At Woodward’s Garden, in the city of San Francisco, is a rather badly
chiselled statue of Pandora pulling open her casket of ills. Pandora’s
raiment, I grieve to state, has slipped down about her waist in a
manner exceedingly reprehensible. One evening about twilight, I was
passing that way, and saw a long gaunt miner, evidently just down from
the mountains, and whom I had seen before, standing rather unsteadily
in front of Pandora, admiring her shapely figure, but seemingly afraid
to approach her. Seeing me advance, he turned to me with a queer,
puzzled expression in his funny eyes, and said with an earnestness that
came near defeating its purpose, “Good ev’n’n t’ye, stranger.” “Good
evening, sir,” I replied, after having analyzed his salutation and
extracted the sense of it. Lowering his voice to what was intended for
a whisper, the miner, with a jerk of his thumb Pandoraward, continued:
“Stranger, d’ye hap’n t’know ’er?” “Certainly; that is Bridget Pandora,
a Greek maiden, in the pay of the Board of Supervisors.”
He straightened himself up with a jerk that threatened the integrity of
his neck and made his teeth snap, lurched heavily to the other side,
oscillated critically for a few moments, and muttered: “Brdgtpnd—.” It
was too much for him; he went down into his pocket, fumbled feebly
round, and finally drawing out a paper of purely hypothetical tobacco,
conveyed it to his mouth and bit off about two-thirds of it, which he
masticated with much apparent benefit to his understanding, offering
what was left to me. He then resumed the conversation with the easy
familiarity of one who has established a claim to respectful attention:
“Pardner, couldn’t ye interdooce a fel’r’s wants tknow’er?”
“Impossible; I have not the honour of her acquaintance.” A look of
distrust crept into his face, and finally settled into a savage scowl
about his eyes. “Sed ye knew ’er!” he faltered, menacingly. “So I do,
but I am not upon speaking terms with her, and—in fact she declines to
recognise me.” The soul of the honest miner flamed out; he laid his
hand threateningly upon his pistol, jerked himself stiff, glared a
moment at me with the look of a tiger, and hurled this question at my
head as if it had been an iron interrogation point: _“W’at a’ yer ben
adoin’ to that gurl?”_
I fled, and the last I saw of the chivalrous gold-hunter, he had his
arm about Pandora’s stony waist and was endeavouring to soothe her
supposed agitation by stroking her granite head.