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!”
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-barred the way, stopped
the servant, and stood gazing, with a face all alive with gratification
and astonishment. Then he said, reverently:
“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.
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 polkad 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.
Something very important happened. The property holders of Nevada voted
against the State Constitution; but the folks who had nothing to lose