downs

that characterize life on the Pacific coast. A man could hardly stumble

into such a variety of queer vicissitudes in any other country.

For two months my sole occupation was avoiding acquaintances; for during

that time I did not earn a penny, or buy an article of any kind, or pay

my board. I became a very adept at “slinking.” I slunk from back street

to back street, I slunk away from approaching faces that looked

familiar, I slunk to my meals, ate them humbly and with a mute apology

for every mouthful I robbed my generous landlady of, and at midnight,

after wanderings that were but slinkings away from cheerfulness and

light, I slunk to my bed. I felt meaner, and lowlier and more despicable

than the worms. During all this time I had but one piece of money—a

silver ten cent piece—and I held to it and would not spend it on any

account, lest the consciousness coming strong upon me that I was

entirely penniless, might suggest suicide. I had pawned every thing but

the clothes I had on; so I clung to my dime desperately, till it was

smooth with handling.

429.jpg (36K)

However, I am forgetting. I did have one other occupation beside that of

“slinking.” It was the entertaining of a collector (and being

entertained by him,) who had in his hands the Virginia banker’s bill for

forty-six dollars which I had loaned my schoolmate, the “Prodigal.” This

man used to call regularly once a week and dun me, and sometimes

oftener. He did it from sheer force of habit, for he knew he could get

nothing. He would get out his bill, calculate the interest for me, at

five per cent a month, and show me clearly that there was no attempt at

fraud in it and no mistakes; and then plead, and argue and dun with all

his might for any sum—any little trifle—even a dollar—even half a

dollar, on account. Then his duty was accomplished and his conscience

free. He immediately dropped the subject there always; got out a couple

of cigars and divided, put his feet in the window, and then we would

have a long, luxurious talk about everything and everybody, and he would

furnish me a world of curious dunning adventures out of the ample store

in his memory. By and by he would clap his hat on his head, shake hands

and say briskly:

“Well, business is business—can’t stay with you always!”—and was off in

a second.

The idea of pining for a dun! And yet I used to long for him to come,

and would get as uneasy as any mother if the day went by without his

visit, when I was expecting him. But he never collected that bill, at

last nor any part of it. I lived to pay it to the banker myself.

Misery loves company. Now and then at night, in out-of-the way, dimly

lighted places, I found myself happening on another child of misfortune.

He looked so seedy and forlorn, so homeless and friendless and forsaken,

that I yearned toward him as a brother. I wanted to claim kinship with

him and go about and enjoy our wretchedness together. The drawing toward

each other must have been mutual; at any rate we got to falling together

oftener, though still seemingly by accident; and although we did not

speak or evince any recognition, I think the dull anxiety passed out of

both of us when we saw each other, and then for several hours we would

idle along contentedly, wide apart, and glancing furtively in at home

lights and fireside gatherings, out of the night shadows, and very much

enjoying our dumb companionship.

Finally we spoke, and were inseparable after that. For our woes were

identical, almost. He had been a reporter too, and lost his berth, and

this was his experience, as nearly as I can recollect it. After losing

his berth he had gone down, down, down, with never a halt: from a

boarding house on Russian Hill to a boarding house in Kearney street;

from thence to Dupont; from thence to a low sailor den; and from thence

to lodgings in goods boxes and empty hogsheads near the wharves. Then;

for a while, he had gained a meagre living by sewing up bursted sacks of

grain on the piers; when that failed he had found food here and there as

chance threw it in his way. He had ceased to show his face in daylight,

now, for a reporter knows everybody, rich and poor, high and low, and

cannot well avoid familiar faces in the broad light of day.

This mendicant Blucher—I call him that for convenience—was a splendid

creature. He was full of hope, pluck and philosophy; he was well read

and a man of cultivated taste; he had a bright wit and was a master of

satire; his kindliness and his generous spirit made him royal in my eyes

and changed his curb-stone seat to a throne and his damaged hat to a

crown.

He had an adventure, once, which sticks fast in my memory as the most

pleasantly grotesque that ever touched my sympathies. He had been

without a penny for two months. He had shirked about obscure streets,

among friendly dim lights, till the thing had become second nature to

him. But at last he was driven abroad in daylight. The cause was

sufficient; _he had not tasted food for forty-eight hours_, and he could

not endure the misery of his hunger in idle hiding. He came along a back

street, glowering at the loaves in bake-shop windows, and feeling that

he could trade his life away for a morsel to eat. The sight of the bread

doubled his hunger; but it was good to look at it, any how, and imagine

what one might do if one only had it.

Presently, in the middle of the street he saw a shining spot—looked

again—did not, and could not, believe his eyes—turned away, to try them,

then looked again. It was a verity—no vain, hunger-inspired delusion—it

was a silver dime!

431.jpg (31K)

He snatched it—gloated over it; doubted it—bit it—found it

genuine—choked his heart down, and smothered a halleluiah. Then he

looked around—saw that nobody was looking at him—threw the dime down

where it was before—walked away a few steps, and approached again,

pretending he did not know it was there, so that he could re-enjoy the

luxury of finding it. He walked around it, viewing it from different

points; then sauntered about with his hands in his pockets, looking up

at the signs and now and then glancing at it and feeling the old thrill

again. Finally he took it up, and went away, fondling it in his pocket.

He idled through unfrequented streets, stopping in doorways and corners

to take it out and look at it. By and by he went home to his lodgings—an

empty queens-ware hogshead,—and employed himself till night trying to

make up his mind what to buy with it. But it was hard to do. To get the

most for it was the idea. He knew that at the Miner’s Restaurant he

could get a plate of beans and a piece of bread for ten cents; or a

fish-ball and some few trifles, but they gave “no bread with one fish-

ball” there. At French Pete’s he could get a veal cutlet, plain, and

some radishes and bread, for ten cents; or a cup of coffee—a pint at

least—and a slice of bread; but the slice was not thick enough by the

eighth of an inch, and sometimes they were still more criminal than that

in the cutting of it. At seven o’clock his hunger was wolfish; and still

his mind was not made up. He turned out and went up Merchant street,

still ciphering; and chewing a bit of stick, as is the way of starving

men.

432.jpg (38K)

He passed before the lights of Martin’s restaurant, the most

aristocratic in the city, and stopped. It was a place where he had often

dined, in better days, and Martin knew him well. Standing aside, just

out of the range of the light, he worshiped the quails and steaks in the

show window, and imagined that may be the fairy times were not gone yet

and some prince in disguise would come along presently and tell him to

go in there and take whatever he wanted. He chewed his stick with a

hungry interest as he warmed to his subject. Just at this juncture he

was conscious of some one at his side, sure enough; and then a finger

touched his arm. He looked up, over his shoulder, and saw an

apparition—a very allegory of Hunger! It was a man six feet high, gaunt,

unshaven, hung with rags; with a haggard face and sunken cheeks, and

eyes that pleaded piteously. This phantom said:

“Come with me—please.”

He locked his arm in Blucher’s and walked up the street to where the

passengers were few and the light not strong, and then facing about, put

out his hands in a beseeching way, and said:

“Friend—stranger—look at me! Life is easy to you—you go about, placid

and content, as I did once, in my day—you have been in there, and eaten

your sumptuous supper, and picked your teeth, and hummed your tune, and

thought your pleasant thoughts, and said to yourself it is a good

world—but you’ve never _suffered_! You don’t know what trouble is—you

don’t know what misery is—nor hunger! Look at me! Stranger have pity on

a poor friendless, homeless dog! As God is my judge, I have not tasted

food for eight and forty hours!—look in my eyes and see if I lie! Give

me the least trifle in the world to keep me from

starving—anything—twenty-five cents! Do it, stranger—do it, _please_. It

will be nothing to you, but life to me. Do it, and I will go down on my

knees and lick the dust before you! I will kiss your footprints—I will

worship the very ground you walk on! Only twenty-five cents! I am

famishing—perishing—starving by inches! For God’s sake don’t desert me!”

433.jpg (71K)

Blucher was bewildered—and touched, too—stirred to the depths. He

reflected. Thought again. Then an idea struck him, and he said:

“Come with me.”

He took the outcast’s arm, walked him down to Martin’s restaurant,

seated him at a marble table, placed the bill of fare before him, and

said:

“Order what you want, friend. Charge it to me, Mr. Martin.”

“All right, Mr. Blucher,” said Martin.

Then Blucher stepped back and leaned against the counter and watched the

man stow away cargo after cargo of buckwheat cakes at seventy-five cents

a plate; cup after cup of coffee, and porter house steaks worth two

dollars apiece; and when six dollars and a half’s worth of destruction

had been accomplished, and the stranger’s hunger appeased, Blucher went

down to French Pete’s, bought a veal cutlet plain, a slice of bread, and

three radishes, with his dime, and set to and feasted like a king!

Take the episode all around, it was as odd as any that can be culled

from the myriad curiosities of Californian life, perhaps.

CHAPTER LX.

By and by, an old friend of mine, a miner, came down from one of the

decayed mining camps of Tuolumne, California, and I went back with him.

We lived in a small cabin on a verdant hillside, and there were not five

other cabins in view over the wide expanse of hill and forest. Yet a

flourishing city of two or three thousand population had occupied this

grassy dead solitude during the flush times of twelve or fifteen years

before, and where our cabin stood had once been the heart of the teeming

hive, the centre of the city. When the mines gave out the town fell into

decay, and in a few years wholly disappeared—streets, dwellings, shops,

everything—and left no sign. The grassy slopes were as green and smooth

and desolate of life as if they had never been disturbed. The mere

handful of miners still remaining, had seen the town spring up spread,

grow and flourish in its pride; and they had seen it sicken and die, and

pass away like a dream. With it their hopes had died, and their zest of

life. They had long ago resigned themselves to their exile, and ceased

to correspond with their distant friends or turn longing eyes toward

their early homes. They had accepted banishment, forgotten the world and

been forgotten of the world. They were far from telegraphs and

railroads, and they stood, as it were, in a living grave, dead to the

events that stirred the globe’s great populations, dead to the common

interests of men, isolated and outcast from brotherhood with their kind.

It was the most singular, and almost the most touching and melancholy

exile that fancy can imagine.—One of my associates in this locality, for

two or three months, was a man who had had a university education; but

now for eighteen years he had decayed there by inches, a bearded, rough-

clad, clay-stained miner, and at times, among his sighings and

soliloquizings, he unconsciously interjected vaguely remembered Latin

and Greek sentences—dead and musty tongues, meet vehicles for the

thoughts of one whose dreams were all of the past, whose life was a

failure; a tired man, burdened with the present, and indifferent to the

future; a man without ties, hopes, interests, waiting for rest and the

end.

436.jpg (34K)

In that one little corner of California is found a species of mining

which is seldom or never mentioned in print. It is called “pocket

mining” and I am not aware that any of it is done outside of that little

corner. The gold is not evenly distributed through the surface dirt, as

in ordinary placer mines, but is collected in little spots, and they are

very wide apart and exceedingly hard to find, but when you do find one

you reap a rich and sudden harvest. There are not now more than twenty

pocket miners in that entire little region. I think I know every one of

them personally. I have known one of them to hunt patiently about the

hill-sides every day for eight months without finding gold enough to

make a snuff-box—his grocery bill running up relentlessly all the

time—and then find a pocket and take out of it two thousand dollars in

two dips of his shovel. I have known him to take out three thousand

dollars in two hours, and go and pay up every cent of his indebtedness,

then enter on a dazzling spree that finished the last of his treasure

before the night was gone. And the next day he bought his groceries on

credit as usual, and shouldered his pan and shovel and went off to the

hills hunting pockets again happy and content. This is the most

fascinating of all the different kinds of mining, and furnishes a very

handsome percentage of victims to the lunatic asylum.

Pocket hunting is an ingenious process. You take a spadeful of earth

from the hill-side and put it in a large tin pan and dissolve and wash

it gradually away till nothing is left but a teaspoonful of fine

sediment. Whatever gold was in that earth has remained, because, being

the heaviest, it has sought the bottom. Among the sediment you will find

half a dozen yellow particles no larger than pin-heads. You are

delighted. You move off to one side and wash another pan. If you find

gold again, you move to one side further, and wash a third pan. If you

find _no_ gold this time, you are delighted again, because you know you

are on the right scent.

You lay an imaginary plan, shaped like a fan, with its handle up the

hill—for just where the end of the handle is, you argue that the rich

deposit lies hidden, whose vagrant grains of gold have escaped and been

washed down the hill, spreading farther and farther apart as they

wandered. And so you proceed up the hill, washing the earth and

narrowing your lines every time the absence of gold in the pan shows

that you are outside the spread of the fan; and at last, twenty yards up

the hill your lines have converged to a point—a single foot from that

point you cannot find any gold. Your breath comes short and quick, you

are feverish with excitement; the dinner-bell may ring its clapper off,

you pay no attention; friends may die, weddings transpire, houses burn

down, they are nothing to you; you sweat and dig and delve with a

frantic interest—and all at once you strike it! Up comes a spadeful of

earth and quartz that is all lovely with soiled lumps and leaves and

sprays of gold. Sometimes that one spadeful is all—$500. Sometimes the

nest contains $10,000, and it takes you three or four days to get it all

out. The pocket-miners tell of one nest that yielded $60,000 and two men

exhausted it in two weeks, and then sold the ground for $10,000 to a

party who never got $300 out of it afterward.

437.jpg (37K)

The hogs are good pocket hunters. All the summer they root around the

bushes, and turn up a thousand little piles of dirt, and then the miners

long for the rains; for the rains beat upon these little piles and wash

them down and expose the gold, possibly right over a pocket. Two pockets

were found in this way by the same man in one day. One had $5,000 in it

and the other $8,000. That man could appreciate it, for he hadn’t had a

cent for about a year.

In Tuolumne lived two miners who used to go to the neighboring village

in the afternoon and return every night with household supplies. Part of

the distance they traversed a trail, and nearly always sat down to rest

on a great boulder that lay beside the path. In the course of thirteen

years they had worn that boulder tolerably smooth, sitting on it. By and

by two vagrant Mexicans came along and occupied the seat. They began to

amuse themselves by chipping off flakes from the boulder with a sledge-

hammer. They examined one of these flakes and found it rich with gold.

That boulder paid them $800 afterward. But the aggravating circumstance

was that these “Greasers” knew that there must be more gold where that

boulder came from, and so they went panning up the hill and found what

was probably the richest pocket that region has yet produced. It took

three months to exhaust it, and it yielded $120,000. The two American

miners who used to sit on the boulder are poor yet, and they take turn

about in getting up early in the morning to curse those Mexicans—and

when it comes down to pure ornamental cursing, the native American is

gifted above the sons of men.

I have dwelt at some length upon this matter of pocket mining because it

is a subject that is seldom referred to in print, and therefore I judged

that it would have for the reader that interest which naturally attaches

to novelty.

CHAPTER LXI.

One of my comrades there—another of those victims of eighteen years of

unrequited toil and blighted hopes—was one of the gentlest spirits that

ever bore its patient cross in a weary exile: grave and simple Dick

Baker, pocket-miner of Dead-House Gulch.—He was forty-six, gray as a

rat, earnest, thoughtful, slenderly educated, slouchily dressed and

clay-soiled, but his heart was finer metal than any gold his shovel ever

brought to light—than any, indeed, that ever was mined or minted.

Whenever he was out of luck and a little down-hearted, he would fall to

mourning over the loss of a wonderful cat he used to own (for where

women and children are not, men of kindly impulses take up with pets,

for they must love something). And he always spoke of the strange

sagacity of that cat with the air of a man who believed in his secret

heart that there was something human about it—may be even supernatural.

I heard him talking about this animal once. He said:

440.jpg (18K)

“Gentlemen, I used to have a cat here, by the name of Tom Quartz, which

you’d a took an interest in I reckon—most any body would. I had him here

eight year—and he was the remarkablest cat _I_ ever see. He was a large

gray one of the Tom specie, an’ he had more hard, natchral sense than

any man in this camp—’n’ a _power_ of dignity—he wouldn’t let the

Gov’ner of Californy be familiar with him. He never ketched a rat in his

life—’peared to be above it. He never cared for nothing but mining. He

knowed more about mining, that cat did, than any man _I_ ever, ever see.

You couldn’t tell _him_ noth’n ’bout placer diggin’s—’n’ as for pocket

mining, why he was just born for it.

“He would dig out after me an’ Jim when we went over the hills

prospect’n’, and he would trot along behind us for as much as five mile,

if we went so fur. An’ he had the best judgment about mining ground—why

you never see anything like it. When we went to work, he’d scatter a

glance around, ’n’ if he didn’t think much of the indications, he would

give a look as much as to say, ‘Well, I’ll have to get you to excuse

_me_,’ ’n’ without another word he’d hyste his nose into the air ’n’

shove for home. But if the ground suited him, he would lay low ’n’ keep

dark till the first pan was washed, ’n’ then he would sidle up ’n’ take

a look, an’ if there was about six or seven grains of gold _he_ was

satisfied—he didn’t want no better prospect ’n’ that—’n’ then he would

lay down on our coats and snore like a steamboat till we’d struck the

pocket, an’ then get up ’n’ superintend. He was nearly lightnin’ on

superintending.

“Well, bye an’ bye, up comes this yer quartz excitement. Every body was

into it—every body was pick’n’ ’n’ blast’n’ instead of shovelin’ dirt on

the hill side—every body was put’n’ down a shaft instead of scrapin’ the

surface. Noth’n’ would do Jim, but _we_ must tackle the ledges, too, ’n’

so we did. We commenced put’n’ down a shaft, ’n’ Tom Quartz he begin to

wonder what in the Dickens it was all about. He hadn’t ever seen any

mining like that before, ’n’ he was all upset, as you may say—he

couldn’t come to a right understanding of it no way—it was too many for

_him_. He was down on it, too, you bet you—he was down on it

powerful—’n’ always appeared to consider it the cussedest foolishness

out. But that cat, you know, was _always_ agin new fangled

arrangements—somehow he never could abide’em. _You_ know how it is with

old habits. But by an’ by Tom Quartz begin to git sort of reconciled a

little, though he never _could_ altogether understand that eternal

sinkin’ of a shaft an’ never pannin’ out any thing. At last he got to

comin’ down in the shaft, hisself, to try to cipher it out. An’ when

he’d git the blues, ’n’ feel kind o’scruffy, ’n’ aggravated ’n’

disgusted—knowin’ as he did, that the bills was runnin’ up all the time

an’ we warn’t makin’ a cent—he would curl up on a gunny sack in the

corner an’ go to sleep. Well, one day when the shaft was down about

eight foot, the rock got so hard that we had to put in a blast—the first

blast’n’ we’d ever done since Tom Quartz was born. An’ then we lit the

fuse ’n’ clumb out ’n’ got off ’bout fifty yards—’n’ forgot ’n’ left Tom

Quartz sound asleep on the gunny sack.

441.jpg (89K)

“In ’bout a minute we seen a puff of smoke bust up out of the hole, ’n’

then everything let go with an awful crash, ’n’ about four million ton

of rocks ’n’ dirt ’n’ smoke ’n; splinters shot up ’bout a mile an’ a

half into the air, an’ by George, right in the dead centre of it was old

Tom Quartz a goin’ end over end, an’ a snortin’ an’ a sneez’n’, an’ a

clawin’ an’ a reachin’ for things like all possessed. But it warn’t no

use, you know, it warn’t no use. An’ that was the last we see of _him_

for about two minutes ’n’ a half, an’ then all of a sudden it begin to

rain rocks and rubbage, an’ directly he come down ker-whop about ten

foot off f’m where we stood Well, I reckon he was p’raps the orneriest

lookin’ beast you ever see. One ear was sot back on his neck, ’n’ his

tail was stove up, ’n’ his eye-winkers was swinged off, ’n’ he was all

blacked up with powder an’ smoke, an’ all sloppy with mud ’n’ slush f’m

one end to the other.

“Well sir, it warn’t no use to try to apologize—we couldn’t say a word.

He took a sort of a disgusted look at hisself, ’n’ then he looked at

us—an’ it was just exactly the same as if he had said—’Gents, may be

_you_ think it’s smart to take advantage of a cat that ’ain’t had no

experience of quartz minin’, but _I_ think _different_’—an’ then he

turned on his heel ’n’ marched off home without ever saying another

word.

442.jpg (16K)

“That was jest his style. An’ may be you won’t believe it, but after

that you never see a cat so prejudiced agin quartz mining as what he

was. An’ by an’ bye when he _did_ get to goin’ down in the shaft agin,

you’d ’a been astonished at his sagacity. The minute we’d tetch off a

blast ’n’ the fuse’d begin to sizzle, he’d give a look as much as to

say: ’Well, I’ll have to git you to excuse _me_,’ an’ it was surpris’n’

the way he’d shin out of that hole ’n’ go f’r a tree. Sagacity? It ain’t

no name for it. ’Twas _inspiration_!”

I said, “Well, Mr. Baker, his prejudice against quartz-mining _was_

remarkable, considering how he came by it. Couldn’t you ever cure him of

it?”

“_Cure him!_ No! When Tom Quartz was sot once, he was _always_ sot—and

you might a blowed him up as much as three million times ’n’ you’d never

a broken him of his cussed prejudice agin quartz mining.”

The affection and the pride that lit up Baker’s face when he delivered

this tribute to the firmness of his humble friend of other days, will

always be a vivid memory with me.

At the end of two months we had never “struck” a pocket. We had panned

up and down the hillsides till they looked plowed like a field; we could

have put in a crop of grain, then, but there would have been no way to

get it to market. We got many good “prospects,” but when the gold gave

out in the pan and we dug down, hoping and longing, we found only

emptiness—the pocket that should have been there was as barren as our

own.—At last we shouldered our pans and shovels and struck out over the

hills to try new localities. We prospected around Angel’s Camp, in

Calaveras county, during three weeks, but had no success. Then we

wandered on foot among the mountains, sleeping under the trees at night,

for the weather was mild, but still we remained as centless as the last

rose of summer. That is a poor joke, but it is in pathetic harmony with

the circumstances, since we were so poor ourselves. In accordance with

the custom of the country, our door had always stood open and our board

welcome to tramping miners—they drifted along nearly every day, dumped

their paust shovels by the threshold and took “pot luck” with us—and now

on our own tramp we never found cold hospitality.

Our wanderings were wide and in many directions; and now I could give

the reader a vivid description of the Big Trees and the marvels of the

Yo Semite—but what has this reader done to me that I should persecute

him? I will deliver him into the hands of less conscientious tourists

and take his blessing. Let me be charitable, though I fail in all

virtues else.

Note: Some of the phrases in the above are mining technicalities,

purely, and may be a little obscure to the general reader. In “placer

diggings” the gold is scattered all through the surface dirt; in

“pocket” diggings it is concentrated in one little spot; in “quartz” the

gold is in a solid, continuous vein of rock, enclosed between distinct

walls of some other kind of stone—and this is the most laborious and

expensive of all the different kinds of mining. “Prospecting” is hunting

for a “placer”; “indications” are signs of its presence; “panning out”

refers to the washing process by which the grains of gold are separated

from the dirt; a “prospect” is what one finds in the first panful of

dirt—and its value determines whether it is a good or a bad prospect,

and whether it is worth while to tarry there or seek further.

CHAPTER LXII.

After a three months’ absence, I found myself in San Francisco again,

without a cent. When my credit was about exhausted, (for I had become

too mean and lazy, now, to work on a morning paper, and there were no

vacancies on the evening journals,) I was created San Francisco

correspondent of the _Enterprise_, and at the end of five months I was

out of debt, but my interest in my work was gone; for my correspondence

being a daily one, without rest or respite, I got unspeakably tired of

it. I wanted another change. The vagabond instinct was strong upon me.

Fortune favored and I got a new berth and a delightful one. It was to go

down to the Sandwich Islands and write some letters for the Sacramento

_Union_, an excellent journal and liberal with employees.

We sailed in the propeller _Ajax_, in the middle of winter. The almanac

called it winter, distinctly enough, but the weather was a compromise

between spring and summer. Six days out of port, it became summer

altogether. We had some thirty passengers; among them a cheerful soul by

the name of Williams, and three sea-worn old whaleship captains going

down to join their vessels. These latter played euchre in the smoking

room day and night, drank astonishing quantities of raw whisky without

being in the least affected by it, and were the happiest people I think

I ever saw. And then there was “the old Admiral—” a retired whaleman. He

was a roaring, terrific combination of wind and lightning and thunder,

and earnest, whole-souled profanity. But nevertheless he was tender-

hearted as a girl. He was a raving, deafening, devastating typhoon,

laying waste the cowering seas but with an unvexed refuge in the centre

where all comers were safe and at rest. Nobody could know the “Admiral”

without liking him; and in a sudden and dire emergency I think no friend

of his would know which to choose—to be cursed by him or prayed for by a

less efficient person.

445.jpg (65K)

His Title of “Admiral” was more strictly “official” than any ever worn

by a naval officer before or since, perhaps—for it was the voluntary

offering of a whole nation, and came direct from the _people_ themselves

without any intermediate red tape—the people of the Sandwich Islands. It

was a title that came to him freighted with affection, and honor, and

appreciation of his unpretending merit. And in testimony of the

genuineness of the title it was publicly ordained that an exclusive flag

should be devised for him and used solely to welcome his coming and wave

him God-speed in his going. From that time forth, whenever his ship was

signaled in the offing, or he catted his anchor and stood out to sea,

that ensign streamed from the royal halliards on the parliament house

and the nation lifted their hats to it with spontaneous accord.

Yet he had never fired a gun or fought a battle in his life. When I knew

him on board the _Ajax_, he was seventy-two years old and had plowed the

salt water sixty-one of them. For sixteen years he had gone in and out

of the harbor of Honolulu in command of a whaleship, and for sixteen

more had been captain of a San Francisco and Sandwich Island passenger

packet and had never had an accident or lost a vessel. The simple

natives knew him for a friend who never failed them, and regarded him as

children regard a father. It was a dangerous thing to oppress them when

the roaring Admiral was around.

Two years before I knew the Admiral, he had retired from the sea on a

competence, and had sworn a colossal nine-jointed oath that he would

“never go within _smelling_ distance of the salt water again as long as

he lived.” And he had conscientiously kept it. That is to say, _he_

considered he had kept it, and it would have been more than dangerous to

suggest to him, even in the gentlest way, that making eleven long sea

voyages, as a passenger, during the two years that had transpired since

he “retired,” was only keeping the general spirit of it and not the

strict letter.

The Admiral knew only one narrow line of conduct to pursue in any and

all cases where there was a fight, and that was to shoulder his way

straight in without an inquiry as to the rights or the merits of it, and

take the part of the weaker side.—And this was the reason why he was

always sure to be present at the trial of any universally execrated

criminal to oppress and intimidate the jury with a vindictive pantomime

of what he would do to them if he ever caught them out of the box. And

this was why harried cats and outlawed dogs that knew him confidently

took sanctuary under his chair in time of trouble. In the beginning he

was the most frantic and bloodthirsty Union man that drew breath in the

shadow of the Flag; but the instant the Southerners began to go down

before the sweep of the Northern armies, he ran up the Confederate

colors and from that time till the end was a rampant and inexorable

secessionist.

He hated intemperance with a more uncompromising animosity than any

individual I have ever met, of either sex; and he was never tired of

storming against it and beseeching friends and strangers alike to be

wary and drink with moderation. And yet if any creature had been

guileless enough to intimate that his absorbing nine gallons of

“straight” whiskey during our voyage was any fraction short of rigid or

inflexible abstemiousness, in that self-same moment the old man would

have spun him to the uttermost parts of the earth in the whirlwind of

his wrath. Mind, I am not saying his whisky ever affected his head or

his legs, for it did not, in even the slightest degree. He was a

capacious container, but he did not hold enough for that. He took a

level tumblerful of whisky every morning before he put his clothes

on—“to sweeten his bilgewater,” he said.—He took another after he got

the most of his clothes on, “to settle his mind and give him his

bearings.” He then shaved, and put on a clean shirt; after which he

recited the Lord’s Prayer in a fervent, thundering bass that shook the

ship to her kelson and suspended all conversation in the main cabin.

Then, at this stage, being invariably “by the head,” or “by the stern,”

or “listed to port or starboard,” he took one more to “put him on an

even keel so that he would mind his hellum and not miss stays and go

about, every time he came up in the wind.”—And now, his state-room door

swung open and the sun of his benignant face beamed redly out upon men

and women and children, and he roared his “Shipmets a’hoy!” in a way

that was calculated to wake the dead and precipitate the final

resurrection; and forth he strode, a picture to look at and a presence

to enforce attention. Stalwart and portly; not a gray hair; broadbrimmed

slouch hat; semi-sailor toggery of blue navy flannel—roomy and ample; a

stately expanse of shirt-front and a liberal amount of black silk neck-

cloth tied with a sailor knot; large chain and imposing seals impending

from his fob; awe-inspiring feet, and “a hand like the hand of

Providence,” as his whaling brethren expressed it; wrist-bands and

sleeves pushed back half way to the elbow, out of respect for the warm

weather, and exposing hairy arms, gaudy with red and blue anchors,

ships, and goddesses of liberty tattooed in India ink. But these details

were only secondary matters—his face was the lodestone that chained the

eye. It was a sultry disk, glowing determinedly out through a weather

beaten mask of mahogany, and studded with warts, seamed with scars,

“blazed” all over with unfailing fresh slips of the razor; and with

cheery eyes, under shaggy brows, contemplating the world from over the

back of a gnarled crag of a nose that loomed vast and lonely out of the

undulating immensity that spread away from its foundations. At his heels

frisked the darling of his bachelor estate, his terrier “Fan,” a

creature no larger than a squirrel. The main part of his daily life was

occupied in looking after “Fan,” in a motherly way, and doctoring her

for a hundred ailments which existed only in his imagination.

448.jpg (48K)

The Admiral seldom read newspapers; and when he did he never believed

anything they said. He read nothing, and believed in nothing, but “The

Old Guard,” a secession periodical published in New York. He carried a

dozen copies of it with him, always, and referred to them for all

required information. If it was not there, he supplied it himself, out

of a bountiful fancy, inventing history, names, dates, and every thing

else necessary to make his point good in an argument. Consequently he

was a formidable antagonist in a dispute. Whenever he swung clear of the

record and began to create history, the enemy was helpless and had to

surrender. Indeed, the enemy could not keep from betraying some little

spark of indignation at his manufactured history—and when it came to

indignation, that was the Admiral’s very “best hold.” He was always

ready for a political argument, and if nobody started one he would do it

himself. With his third retort his temper would begin to rise, and

within five minutes he would be blowing a gale, and within fifteen his

smoking-room audience would be utterly stormed away and the old man left

solitary and alone, banging the table with his fist, kicking the chairs,

and roaring a hurricane of profanity. It got so, after a while, that

whenever the Admiral approached, with politics in his eye, the

passengers would drop out with quiet accord, afraid to meet him; and he

would camp on a deserted field.

449.jpg (34K)

But he found his match at last, and before a full company. At one time

or another, everybody had entered the lists against him and been routed,

except the quiet passenger Williams. He had never been able to get an

expression of opinion out of him on politics. But now, just as the

Admiral drew near the door and the company were about to slip out,

Williams said:

“Admiral, are you _certain_ about that circumstance concerning the

clergymen you mentioned the other day?”—referring to a piece of the

Admiral’s manufactured history.

Every one was amazed at the man’s rashness. The idea of deliberately

inviting annihilation was a thing incomprehensible. The retreat came to

a halt; then everybody sat down again wondering, to await the upshot of

it. The Admiral himself was as surprised as any one. He paused in the

door, with his red handkerchief half raised to his sweating face, and

contemplated the daring reptile in the corner.

“_Certain_ of it? Am I _certain_ of it? Do you think I’ve been lying

about it? What do you take me for? Anybody that don’t know that

circumstance, don’t know anything; a child ought to know it. Read up

your history! Read it up— — — —, and don’t come asking a man if he’s

_certain_ about a bit of ABC stuff that the very southern niggers know

all about.”

Here the Admiral’s fires began to wax hot, the atmosphere thickened, the

coming earthquake rumbled, he began to thunder and lighten. Within three

minutes his volcano was in full irruption and he was discharging flames

and ashes of indignation, belching black volumes of foul history aloft,

and vomiting red-hot torrents of profanity from his crater. Meantime

Williams sat silent, and apparently deeply and earnestly interested in

what the old man was saying. By and by, when the lull came, he said in

the most deferential way, and with the gratified air of a man who has

had a mystery cleared up which had been puzzling him uncomfortably:

“_Now_ I understand it. I always thought I knew that piece of history

well enough, but was still afraid to trust it, because there was not

that convincing particularity about it that one likes to have in

history; but when you mentioned every name, the other day, and every

date, and every little circumstance, in their just order and sequence, I

said to myself, _this_ sounds something like—_this_ is history—_this_ is

putting it in a shape that gives a man confidence; and I said to myself

afterward, I will just ask the Admiral if he is perfectly certain about

the details, and if he is I will come out and thank him for clearing

this matter up for me. And that is what I want to do now—for until you

set that matter right it was nothing but just a confusion in my mind,

without head or tail to it.”

Nobody ever saw the Admiral look so mollified before, and so pleased.

Nobody had ever received his bogus history as gospel before; its

genuineness had always been called in question either by words or looks;

but here was a man that not only swallowed it all down, but was grateful

for the dose. He was taken a back; he hardly knew what to say; even his

profanity failed him. Now, Williams continued, modestly and earnestly: