Ewriting Format by Carl Peterson © 2001

Contents
I.

Across The Plains II.

The Old Pacific Capital III.

Fontainebleau IV.

Epilogue
to "An Inland Voyage" V.

Random Memories VI.

Random Memories Continued VII.

The Lantern-bearers VIII.

A Chapter on Dreams IX.

Beggars X.

Letter
to a Young Gentleman XI.

Pulvis et Umbra XII.

A Christmas Sermon
CHAPTER I - ACROSS THE PLAINS
LEAVES FROM THE NOTEBOOK OF AN EMIGRANT BETWEEN NEW YORK AND SAN FRANCISCO
MONDAY.

- It was,
if I remember rightly,
five o'clock when we were all signalled
to be present at the Ferry Depot of the railroad.

An emigrant ship had arrived at New York on the Saturday night,
another on the Sunday morning,
our own on Sunday afternoon,
a fourth early on Monday;
and as there is no emigrant train on Sunday a great part of the passengers from these four ships was concentrated on the train by which I was
to travel.

There was a babel of bewildered men,
women,
and children.

The wretched little booking-office,
and the baggage-room,
which was not much larger,
were crowded thick
with emigrants,
and were heavy and rank
with the atmosphere of dripping clothes.

Open carts full of bedding stood by the half-hour in the rain.

The officials loaded each other
with recriminations.

A bearded,
mildewed little man,
whom I take
to have been an emigrant agent,
was all over the place,
his mouth full of brimstone,
blustering and interfering.

It was plain that the whole system,
if system there was,
had utterly broken down under the strain of so many passengers.My own ticket was given me at once,
and an oldish man,
who preserved his head in the midst of this turmoil,
got my baggage registered,
and counselled me
to stay quietly where I was till he should give me the word
to move.

I had taken along
with me a small valise,
a knapsack,
which I carried on my shoulders,
and in the bag of my railway rug the whole of BANCROFT'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES,
in six fat volumes.

It was as much as I could carry
with convenience even
for short distances,
but it insured me plenty of clothing,
and the valise was at that moment,
and often after,
useful
for a stool.

I am sure I sat
for an hour in the baggage- room,
and wretched enough it was;
yet,
when at last the word was passed
to me and I picked up my bundles and got under way,
it was only
to exchange discomfort
for downright misery and danger.I followed the porters in
to a long shed reaching downhill from West Street
to the river.

It was dark,
the wind blew clean through it from end
to end;
and here I found a great block of passengers and baggage,
hundreds of one and tons of the other.

I feel I shall have a difficulty
to make myself believed;
and certainly the scene must have been exceptional,

for it was too dangerous
for daily repetition.

It was a tight jam;
there was no fair way through the mingled mass of brute and living obstruction.

In
to the upper skirts of the crowd porters,
infuriated by hurry and overwork,
clove their way
with shouts.

I may say that we stood like sheep,
and that the porters charged among us like so many maddened sheep- dogs;
and I believe these men were no longer answerable
for their acts.

It mattered not what they were carrying,
they drove straight in
to the press,
and when they could get no farther,
blindly discharged their barrowful.


with my own hand,

for instance,
I saved the life of a child as it sat upon its mother's knee,
she sitting on a box;
and since I heard of no accident,
I must suppose that there were many similar interpositions in the course of the evening.

It will give some idea of the state of mind
to which we were reduced if I tell you that neither the porter nor the mother of the child paid the least attention
to my act.

It was not till some time after that I understood what I had done myself,

for
to ward off heavy boxes seemed at the moment a natural incident of human life.

Cold,
wet,
clamour,
dead opposition
to progress,
such as one encounters in an evil dream,
had utterly daunted the spirits.

We had accepted this purgatory as a child accepts the conditions of the world.


for my part,
I shivered a little,
and my back ached wearily;
but I believe I had neither a hope nor a fear,
and all the activities of my nature had become tributary
to one massive sensation of discomfort.At length,
and after how long an interval I hesitate
to guess,
the crowd began
to move,
heavily straining through itself.

About the same time some lamps were lighted,
and threw a sudden flare over the shed.

We were being filtered out in
to the river boat
for Jersey City.

You may imagine how slowly this filtering proceeded,
through the dense,
choking crush,
every one overladen
with packages or children,
and yet under the necessity of fishing out his ticket by the way;
but it ended at length
for me,
and I found myself on deck under a flimsy awning and
with a trifle of elbow-room
to stretch and breathe in.

This was on the starboard;

for the bulk of the emigrants stuck hopelessly on the port side,
by which we had entered.

In vain the seamen shouted
to them
to move on,
and threatened them
with shipwreck.

These poor people were under a spell of stupor,
and did not stir a foot.

It rained as heavily as ever,
but the wind now came in sudden claps and capfuls,
not without danger
to a boat so badly ballasted as ours;
and we crept over the river in the darkness,
trailing one paddle in the water like a wounded duck,
and passed ever and again by huge,
illuminated steamers running many knots,
and heralding their approach by strains of music.

The contrast between these pleasure embarkations and our own grim vessel,

with her list
to port and her freight of wet and silent emigrants,
was of that glaring description which we count too obvious
for the purposes of art.The landing at Jersey City was done in a stampede.

I had a fixed sense of calamity,
and
to judge by conduct,
the same persuasion was common
to us all.

A panic selfishness,
like that produced by fear,
presided over the disorder of our landing.

People pushed,
and elbowed,
and ran,
their families following how they could.

Children fell,
and were picked up
to be rewarded by a blow.

One child,
who had lost her parents,
screamed steadily and
with increasing shrillness,
as though verging towards a fit;
an official kept her by him,
but no one else seemed so much as
to remark her distress;
and I am ashamed
to say that I ran among the rest.

I was so weary that I had twice
to make a halt and set down my bundles in the hundred yards or so between the pier and the railway station,
so that I was quite wet by the time that I got under cover.

There was no waiting-room,
no refreshment room;
the cars were locked;
and
for at least another hour,
or so it seemed,
we had
to camp upon the draughty,
gaslit platform.

I sat on my valise,
too crushed
to observe my neighbours;
but as they were all cold,
and wet,
and weary,
and driven stupidly crazy by the mismanagement
to which we had been subjected,
I believe they can have been no happier than myself.

I bought half-a-dozen oranges from a boy,

for oranges and nuts were the only refection
to be had.

As only two of them had even a pretence of juice,
I threw the other four under the cars,
and beheld,
as in a dream,
grown people and children groping on the track after my leavings.At last we were admitted in
to the cars,
utterly dejected,
and far from dry.


for my own part,
I got out a clothes-brush,
and brushed my trousers as hard as I could till I had dried them and warmed my blood in
to the bargain;
but no one else,
except my next neighbour
to whom I lent the brush,
appeared
to take the least precaution.

As they were,
they composed themselves
to sleep.

I had seen the lights of Philadelphia,
and been twice ordered
to change carriages and twice countermanded,
before I allowed myself
to follow their example.TUESDAY.

- When I awoke,
it was already day;
the train was standing idle;
I was in the last carriage,
and,
seeing some others strolling
to and fro about the lines,
I opened the door and stepped forth,
as from a caravan by the wayside.

We were near no station,
nor even,
as far as I could see,
within reach of any signal.

A green,
open,
undulating country stretched away upon all sides.

Locust trees and a single field of Indian corn gave it a foreign grace and interest;
but the contours of the land were soft and English.

It was not quite England,
neither was it quite France;
yet like enough either
to seem natural in my eyes.

And it was in the sky,
and not upon the earth,
that I was surprised
to find a change.

Explain it how you may,
and
for my part I cannot explain it at all,
the sun rises
with a different splendour in America and Europe.

There is more clear gold and scarlet in our old country mornings;
more purple,
brown,
and smoky orange in those of the new.

It may be from habit,
but
to me the coming of day is less fresh and inspiriting in the latter;
it has a duskier glory,
and more nearly resembles sunset;
it seems
to fit some subsequential,
evening epoch of the world,
as though America were in fact,
and not merely in fancy,
farther from the orient of Aurora and the springs of day.

I thought so then,
by the railroad side in Pennsylvania,
and I have thought so a dozen times since in far distant parts of the continent.

If it be an illusion it is one very deeply rooted,
and in which my eyesight is accomplice.Soon after a train whisked by,
announcing and accompanying its passage by the swift beating of a sort of chapel bell upon the engine;
and as it was
for this we had been waiting,
we were summoned by the cry of "All aboard!" and went on again upon our way.

The whole line,
it appeared,
was topsy-turvy;
an accident at midnight having thrown all the traffic hours in
to arrear.

We paid
for this in the flesh,

for we had no meals all that day.

Fruit we could buy upon the cars;
and now and then we had a few minutes at some station
with a meagre show of rolls and sandwiches
for sale;
but we were so many and so ravenous that,
though I tried at every opportunity,
the coffee was always exhausted before I could elbow my way
to the counter.Our American sunrise had ushered in a noble summer's day.

There was not a cloud;
the sunshine was baking;
yet in the woody river valleys among which we wound our way,
the atmosphere preserved a sparkling freshness till late in the afternoon.

It had an inland sweetness and variety
to one newly from the sea;
it smelt of woods,
rivers,
and the delved earth.

These,
though in so far a country,
were airs from home.

I stood on the platform by the hour;
and as I saw,
one after another,
pleasant villages,
carts upon the highway and fishers by the stream,
and heard cockcrows and cheery voices in the distance,
and beheld the sun,
no longer shining blankly on the plains of ocean,
but striking among shapely hills and his light dispersed and coloured by a thousand accidents of form and surface,
I began
to exult
with myself upon this rise in life like a man who had come in
to a rich estate.

And when I had asked the name of a river from the brakesman,
and heard that it was called the Susquehanna,
the beauty of the name seemed
to be part and parcel of the beauty of the land.

As when Adam
with divine fitness named the creatures,
so this word Susquehanna was at once accepted by the fancy.

That was the name,
as no other could be,

for that shining river and desirable valley.None can care
for literature in itself who do not take a special pleasure in the sound of names;
and there is no part of the world where nomenclature is so rich,
poetical,
humorous,
and picturesque as the United States of America.

All times,
races,
and languages have brought their contribution.

Pekin is in the same State
with Euclid,

with Bellefontaine,
and
with Sandusky.

Chelsea,

with its London associations of red brick,
Sloane Square,
and the King's Road,
is own suburb
to stately and primeval Memphis;
there they have their seat,
translated names of cities,
where the Mississippi runs by Tennessee and Arkansas;
and both,
while I was crossing the continent,
lay,
watched by armed men,
in the horror and isolation of a plague.

Old,
red Manhattan lies,
like an Indian arrowhead under a steam factory,
below anglified New York.

The names of the States and Territories themselves form a chorus of sweet and most romantic vocables:

Delaware,
Ohio,
Indiana,
Florida,
Dakota,
Iowa,
Wyoming,
Minnesota,
and the Carolinas;
there are few poems
with a nobler music
for the ear:

a songful,
tuneful land;
and if the new Homer shall arise from the Western continent,
his verse will be enriched,
his pages sing spontaneously,

with the names of states and cities that would strike the fancy in a business circular.Late in the evening we were landed in a waiting-room at Pittsburg.

I had now under my charge a young and sprightly Dutch widow
with her children;
these I was
to watch over providentially
for a certain distance farther on the way;
but as I found she was furnished
with a basket of eatables,
I left her in the waiting-room
to seek a dinner
for myself.

I mention this meal,
not only because it was the first of which I had partaken
for about thirty hours,
but because it was the means of my first introduction
to a coloured gentleman.

He did me the honour
to wait upon me after a fashion,
while I was eating;
and
with every word,
look,
and gesture marched me farther in
to the country of surprise.

He was indeed strikingly unlike the negroes of Mrs. Beecher Stowe,
or the Christy Minstrels of my youth.

Imagine a gentleman,
certainly somewhat dark,
but of a pleasant warm hue,
speaking English
with a slight and rather odd foreign accent,
every inch a man of the world,
and armed
with manners so patronisingly superior that I am at a loss
to name their parallel in England.

A butler perhaps rides as high over the unbutlered,
but then he sets you right
with a reserve and a sort of sighing patience which one is often moved
to admire.

And again,
the abstract butler never stoops
to familiarity.

But the coloured gentleman will pass you a wink at a time;
he is familiar like an upper form boy
to a fag;
he unbends
to you like Prince Hal
with Poins and Falstaff.

He makes himself at home and welcome.

Indeed,
I may say,
this waiter behaved himself
to me throughout that supper much as,

with us,
a young,
free,
and not very self-respecting master might behave
to a good-looking chambermaid.

I had come prepared
to pity the poor negro,

to put him at his ease,

to prove in a thousand condescensions that I was no sharer in the prejudice of race;
but I assure you I put my patronage away
for another occasion,
and had the grace
to be pleased
with that result.Seeing he was a very honest fellow,
I consulted him upon a point of etiquette:

if one should offer
to tip the American waiter?

Certainly not,
he told me.

Never.

It would not do.

They considered themselves too highly
to accept.

They would even resent the offer.

As
for him and me,
we had enjoyed a very pleasant conversation;
he,
in particular,
had found much pleasure in my society;
I was a stranger;
this was exactly one of those rare conjunctures....

Without being very clear seeing,
I can still perceive the sun at noonday;
and the coloured gentleman deftly pocketed a quarter.WEDNESDAY.

- A little after midnight I convoyed my widow and orphans on board the train;
and morning found us far in
to Ohio.

This had early been a favourite home of my imagination;
I have played at being in Ohio by the week,
and enjoyed some capital sport there
with a dummy gun,
my person being still unbreeched.

My preference was founded on a work which appeared in CASSELL'S FAMILY PAPER,
and was read aloud
to me by my nurse.

It narrated the doings of one Custaloga,
an Indian brave,
who,
in the last chapter,
very obligingly washed the paint off his face and became Sir Reginald Somebody-or-other;
a trick I never forgave him.

The idea of a man being an Indian brave,
and then giving that up
to be a baronet,
was one which my mind rejected.

It offended verisimilitude,
like the pretended anxiety of Robinson Crusoe and others
to escape from uninhabited islands.But Ohio was not at all as I had pictured it.

We were now on those great plains which stretch unbroken
to the Rocky Mountains.

The country was flat like Holland,
but far from being dull.

All through Ohio,
Indiana,
Illinois,
and Iowa,
or
for as much as I saw of them from the train and in my waking moments,
it was rich and various,
and breathed an elegance peculiar
to itself.

The tall corn pleased the eye;
the trees were graceful in themselves,
and framed the plain in
to long,
aerial vistas;
and the clean,
bright,
gardened townships spoke of country fare and pleasant summer evenings on the stoop.

It was a sort of flat paradise;
but,
I am afraid,
not unfrequented by the devil.

That morning dawned
with such a freezing chill as I have rarely felt;
a chill that was not perhaps so measurable by instrument,
as it struck home upon the heart and seemed
to travel
with the blood.

Day came in
with a shudder.

White mists lay thinly over the surface of the plain,
as we see them more often on a lake;
and though the sun had soon dispersed and drunk them up,
leaving an atmosphere of fever heat and crystal pureness from horizon
to horizon,
the mists had still been there,
and we knew that this paradise was haunted by killing damps and foul malaria.

The fences along the line bore but two descriptions of advertisement;
one
to recommend tobaccos,
and the other
to vaunt remedies against the ague.

At the point of day,
and while we were all in the grasp of that first chill,
a native of the state,
who had got in at some way station,
pronounced it,

with a doctoral air,
"a fever and ague morning."


The Dutch widow was a person of some character.

She had conceived at first sight a great aversion
for the present writer,
which she was at no pains
to conceal.

But being a woman of a practical spirit,
she made no difficulty about accepting my attentions,
and encouraged me
to buy her children fruits and candies,

to carry all her parcels,
and even
to sleep upon the floor that she might profit by my empty seat.

Nay,
she was such a rattle by nature,
and,
so powerfully moved
to autobiographical talk,
that she was forced,

for want of a better,

to take me in
to confidence and tell me the story of her life.

I heard about her late husband,
who seemed
to have made his chief impression by taking her out pleasuring on Sundays.

I could tell you her prospects,
her hopes,
the amount of her fortune,
the cost of her housekeeping by the week,
and a variety of particular matters that are not usually disclosed except
to friends.

At one station,
she shook up her children
to look at a man on the platform and say if he were not like Mr. Z.;
while
to me she explained how she had been keeping company
with this Mr. Z.,
how far matters had proceeded,
and how it was because of his desistance that she was now travelling
to the West.

Then,
when I was thus put in possession of the facts,
she asked my judgment on that type of manly beauty.

I admired it
to her heart's content.

She was not,
I think,
remarkably veracious in talk,
but broidered as fancy prompted,
and built castles in the air out of her past;
yet she had that sort of candour,

to keep me,
in spite of all these confidences,
steadily aware of her aversion.

Her parting words were ingeniously honest.

"I am sure," said she,
"we all OUGHT
to be very much obliged
to you."

I cannot pretend that she put me at my ease;
but I had a certain respect
for such a genuine dislike.

A poor nature would have slipped,
in the course of these familiarities,
in
to a sort of worthless toleration
for me.We reached Chicago in the evening.

I was turned out of the cars,
bundled in
to an omnibus,
and driven off through the streets
to the station of a different railroad.

Chicago seemed a great and gloomy city.

I remember having subscribed,
let us say sixpence,
towards its restoration at the period of the fire;
and now when I beheld street after street of ponderous houses and crowds of comfortable burghers,
I thought it would be a graceful act
for the corporation
to refund that sixpence,
or,
at the least,

to entertain me
to a cheerful dinner.

But there was no word of restitution.

I was that city's benefactor,
yet I was received in a third-class waiting- room,
and the best dinner I could get was a dish of ham and eggs at my own expense.I can safely say,
I have never been so dog-tired as that night in Chicago.

When it was time
to start,
I descended the platform like a man in a dream.

It was a long train,
lighted from end
to end;
and car after car,
as I came up
with it,
was not only filled but overflowing.

My valise,
my knapsack,
my rug,

with those six ponderous tomes of Bancroft,
weighed me double;
I was hot,
feverish,
painfully athirst;
and there was a great darkness over me,
an internal darkness,
not
to be dispelled by gas.

When at last I found an empty bench,
I sank in
to it like a bundle of rags,
the world seemed
to swim away in
to the distance,
and my consciousness dwindled within me
to a mere pin's head,
like a taper on a foggy night.When I came a little more
to myself,
I found that there had sat down beside me a very cheerful,
rosy little German gentleman,
somewhat gone in drink,
who was talking away
to me,
nineteen
to the dozen,
as they say.

I did my best
to keep up the conversation;

for it seemed
to me dimly as if something depended upon that.

I heard him relate,
among many other things,
that there were pickpockets on the train,
who had already robbed a man of forty dollars and a return ticket;
but though I caught the words,
I do not think I properly understood the sense until next morning;
and I believe I replied at the time that I was very glad
to hear it.

What else he talked about I have no guess;
I remember a gabbling sound of words,
his profuse gesticulation,
and his smile,
which was highly explanatory:

but no more.

And I suppose I must have shown my confusion very plainly;
for,
first,
I saw him knit his brows at me like one who has conceived a doubt;
next,
he tried me in German,
supposing perhaps that I was unfamiliar
with the English tongue;
and finally,
in despair,
he rose and left me.

I felt chagrined;
but my fatigue was too crushing
for delay,
and,
stretching myself as far as that was possible upon the bench,
I was received at once in
to a dreamless stupor.The little German gentleman was only going a little way in
to the suburbs after a DINER FIN,
and was bent on entertainment while the journey lasted.

Having failed
with me,
he pitched next upon another emigrant,
who had come through from Canada,
and was not one jot less weary than myself.

Nay,
even in a natural state,
as I found next morning when we scraped acquaintance,
he was a heavy,
uncommunicative man.

After trying him on different topics,
it appears that the little German gentleman flounced in
to a temper,
swore an oath or two,
and departed from that car in quest of livelier society.

Poor little gentleman!

I suppose he thought an emigrant should be a rollicking,
free-hearted blade,

with a flask of foreign brandy and a long,
comical story
to beguile the moments of digestion.THURSDAY.

- I suppose there must be a cycle in the fatigue of travelling,

for when I awoke next morning,
I was entirely renewed in spirits and ate a hearty breakfast of porridge,

with sweet milk,
and coffee and hot cakes,
at Burlington upon the Mississippi.

Another long day's ride followed,

with but one feature worthy of remark.

At a place called Creston,
a drunken man got in.

He was aggressively friendly,
but,
according
to English notions,
not at all unpresentable upon a train.


for one stage he eluded the notice of the officials;
but just as we were beginning
to move out of the next station,
Cromwell by name,
by came the conductor.

There was a word or two of talk;
and then the official had the man by the shoulders,
twitched him from his seat,
marched him through the car,
and sent him flying on
to the track.

It was done in three motions,
as exact as a piece of drill.

The train was still moving slowly,
although beginning
to mend her pace,
and the drunkard got his feet without a fall.

He carried a red bundle,
though not so red as his cheeks;
and he shook this menacingly in the air
with one hand,
while the other stole behind him
to the region of the kidneys.

It was the first indication that I had come among revolvers,
and I observed it
with some emotion.

The conductor stood on the steps
with one hand on his hip,
looking back at him;
and perhaps this attitude imposed upon the creature,

for he turned without further ado,
and went off staggering along the track towards Cromwell followed by a peal of laughter from the cars.

They were speaking English all about me,
but I knew I was in a foreign land.Twenty minutes before nine that night,
we were deposited at the Pacific Transfer Station near Council Bluffs,
on the eastern bank of the Missouri river.

Here we were
to stay the night at a kind of caravanserai,
set apart
for emigrants.

But I gave way
to a thirst
for luxury,
separated myself from my companions,
and marched
with my effects in
to the Union Pacific Hotel.

A white clerk and a coloured gentleman whom,
in my plain European way,
I should call the boots,
were installed behind a counter like bank tellers.

They took my name,
assigned me a number,
and proceeded
to deal
with my packages.

And here came the tug of war.

I wished
to give up my packages in
to safe keeping;
but I did not wish
to go
to bed.

And this,
it appeared,
was impossible in an American hotel.It was,
of course,
some inane misunderstanding,
and sprang from my unfamiliarity
with the language.


for although two nations use the same words and read the same books,
intercourse is not conducted by the dictionary.

The business of life is not carried on by words,
but in set phrases,
each
with a special and almost a slang signification.

Some international obscurity prevailed between me and the coloured gentleman at Council Bluffs;
so that what I was asking,
which seemed very natural
to me,
appeared
to him a monstrous exigency.

He refused,
and that
with the plainness of the West.

This American manner of conducting matters of business is,
at first,
highly unpalatable
to the European.

When we approach a man in the way of his calling,
and
for those services by which he earns his bread,
we consider him
for the time being our hired servant.

But in the American opinion,
two gentlemen meet and have a friendly talk
with a view
to exchanging favours if they shall agree
to please.

I know not which is the more convenient,
nor even which is the more truly courteous.

The English stiffness unfortunately tends
to be continued after the particular transaction is at an end,
and thus favours class separations.

But on the other hand,
these equalitarian plainnesses leave an open field
for the insolence of Jack-in-office.I was nettled by the coloured gentleman's refusal,
and unbuttoned my wrath under the similitude of ironical submission.

I knew nothing,
I said,
of the ways of American hotels;
but I had no desire
to give trouble.

If there was nothing
for it but
to get
to bed immediately,
let him say the word,
and though it was not my habit,
I should cheerfully obey.He burst in
to a shout of laughter.

"Ah!" said he,
"you do not know about America.

They are fine people in America.

Oh!

you will like them very well.

But you mustn't get mad.

I know what you want.

You come along
with me."


And issuing from behind the counter,
and taking me by the arm like an old acquaintance,
he led me
to the bar of the hotel."

There," said he,
pushing me from him by the shoulder,
"go and have a drink!"
THE EMIGRANT TRAIN
All this while I had been travelling by mixed trains,
where I might meet
with Dutch widows and little German gentry fresh from table.

I had been but a latent emigrant;
now I was
to be branded once more,
and put apart
with my fellows.

It was about two in the afternoon of Friday that I found myself in front of the Emigrant House,

with more than a hundred others,

to be sorted and boxed
for the journey.

A white-haired official,

with a stick under one arm,
and a list in the other hand,
stood apart in front of us,
and called name after name in the tone of a command.

At each name you would see a family gather up its brats and bundles and run
for the hindmost of the three cars that stood awaiting us,
and I soon concluded that this was
to be set apart
for the women and children.

The second or central car,
it turned out,
was devoted
to men travelling alone,
and the third
to the Chinese.

The official was easily moved
to anger at the least delay;
but the emigrants were both quick at answering their names,
and speedy in getting themselves and their effects on board.The families once housed,
we men carried the second car without ceremony by simultaneous assault.

I suppose the reader has some notion of an American railroad-car,
that long,
narrow wooden box,
like a flat-roofed Noah's ark,

with a stove and a convenience,
one at either end,
a passage down the middle,
and transverse benches upon either hand.

Those destined
for emigrants on the Union Pacific are only remarkable
for their extreme plainness,
nothing but wood entering in any part in
to their constitution,
and
for the usual inefficacy of the lamps,
which often went out and shed but a dying glimmer even while they burned.

The benches are too short
for anything but a young child.

Where there is scarce elbow-room
for two
to sit,
there will not be space enough
for one
to lie.

Hence the company,
or rather,
as it appears from certain bills about the Transfer Station,
the company's servants,
have conceived a plan
for the better accommodation of travellers.

They prevail on every two
to chum together.


to each of the chums they sell a board and three square cushions stuffed
with straw,
and covered
with thin cotton.

The benches can be made
to face each other in pairs,

for the backs are reversible.

On the approach of night the boards are laid from bench
to bench,
making a couch wide enough
for two,
and long enough
for a man of the middle height;
and the chums lie down side by side upon the cushions
with the head
to the conductor's van and the feet
to the engine.

When the train is full,
of course this plan is impossible,

for there must not be more than one
to every bench,
neither can it be carried out unless the chums agree.

It was
to bring about this last condition that our white-haired official now bestirred himself.

He made a most active master of ceremonies,
introducing likely couples,
and even guaranteeing the amiability and honesty of each.

The greater the number of happy couples the better
for his pocket,

for it was he who sold the raw material of the beds.

His price
for one board and three straw cushions began
with two dollars and a half;
but before the train left,
and,
I am sorry
to say,
long after I had purchased mine,
it had fallen
to one dollar and a half.The match-maker had a difficulty
with me;
perhaps,
like some ladies,
I showed myself too eager
for union at any price;
but certainly the first who was picked out
to be my bedfellow,
declined the honour without thanks.

He was an old,
heavy,
slow-spoken man,
I think from Yankeeland,
looked me all over
with great timidity,
and then began
to excuse himself in broken phrases.

He didn't know the young man,
he said.

The young man might be very honest,
but how was he
to know that?

There was another young man whom he had met already in the train;
he guessed he was honest,
and would prefer
to chum
with him upon the whole.

All this without any sort of excuse,
as though I had been inanimate or absent.

I began
to tremble lest every one should refuse my company,
and I be left rejected.

But the next in turn was a tall,
strapping,
long-limbed,
small-headed,
curly-haired Pennsylvania Dutchman,

with a soldierly smartness in his manner.


to be exact,
he had acquired it in the navy.

But that was all one;
he had at least been trained
to desperate resolves,
so he accepted the match,
and the white-haired swindler pronounced the connubial benediction,
and pocketed his fees.The rest of the afternoon was spent in making up the train.

I am afraid
to say how many baggage-waggons followed the engine,
certainly a score;
then came the Chinese,
then we,
then the families,
and the rear was brought up by the conductor in what,
if I have it rightly,
is called his caboose.

The class
to which I belonged was of course far the largest,
and we ran over,
so
to speak,

to both sides;
so that there were some Caucasians among the Chinamen,
and some bachelors among the families.

But our own car was pure from admixture,
save
for one little boy of eight or nine who had the whooping-cough.

At last,
about six,
the long train crawled out of the Transfer Station and across the wide Missouri river
to Omaha,
westward bound.It was a troubled uncomfortable evening in the cars.

There was thunder in the air,
which helped
to keep us restless.

A man played many airs upon the cornet,
and none of them were much attended to,
until he came
to "Home,
sweet home."

It was truly strange
to note how the talk ceased at that,
and the faces began
to lengthen.

I have no idea whether musically this air is
to be considered good or bad;
but it belongs
to that class of art which may be best described as a brutal assault upon the feelings.

Pathos must be relieved by dignity of treatment.

If you wallow naked in the pathetic,
like the author of "Home,
sweet home," you make your hearers weep in an unmanly fashion;
and even while yet they are moved,
they despise themselves and hate the occasion of their weakness.

It did not come
to tears that night,

for the experiment was interrupted.

An elderly,
hard-looking man,

with a goatee beard and about as much appearance of sentiment an you would expect from a retired slaver,
turned
with a start and bade the performer stop that "damned thing."

"I've heard about enough of that," he added;
"give us something about the good country we're going to."

A murmur of adhesion ran round the car;
the performer took the instrument from his lips,
laughed and nodded,
and then struck in
to a dancing measure;
and,
like a new Timotheus,
stilled immediately the emotion he had raised.The day faded;
the lamps were lit;
a party of wild young men,
who got off next evening at North Platte,
stood together on the stern platform,
singing "The Sweet By-and-bye"
with very tuneful voices;
the chums began
to put up their beds;
and it seemed as if the business of the day were at an end.

But it was not so;
for,
the train stopping at some station,
the cars were instantly thronged
with the natives,
wives and fathers,
young men and maidens,
some of them in little more than nightgear,
some
with stable lanterns,
and all offering beds
for sale.

Their charge began
with twenty-five cents a cushion,
but fell,
before the train went on again,

to fifteen,

with the bed-board gratis,
or less than one-fifth of what I had paid
for mine at the Transfer.

This is my contribution
to the economy of future emigrants.A great personage on an American train is the newsboy.

He sells books (such books!),
papers,
fruit,
lollipops,
and cigars;
and on emigrant journeys,
soap,
towels,
tin washing dishes,
tin coffee pitchers,
coffee,
tea,
sugar,
and tinned eatables,
mostly hash or beans and bacon.

Early next morning the newsboy went around the cars,
and chumming on a more extended principle became the order of the hour.

It requires but a copartnery of two
to manage beds;
but washing and eating can be carried on most economically by a syndicate of three.

I myself entered a little after sunrise in
to articles of agreement,
and became one of the firm of Pennsylvania,
Shakespeare,
and Dubuque.

Shakespeare was my own nickname on the cars;
Pennsylvania that of my bedfellow;
and Dubuque,
the name of a place in the State of Iowa,
that of an amiable young fellow going west
to cure an asthma,
and retarding his recovery by incessantly chewing or smoking,
and sometimes chewing and smoking together.

I have never seen tobacco so sillily abused.

Shakespeare bought a tin washing-dish,
Dubuque a towel,
and Pennsylvania a brick of soap.

The partners used these instruments,
one after another,
according
to the order of their first awaking;
and when the firm had finished there was no want of borrowers.

Each filled the tin dish at the water filter opposite the stove,
and retired
with the whole stock in trade
to the platform of the car.

There he knelt down,
supporting himself by a shoulder against the woodwork or one elbow crooked about the railing,
and made a shift
to wash his face and neck and hands;
a cold,
an insufficient,
and,
if the train is moving rapidly,
a somewhat dangerous toilet.On a similar division of expense,
the firm of Pennsylvania,
Shakespeare,
and Dubuque supplied themselves
with coffee,
sugar,
and necessary vessels;
and their operations are a type of what went on through all the cars.

Before the sun was up the stove would be brightly burning;
at the first station the natives would come on board
with milk and eggs and coffee cakes;
and soon from end
to end the car would be filled
with little parties breakfasting upon the bed-boards.

It was the pleasantest hour of the day.There were meals
to be had,
however,
by the wayside:

a breakfast in the morning,
a dinner somewhere between eleven and two,
and supper from five
to eight or nine at night.

We had rarely less than twenty minutes
for each;
and if we had not spent many another twenty minutes waiting
for some express upon a side track among miles of desert,
we might have taken an hour
to each repast and arrived at San Francisco up
to time.


for haste is not the foible of an emigrant train.

It gets through on sufferance,
running the gauntlet among its more considerable brethren;
should there be a block,
it is unhesitatingly sacrificed;
and they cannot,
in consequence,
predict the length of the passage within a day or so.

Civility is the main comfort that you miss.

Equality,
though conceived very largely in America,
does not extend so low down as
to an emigrant.

Thus in all other trains,
a warning cry of "All aboard!" recalls the passengers
to take their seats;
but as soon as I was alone
with emigrants,
and from the Transfer all the way
to San Francisco,
I found this ceremony was pretermitted;
the train stole from the station without note of warning,
and you had
to keep an eye upon it even while you ate.

The annoyance is considerable,
and the disrespect both wanton and petty.Many conductors,
again,
will hold no communication
with an emigrant.

I asked a conductor one day at what time the train would stop
for dinner;
as he made no answer I repeated the question,

with a like result;
a third time I returned
to the charge,
and then Jack-in-office looked me coolly in the face
for several seconds and turned ostentatiously away.

I believe he was half ashamed of his brutality;

for when another person made the same inquiry,
although he still refused the information,
he condescended
to answer,
and even
to justify his reticence in a voice loud enough
for me
to hear.

It was,
he said,
his principle not
to tell people where they were
to dine;

for one answer led
to many other questions,
as what o'clock it was?

or,
how soon should we be there?

and he could not afford
to be eternally worried.As you are thus cut off from the superior authorities,
a great deal of your comfort depends on the character of the newsboy.

He has it in his power indefinitely
to better and brighten the emigrant's lot.

The newsboy
with whom we started from the Transfer was a dark,
bullying,
contemptuous,
insolent scoundrel,
who treated us like dogs.

Indeed,
in his case,
matters came nearly
to a fight.

It happened thus:

he was going his rounds through the cars
with some commodities
for sale,
and coming
to a party who were at SEVEN- UP or CASCINO (our two games),
upon a bed-board,
slung down a cigar-box in the middle of the cards,
knocking one man's hand
to the floor.

It was the last straw.

In a moment the whole party were upon their feet,
the cigars were upset,
and he was ordered
to "get out of that directly,
or he would get more than he reckoned for."

The fellow grumbled and muttered,
but ended by making off,
and was less openly insulting in the future.

On the other hand,
the lad who rode
with us in this capacity from Ogden
to Sacramen
to made himself the friend of all,
and helped us
with information,
attention,
assistance,
and a kind countenance.

He told us where and when we should have our meals,
and how long the train would stop;
kept seats at table
for those who were delayed,
and watched that we should neither be left behind nor yet unnecessarily hurried.

You,
who live at home at ease,
can hardly realise the greatness of this service,
even had it stood alone.

When I think of that lad coming and going,
train after train,

with his bright face and civil words,
I see how easily a good man may become the benefactor of his kind.

Perhaps he is discontented
with himself,
perhaps troubled
with ambitions;
why,
if he but knew it,
he is a hero of the old Greek stamp;
and while he thinks he is only earning a profit of a few cents,
and that perhaps exorbitant,
he is doing a man's work,
and bettering the world.I must tell here an experience of mine
with another newsboy.

I tell it because it gives so good an example of that uncivil kindness of the American,
which is perhaps their most bewildering character
to one newly landed.

It was immediately after I had left the emigrant train;
and I am told I looked like a man at death's door,
so much had this long journey shaken me.

I sat at the end of a car,
and the catch being broken,
and myself feverish and sick,
I had
to hold the door open
with my foot
for the sake of air.

In this attitude my leg debarred the newsboy from his box of merchandise.

I made haste
to let him pass when I observed that he was coming;
but I was busy
with a book,
and so once or twice he came upon me unawares.

On these occasions he most rudely struck my foot aside;
and though I myself apologised,
as if
to show him the way,
he answered me never a word.

I chafed furiously,
and I fear the next time it would have come
to words.

But suddenly I felt a touch upon my shoulder,
and a large juicy pear was put in
to my hand.

It was the newsboy,
who had observed that I was looking ill,
and so made me this present out of a tender heart.


for the rest of the journey I was petted like a sick child;
he lent me newspapers,
thus depriving himself of his legitimate profit on their sale,
and came repeatedly
to sit by me and cheer me up.

THE PLAINS OF NEBRASKA
It had thundered on the Friday night,
but the sun rose on Saturday without a cloud.

We were at sea - there is no other adequate expression - on the plains of Nebraska.

I made my observatory on the top of a fruit-waggon,
and sat by the hour upon that perch
to spy about me,
and
to spy in vain
for something new.

It was a world almost without a feature;
an empty sky,
an empty earth;
front and back,
the line of railway stretched from horizon
to horizon,
like a cue across a billiard-board;
on either hand,
the green plain ran till it touched the skirts of heaven.

Along the track innumerable wild sunflowers,
no bigger than a crown-piece,
bloomed in a continuous flower-bed;
grazing beasts were seen upon the prairie at all degrees of distance and diminution;
and now and again we might perceive a few dots beside the railroad which grew more and more distinct as we drew nearer till they turned in
to wooden cabins,
and then dwindled and dwindled in our wake until they melted in
to their surroundings,
and we were once more alone upon the billiard-board.

The train toiled over this infinity like a snail;
and being the one thing moving,
it was wonderful what huge proportions it began
to assume in our regard.

It seemed miles in length,
and either end of it within but a step of the horizon.

Even my own body or my own head seemed a great thing in that emptiness.

I note the feeling the more readily as it is the contrary of what I have read of in the experience of others.

Day and night,
above the roar of the train,
our ears were kept busy
with the incessant chirp of grasshoppers - a noise like the winding up of countless clocks and watches,
which began after a while
to seem proper
to that land.
to one hurrying through by steam there was a certain exhilaration in this spacious vacancy,
this greatness of the air,
this discovery of the whole arch of heaven,
this straight,
unbroken,
prison-line of the horizon.

Yet one could not but reflect upon the weariness of those who passed by there in old days,
at the foot's pace of oxen,
painfully urging their teams,
and
with no landmark but that unattainable evening sun
for which they steered,
and which daily fled them by an equal stride.

They had nothing,
it would seem,

to overtake;
nothing by which
to reckon their advance;
no sight
for repose or
for encouragement;
but stage after stage,
only the dead green waste under foot,
and the mocking,
fugitive horizon.

But the eye,
as I have been told,
found differences even here;
and at the worst the emigrant came,
by perseverance,

to the end of his toil.

It is the settlers,
after all,
at whom we have a right
to marvel.

Our consciousness,
by which we live,
is itself but the creature of variety.

Upon what food does it subsist in such a land?

What livelihood can repay a human creature
for a life spent in this huge sameness?

He is cut off from books,
from news,
from company,
from all that can relieve existence but the prosecution of his affairs.

A sky full of stars is the most varied spectacle that he can hope.

He may walk five miles and see nothing;
ten,
and it is as though he had not moved;
twenty,
and still he is in the midst of the same great level,
and has approached no nearer
to the one object within view,
the flat horizon which keeps pace
with his advance.

We are full at home of the question of agreeable wall-papers,
and wise people are of opinion that the temper may be quieted by sedative surroundings.

But what is
to be said of the Nebraskan settler?

His is a wall-paper
with a vengeance - one quarter of the universe laid bare in all its gauntness.His eye must embrace at every glance the whole seeming concave of the visible world;
it quails before so vast an outlook,
it is tortured by distance;
yet there is no rest or shelter till the man runs in
to his cabin,
and can repose his sight upon things near at hand.

Hence,
I am told,
a sickness of the vision peculiar
to these empty plains.Yet perhaps
with sunflowers and cicadae,
summer and winter,
cattle,
wife and family,
the settler may create a full and various existence.

One person at least I saw upon the plains who seemed in every way superior
to her lot.

This was a woman who boarded us at a way station,
selling milk.

She was largely formed;
her features were more than comely;
she had that great rarity - a fine complexion which became her;
and her eyes were kind,
dark,
and steady.

She sold milk
with patriarchal grace.

There was not a line in her countenance,
not a note in her soft and sleepy voice,
but spoke of an entire contentment
with her life.

It would have been fatuous arrogance
to pity such a woman.

Yet the place where she lived was
to me almost ghastly.

Less than a dozen wooden houses,
all of a shape and all nearly of a size,
stood planted along the railway lines.

Each stood apart in its own lot.

Each opened direct off the billiard-board,
as if it were a billiard- board indeed,
and these only models that had been set down upon it ready made.

Her own,
in
to which I looked,
was clean but very empty,
and showed nothing homelike but the burning fire.

This extreme newness,
above all in so naked and flat a country,
gives a strong impression of artificiality.


with none of the litter and discoloration of human life;

with the paths unworn,
and the houses still sweating from the axe,
such a settlement as this seems purely scenic.

The mind is loth
to accept it
for a piece of reality;
and it seems incredible that life can go on
with so few properties,
or the great child,
man,
find entertainment in so bare a playroom.And truly it is as yet an incomplete society in some points;
or at least it contained,
as I passed through,
one person incompletely civilised.

At North Platte,
where we supped that evening,
one man asked another
to pass the milk-jug.

This other was well-dressed and of what we should call a respectable appearance;
a darkish man,
high spoken,
eating as though he had some usage of society;
but he turned upon the first speaker
with extraordinary vehemence of tone -
"There's a waiter here!" he cried."

I only asked you
to pass the milk," explained the first.Here is the retort verbatim -
"Pass!

Hell!

I'm not paid
for that business;
the waiter's paid
for it.

You should use civility at table,
and,
by God,
I'll show you how!"
The other man very wisely made no answer,
and the bully went on
with his supper as though nothing had occurred.

It pleases me
to think that some day soon he will meet
with one of his own kidney;
and that perhaps both may fall.

THE DESERT OF WYOMING

to cross such a plain is
to grow homesick
for the mountains.

I longed
for the Black Hills of Wyoming,
which I knew we were soon
to enter,
like an ice-bound whaler
for the spring.

Alas!

and it was a worse country than the other.

All Sunday and Monday we travelled through these sad mountains,
or over the main ridge of the Rockies,
which is a fair match
to them
for misery of aspect.

Hour after hour it was the same unhomely and unkindly world about our onward path;
tumbled boulders,
cliffs that drearily imitate the shape of monuments and fortifications - how drearily,
how tamely,
none can tell who has not seen them;
not a tree,
not a patch of sward,
not one shapely or commanding mountain form;
sage-brush,
eternal sage- brush;
over all,
the same weariful and gloomy colouring,
grays warming in
to brown,
grays darkening towards black;
and
for sole sign of life,
here and there a few fleeing antelopes;
here and there,
but at incredible intervals,
a creek running in a canon.

The plains have a grandeur of their own;
but here there is nothing but a contorted smallness.

Except
for the air,
which was light and stimulating,
there was not one good circumstance in that God- forsaken land.I had been suffering in my health a good deal all the way;
and at last,
whether I was exhausted by my complaint or poisoned in some wayside eating-house,
the evening we left Laramie,
I fell sick outright.

That was a night which I shall not readily forget.

The lamps did not go out;
each made a faint shining in its own neighbourhood,
and the shadows were confounded together in the long,
hollow box of the car.

The sleepers lay in uneasy attitudes;
here two chums alongside,
flat upon their backs like dead folk;
there a man sprawling on the floor,

with his face upon his arm;
there another half seated
with his head and shoulders on the bench.

The most passive were continually and roughly shaken by the movement of the train;
others stirred,
turned,
or stretched out their arms like children;
it was surprising how many groaned and murmured in their sleep;
and as I passed
to and fro,
stepping across the prostrate,
and caught now a snore,
now a gasp,
now a half-formed word,
it gave me a measure of the worthlessness of rest in that unresting vehicle.

Although it was chill,
I was obliged
to open my window,

for the degradation of the air soon became intolerable
to one who was awake and using the full supply of life.

Outside,
in a glimmering night,
I saw the black,
amorphous hills shoot by unweariedly in
to our wake.

They that long
for morning have never longed
for it more earnestly than I.And yet when day came,
it was
to shine upon the same broken and unsightly quarter of the world.

Mile upon mile,
and not a tree,
a bird,
or a river.

Only down the long,
sterile canons,
the train shot hooting and awoke the resting echo.

That train was the one piece of life in all the deadly land;
it was the one actor,
the one spectacle fit
to be observed in this paralysis of man and nature.

And when I think how the railroad has been pushed through this unwatered wilderness and haunt of savage tribes,
and now will bear an emigrant
for some 12 pounds from the Atlantic
to the Golden Gates;
how at each stage of the construction,
roaring,
impromptu cities,
full of gold and lust and death,
sprang up and then died away again,
and are now but wayside stations in the desert;
how in these uncouth places pig-tailed Chinese pirates worked side by side
with border ruffians and broken men from Europe,
talking together in a mixed dialect,
mostly oaths,
gambling,
drinking,
quarrelling and murdering like wolves;
how the plumed hereditary lord of all America heard,
in this last fastness,
the scream of the "bad medicine waggon" charioting his foes;
and then when I go on
to remember that all this epical turmoil was conducted by gentlemen in frock coats,
and
with a view
to nothing more extraordinary than a fortune and a subsequent visit
to Paris,
it seems
to me,
I own,
as if this railway were the one typical achievement of the age in which we live,
as if it brought together in
to one plot all the ends of the world and all the degrees of social rank,
and offered
to some great writer the busiest,
the most extended,
and the most varied subject
for an enduring literary work.

If it be romance,
if it be contrast,
if it be heroism that we require,
what was Troy town
to this?

But,
alas!

it is not these things that are necessary - it is only Homer.Here also we are grateful
to the train,
as
to some god who conducts us swiftly through these shades and by so many hidden perils.

Thirst,
hunger,
the sleight and ferocity of Indians are all no more feared,
so lightly do we skim these horrible lands;
as the gull,
who wings safely through the hurricane and past the shark.

Yet we should not be forgetful of these hardships of the past;
and
to keep the balance true,
since I have complained of the trifling discomforts of my journey,
perhaps more than was enough,
let me add an original document.

It was not written by Homer,
but by a boy of eleven,
long since dead,
and is dated only twenty years ago.

I shall punctuate,

to make things clearer,
but not change the spelling."

My dear Sister Mary,
- I am afraid you will go nearly crazy when you read my letter.

If Jerry" (the writer's eldest brother) "has not written
to you before now,
you will be surprised
to heare that we are in California,
and that poor Thomas" (another brother,
of fifteen) "is dead.

We started from - in July,

with plenly of provisions and too yoke oxen.

We went along very well till we got within six or seven hundred miles of California,
when the Indians attacked us.

We found places where they had killed the emigrants.

We had one passenger
with us,
too guns,
and one revolver;
so we ran all the lead We had in
to bullets (and) hung the guns up in the wagon so that we could get at them in a minit.

It was about two o'clock in the afternoon;
droave the cattel a little way;
when a prairie chicken alited a little way from the wagon."

Jerry took out one of the guns
to shoot it,
and told Tom drive the oxen.

Tom and I drove the oxen,
and Jerry and the passenger went on.

Then,
after a little,
I left Tom and caught up
with Jerry and the other man.

Jerry stopped Tom
to come up;
me and the man went on and sit down by a little stream.

In a few minutes,
we heard some noise;
then three shots (they all struck poor Tom,
I suppose);
then they gave the war hoop,
and as many as twenty of the redskins came down upon us.

The three that shot Tom was hid by the side of the road in the bushes."

I thought the Tom and Jerry were shot;
so I told the other man that Tom and Jerry were dead,
and that we had better try
to escape,
if possible.

I had no shoes on;
having a sore foot,
I thought I would not put them on.

The man and me run down the road,
but We was soon stopped by an Indian on a pony.

We then turend the other way,
and run up the side of the Mountain,
and hid behind some cedar trees,
and stayed there till dark.

The Indians hunted all over after us,
and verry close
to us,
so close that we could here there tomyhawks Jingle.

At dark the man and me started on,
I stubing my toes against sticks and stones.

We traveld on all night;
and next morning,
just as it was getting gray,
we saw something in the shape of a man.

It layed Down in the grass.

We went up
to it,
and it was Jerry.

He thought we ware Indians.

You can imagine how glad he was
to see me.

He thought we was all dead but him,
and we thought him and Tom was dead.

He had the gun that he took out of the wagon
to shoot the prairie Chicken;
all he had was the load that was in it."

We traveld on till about eight o'clock,
We caught up
with one wagon
with too men
with it.

We had traveld
with them before one day;
we stopt and they Drove on;
we knew that they was ahead of us,
unless they had been killed to.

My feet was so sore when we caught up
with them that I had
to ride;
I could not step.

We traveld on
for too days,
when the men that owned the cattle said they would (could) not drive them another inch.

We unyoked the oxen;
we had about seventy pounds of flour;
we took it out and divided it in
to four packs.

Each of the men took about 18 pounds apiece and a blanket.

I carried a little bacon,
dried meat,
and little quilt;
I had in all about twelve pounds.

We had one pint of flour a day
for our alloyance.

Sometimes we made soup of it;
sometimes we (made) pancakes;
and sometimes mixed it up
with cold water and eat it that way.

We traveld twelve or fourteen days.

The time came at last when we should have
to reach some place or starve.

We saw fresh horse and cattle tracks.

The morning come,
we scraped all the flour out of the sack,
mixed it up,
and baked it in
to bread,
and made some soup,
and eat everything we had.

We traveld on all day without anything
to eat,
and that evening we Caught up
with a sheep train of eight wagons.

We traveld
with them till we arrived at the settlements;
and know I am safe in California,
and got
to good home,
and going
to school."

Jerry is working in - .

It is a good country.

You can get from 50
to 60 and 75 Dollars
for cooking.

Tell me all about the affairs in the States,
and how all the folks get along."


And so ends this artless narrative.

The little man was at school again,
God bless him,
while his brother lay scalped upon the deserts.

FELLOW-PASSENGERS
At Ogden we changed cars from the Union Pacific
to the Central Pacific line of railroad.

The change was doubly welcome;
for,
first,
we had better cars on the new line;
and,
second,
those in which we had been cooped
for more than ninety hours had begun
to stink abominably.

Several yards away,
as we returned,
let us say from dinner,
our nostrils were assailed by rancid air.

I have stood on a platform while the whole train was shunting;
and as the dwelling-cars drew near,
there would come a whiff of pure menagerie,
only a little sourer,
as from men instead of monkeys.

I think we are human only in virtue of open windows.

Without fresh air,
you only require a bad heart,
and a remarkable command of the Queen's English,

to become such another as Dean Swift;
a kind of leering,
human goat,
leaping and wagging your scut on mountains of offence.

I do my best
to keep my head the other way,
and look
for the human rather than the bestial in this Yahoo-like business of the emigrant train.

But one thing I must say,
the car of the Chinese was notably the least offensive.The cars on the Central Pacific were nearly twice as high,
and so proportionally airier;
they were freshly varnished,
which gave us all a sense of cleanliness an though we had bathed;
the seats drew out and joined in the centre,
so that there was no more need
for bed boards;
and there was an upper tier of berths which could be closed by day and opened at night.I had by this time some opportunity of seeing the people whom I was among.

They were in rather marked contrast
to the emigrants I had met on board ship while crossing the Atlantic.

They were mostly lumpish fellows,
silent and noisy,
a common combination;
somewhat sad,
I should say,

with an extraordinary poor taste in humour,
and little interest in their fellow-creatures beyond that of a cheap and merely external curiosity.

If they heard a man's name and business,
they seemed
to think they had the heart of that mystery;
but they were as eager
to know that much as they were indifferent
to the rest.

Some of them were on nettles till they learned your name was Dickson and you a journeyman baker;
but beyond that,
whether you were Catholic or Mormon,
dull or clever,
fierce or friendly,
was all one
to them.

Others who were not so stupid,
gossiped a little,
and,
I am bound
to say,
unkindly.

A favourite witticism was
for some lout
to raise the alarm of "All aboard!" while the rest of us were dining,
thus contributing his mite
to the general discomfort.

Such a one was always much applauded
for his high spirits.

When I was ill coming through Wyoming,
I was astonished - fresh from the eager humanity on board ship -
to meet
with little but laughter.

One of the young men even amused himself by incommoding me,
as was then very easy;
and that not from ill- nature,
but mere clodlike incapacity
to think,

for he expected me
to join the laugh.

I did so,
but it was phantom merriment.

Later on,
a man from Kansas had three violent epileptic fits,
and though,
of course,
there were not wanting some
to help him,
it was rather superstitious terror than sympathy that his case evoked among his fellow-passengers.

"Oh,
I hope he's not going
to die!" cried a woman;
"it would be terrible
to have a dead body!" And there was a very general movement
to leave the man behind at the next station.

This,
by good fortune,
the conductor negatived.There was a good deal of story-telling in some quarters;
in others,
little but silence.

In this society,
more than any other that ever I was in,
it was the narrator alone who seemed
to enjoy the narrative.

It was rarely that any one listened
for the listening.

If he lent an ear
to another man's story,
it was because he was in immediate want of a hearer
for one of his own.

Food and the progress of the train were the subjects most generally treated;
many joined
to discuss these who otherwise would hold their tongues.

One small knot had no better occupation than
to worm out of me my name;
and the more they tried,
the more obstinately fixed I grew
to baffle them.

They assailed me
with artful questions and insidious offers of correspondence in the future;
but I was perpetually on my guard,
and parried their assaults
with inward laughter.

I am sure Dubuque would have given me ten dollars
for the secret.

He owed me far more,
had he understood life,

for thus preserving him a lively interest throughout the journey.

I met one of my fellow-passengers months after,
driving a street tramway car in San Francisco;
and,
as the joke was now out of season,
told him my name without subterfuge.

You never saw a man more chapfallen.

But had my name been Demogorgon,
after so prolonged a mystery he had still been disappointed.There were no emigrants direct from Europe - save one German family and a knot of Cornish miners who kept grimly by themselves,
one reading the New Testament all day long through steel spectacles,
the rest discussing privately the secrets of their old-world,
mysterious race.

Lady Hester Stanhope believed she could make something great of the Cornish;

for my part,
I can make nothing of them at all.

A division of races,
older and more original than that of Babel,
keeps this close,
esoteric family apart from neighbouring Englishmen.

Not even a Red Indian seems more foreign in my eyes.

This is one of the lessons of travel - that some of the strangest races dwell next door
to you at home.The rest were all American born,
but they came from almost every quarter of that Continent.

All the States of the North had sent out a fugitive
to cross the plains
with me.

From Virginia,
from Pennsylvania,
from New York,
from far western Iowa and Kansas,
from Maime that borders on the Canadas,
and from the Canadas themselves - some one or two were fleeing in quest of a better land and better wages.

The talk in the train,
like the talk I heard on the steamer,
ran upon hard times,
short commons,
and hope that moves ever westward.

I thought of my shipful from Great Britain
with a feeling of despair.

They had come 3000 miles,
and yet not far enough.

Hard times bowed them out of the Clyde,
and stood
to welcome them at Sandy Hook.

Where were they
to go?

Pennsylvania,
Maine,
Iowa,
Kansas?

These were not places
for immigration,
but
for emigration,
it appeared;
not one of them,
but I knew a man who had lifted up his heel and left it
for an ungrateful country.

And it was still westward that they ran.

Hunger,
you would have thought,
came out of the east like the sun,
and the evening was made of edible gold.

And,
meantime,
in the car in front of me,
were there not half a hundred emigrants from the opposite quarter?

Hungry Europe and hungry China,
each pouring from their gates in search of provender,
had here come face
to face.

The two waves had met;
east and west had alike failed;
the whole round world had been prospected and condemned;
there was no El Dorado anywhere;
and till one could emigrate
to the moon,
it seemed as well
to stay patiently at home.

Nor was there wanting another sign,
at once more picturesque and more disheartening;
for,
as we continued
to steam westward toward the land of gold,
we were continually passing other emigrant trains upon the journey east;
and these were as crowded as our own.

Had all these return voyagers made a fortune in the mines?

Were they all bound
for Paris,
and
to be in Rome by Easter?

It would seem not,
for,
whenever we met them,
the passengers ran on the platform and cried
to us through the windows,
in a kind of wailing chorus,

to "come back."

On the plains of Nebraska,
in the mountains of Wyoming,
it was still the same cry,
and dismal
to my heart,
"Come back!" That was what we heard by the way "about the good country we were going to."

And at that very hour the Sand-lot of San Francisco was crowded
with the unemployed,
and the echo from the other side of Market Street was repeating the rant of demagogues.If,
in truth,
it were only
for the sake of wages that men emigrate,
how many thousands would regret the bargain!

But wages,
indeed,
are only one consideration out of many;

for we are a race of gipsies,
and love change and travel
for themselves.

DESPISED RACES
Of all stupid ill-feelings,
the sentiment of my fellow Caucasians towards our companions in the Chinese car was the most stupid and the worst.

They seemed never
to have looked at them,
listened
to them,
or thought of them,
but hated them A PRIORI.

The Mongols were their enemies in that cruel and treacherous battle-field of money.

They could work better and cheaper in half a hundred industries,
and hence there was no calumny too idle
for the Caucasians
to repeat,
and even
to believe.

They declared them hideous vermin,
and affected a kind of choking in the throat when they beheld them.

Now,
as a matter of fact,
the young Chinese man is so like a large class of European women,
that on raising my head and suddenly catching sight of one at a considerable distance,
I have
for an instant been deceived by the resemblance.

I do not say it is the most attractive class of our women,
but
for all that many a man's wife is less pleasantly favoured.

Again,
my emigrants declared that the Chinese were dirty.

I cannot say they were clean,

for that was impossible upon the journey;
but in their efforts after cleanliness they put the rest of us
to shame.

We all pigged and stewed in one infamy,
wet our hands and faces
for half a minute daily on the platform,
and were unashamed.

But the Chinese never lost an opportunity,
and you would see them washing their feet - an act not dreamed of among ourselves - and going as far as decency permitted
to wash their whole bodies.

I may remark by the way that the dirtier people are in their persons the more delicate is their sense of modesty.

A clean man strips in a crowded boathouse;
but he who is unwashed slinks in and out of bed without uncovering an inch of skin.

Lastly,
these very foul and malodorous Caucasians entertained the surprising illusion that it was the Chinese waggon,
and that alone,
which stank.

I have said already that it was the exceptions and notably the freshest of the three.These judgments are typical of the feeling in all Western America.

The Chinese are considered stupid,
because they are imperfectly acquainted
with English.

They are held
to be base,
because their dexterity and frugality enable them
to underbid the lazy,
luxurious Caucasian.

They are said
to be thieves;
I am sure they have no monopoly of that.

They are called cruel;
the Anglo-Saxon and the cheerful Irishman may each reflect before he bears the accusation.

I am told,
again,
that they are of the race of river pirates,
and belong
to the most despised and dangerous class in the Celestial Empire.

But if this be so,
what remarkable pirates have we here!

and what must be the virtues,
the industry,
the education,
and the intelligence of their superiors at home!
Awhile ago it was the Irish,
now it is the Chinese that must go.

Such is the cry.

It seems,
after all,
that no country is bound
to submit
to immigration any more than
to invasion;
each is war
to the knife,
and resistance
to either but legitimate defence.

Yet we may regret the free tradition of the republic,
which loved
to depict herself
with open arms,
welcoming all unfortunates.

And certainly,
as a man who believes that he loves freedom,
I may be excused some bitterness when I find her sacred name misused in the contention.

It was but the other day that I heard a vulgar fellow in the Sand- lot,
the popular tribune of San Francisco,
roaring
for arms and butchery.

"At the call of Abraham Lincoln," said the orator,
"ye rose in the name of freedom
to set free the negroes;
can ye not rise and liberate yourselves from a few dirty Mongolians?"



for my own part,
I could not look but
with wonder and respect on the Chinese.

Their forefathers watched the stars before mine had begun
to keep pigs.

Gun-powder and printing,
which the other day we imitated,
and a school of manners which we never had the delicacy so much as
to desire
to imitate,
were theirs in a long- past antiquity.

They walk the earth
with us,
but it seems they must be of different clay.

They hear the clock strike the same hour,
yet surely of a different epoch.

They travel by steam conveyance,
yet
with such a baggage of old Asiatic thoughts and superstitions as might check the locomotive in its course.

Whatever is thought within the circuit of the Great Wall;
what the wry-eyed,
spectacled schoolmaster teaches in the hamlets round Pekin;
religions so old that our language looks a halfing boy alongside;
philosophy so wise that our best philosophers find things therein
to wonder at;
all this travelled alongside of me
for thousands of miles over plain and mountain.

Heaven knows if we had one common thought or fancy all that way,
or whether our eyes,
which yet were formed upon the same design,
beheld the same world out of the railway windows.

And when either of us turned his thoughts
to home and childhood,
what a strange dissimilarity must there not have been in these pictures of the mind - when I beheld that old,
gray,
castled city,
high throned above the firth,

with the flag of Britain flying,
and the red-coat sentry pacing over all;
and the man in the next car
to me would conjure up some junks and a pagoda and a fort of porcelain,
and call it,

with the same affection,
home.Another race shared among my fellow-passengers in the disfavour of the Chinese;
and that,
it is hardly necessary
to say,
was the noble red man of old story - over whose own hereditary continent we had been steaming all these days.

I saw no wild or independent Indian;
indeed,
I hear that such avoid the neighbourhood of the train;
but now and again at way stations,
a husband and wife and a few children,
disgracefully dressed out
with the sweepings of civilisation,
came forth and stared upon the emigrants.

The silent stoicism of their conduct,
and the pathetic degradation of their appearance,
would have touched any thinking creature,
but my fellow-passengers danced and jested round them
with a truly Cockney baseness.

I was ashamed
for the thing we call civilisation.

We should carry upon our consciences so much,
at least,
of our forefathers' misconduct as we continue
to profit by ourselves.If oppression drives a wise man mad,
what should be raging in the hearts of these poor tribes,
who have been driven back and back,
step after step,
their promised reservations torn from them one after another as the States extended westward,
until at length they are shut up in
to these hideous mountain deserts of the centre - and even there find themselves invaded,
insulted,
and hunted out by ruffianly diggers?

The eviction of the Cherokees (
to name but an instance),
the extortion of Indian agents,
the outrages of the wicked,
the ill-faith of all,
nay,
down
to the ridicule of such poor beings as were here
with me upon the train,
make up a chapter of injustice and indignity such as a man must be in some ways base if his heart will suffer him
to pardon or forget.

These old,
well- founded,
historical hatreds have a savour of nobility
for the independent.

That the Jew should not love the Christian,
nor the Irishman love the English,
nor the Indian brave tolerate the thought of the American,
is not disgraceful
to the nature of man;
rather,
indeed,
honourable,
since it depends on wrongs ancient like the race,
and not personal
to him who cherishes the indignation.


TO THE GOLDEN GATES
A little corner of Utah is soon traversed,
and leaves no particular impressions on the mind.

By an early hour on Wednesday morning we stopped
to breakfast at Toano,
a little station on a bleak,
high- lying plateau in Nevada.

The man who kept the station eating-house was a Scot,
and learning that I was the same,
he grew very friendly,
and gave me some advice on the country I was now entering.

"You see," said he,
"I tell you this,
because I come from your country."

Hail,
brither Scots!
His most important hint was on the moneys of this part of the world.

There is something in the simplicity of a decimal coinage which is revolting
to the human mind;
thus the French,
in small affairs,
reckon strictly by halfpence;
and you have
to solve,
by a spasm of mental arithmetic,
such posers as thirty-two,
forty-five,
or even a hundred halfpence.

In the Pacific States they have made a bolder push
for complexity,
and settle their affairs by a coin that no longer that no longer exists - the BIT,
or old Mexican real.

The supposed value of the bit is twelve and a half cents,
eight
to the dollar.

When it comes
to two bits,
the quarter-dollar stands
for the required amount.

But how about an odd bit?

The nearest coin
to it is a dime,
which is,
short by a fifth.

That,
then,
is called a SHORT bit.

If you have one,
you lay it triumphantly down,
and save two and a half cents.

But if you have not,
and lay down a quarter,
the bar-keeper or shopman calmly tenders you a dime by way of change;
and thus you have paid what is called a LONG BIT,
and lost two and a half cents,
or even,
by comparison
with a short bit,
five cents.

In country places all over the Pacific coast,
nothing lower than a bit is ever asked or taken,
which vastly increases the cost of life;
as even
for a glass of beer you must pay fivepence or sevenpence-halfpenny,
as the case may be.

You would say that this system of mutual robbery was as broad as it was long;
but I have discovered a plan
to make it broader,

with which I here endow the public.

It is brief and simple - radiantly simple.

There is one place where five cents are recognised,
and that is the post-office.

A quarter is only worth two bits,
a short and a long.

Whenever you have a quarter,
go
to the post-office and buy five cents worth of postage-stamps;
you will receive in change two dimes,
that is,
two short bits.

The purchasing power of your money is undiminished.

You can go and have your two glasses of beer all the same;
and you have made yourself a present of five cents worth of postage-stamps in
to the bargain.

Benjamin Franklin would have patted me on the head
for this discovery.From Toano we travelled all day through deserts of alkali and sand,
horrible
to man,
and bare sage-brush country that seemed little kindlier,
and came by supper-time
to Elko.

As we were standing,
after our manner,
outside the station,
I saw two men whip suddenly from underneath the cars,
and take
to their heels across country.

They were tramps,
it appeared,
who had been riding on the beams since eleven of the night before;
and several of my fellow- passengers had already seen and conversed
with them while we broke our fast at Toano.

These land stowaways play a great part over here in America,
and I should have liked dearly
to become acquainted
with them.At Elko an odd circumstance befell me.

I was coming out from supper,
when I was stopped by a small,
stout,
ruddy man,
followed by two others taller and ruddier than himself."

Excuse me,
sir," he said,
"but do you happen
to be going on?"


I said I was,
whereupon he said he hoped
to persuade me
to desist from that intention.

He had a situation
to offer me,
and if we could come
to terms,
why,
good and well.

"You see," he continued,
"I'm running a theatre here,
and we're a little short in the orchestra.

You're a musician,
I guess?"


I assured him that,
beyond a rudimentary acquaintance
with "Auld Lang Syne" and "The Wearing of the Green," I had no pretension whatever
to that style.

He seemed much put out of countenance;
and one of his taller companions asked him,
on the nail,

for five dollars."

You see,
sir," added the latter
to me,
"he bet you were a musician;
I bet you weren't.

No offence,
I hope?"


"None whatever," I said,
and the two withdrew
to the bar,
where I presume the debt was liquidated.This little adventure woke bright hopes in my fellow-travellers,
who thought they had now come
to a country where situations went a- begging.

But I am not so sure that the offer was in good faith.

Indeed,
I am more than half persuaded it was but a feeler
to decide the bet.Of all the next day I will tell you nothing,

for the best of all reasons,
that I remember no more than that we continued through desolate and desert scenes,
fiery hot and deadly weary.

But some time after I had fallen asleep that night,
I was awakened by one of my companions.

It was in vain that I resisted.

A fire of enthusiasm and whisky burned in his eyes;
and he declared we were in a new country,
and I must come forth upon the platform and see
with my own eyes.

The train was then,
in its patient way,
standing halted in a by-track.

It was a clear,
moonlit night;
but the valley was too narrow
to admit the moonshine direct,
and only a diffused glimmer whitened the tall rocks and relieved the blackness of the pines.

A hoarse clamour filled the air;
it was the continuous plunge of a cascade somewhere near at hand among the mountains.

The air struck chill,
but tasted good and vigorous in the nostrils - a fine,
dry,
old mountain atmosphere.

I was dead sleepy,
but I returned
to roost
with a grateful mountain feeling at my heart.When I awoke next morning,
I was puzzled
for a while
to know if it were day or night,

for the illumination was unusual.

I sat up at last,
and found we were grading slowly downward through a long snowshed;
and suddenly we shot in
to an open;
and before we were swallowed in
to the next length of wooden tunnel,
I had one glimpse of a huge pine-forested ravine upon my left,
a foaming river,
and a sky already coloured
with the fires of dawn.

I am usually very calm over the displays of nature;
but you will scarce believe how my heart leaped at this.

It was like meeting one's wife.

I had come home again - home from unsightly deserts
to the green and habitable corners of the earth.

Every spire of pine along the hill-top,
every trouty pool along that mountain river,
was more dear
to me than a blood relation.

Few people have praised God more happily than I did.

And thenceforward,
down by Blue Canon,
Alta,
Dutch Flat,
and all the old mining camps,
through a sea of mountain forests,
dropping thousands of feet toward the far sea-level as we went,
not I only,
but all the passengers on board,
threw off their sense of dirt and heat and weariness,
and bawled like schoolboys,
and thronged
with shining eyes upon the platform and became new creatures within and without.

The sun no longer oppressed us
with heat,
it only shone laughingly along the mountain-side,
until we were fain
to laugh ourselves
for glee.

At every turn we could see farther in
to the land and our own happy futures.

At every town the cocks were tossing their clear notes in
to the golden air,
and crowing
for the new day and the new country.


for this was indeed our destination;
this was "the good country" we had been going
to so long.By afternoon we were at Sacramento,
the city of gardens in a plain of corn;
and the next day before the dawn we were lying
to upon the Oakland side of San Francisco Bay.

The day was breaking as we crossed the ferry;
the fog was rising over the citied hills of San Francisco;
the bay was perfect - not a ripple,
scarce a stain,
upon its blue expanse;
everything was waiting,
breathless,

for the sun.

A spot of cloudy gold lit first upon the head of Tamalpais,
and then widened downward on its shapely shoulder;
the air seemed
to awaken,
and began
to sparkle;
and suddenly
"The tall hills Titan discovered,"
and the city of San Francisco,
and the bay of gold and corn,
were lit from end
to end
with summer daylight.[1879.]
CHAPTER II - THE OLD PACIFIC CAPITAL
THE WOODS AND THE PACIFIC
THE Bay of Monterey has been compared by no less a person than General Sherman
to a bent fishing-hook;
and the comparison,
if less important than the march through Georgia,
still shows the eye of a soldier
for topography.

Santa Cruz sits exposed at the shank;
the mouth of the Salinas river is at the middle of the bend;
and Monterey itself is cosily ensconced beside the barb.

Thus the ancient capital of California faces across the bay,
while the Pacific Ocean,
though hidden by low hills and forest,
bombards her left flank and rear
with never-dying surf.

In front of the town,
the long line of sea-beach trends north and north-west,
and then westward
to enclose the bay.

The waves which lap so quietly about the jetties of Monterey grow louder and larger in the distance;
you can see the breakers leaping high and white by day;
at night,
the outline of the shore is traced in transparent silver by the moonlight and the flying foam;
and from all round,
even in quiet weather,
the distant,
thrilling roar of the Pacific hangs over the coast and the adjacent country like smoke above a battle.These long beaches are enticing
to the idle man.

It would be hard
to find a walk more solitary and at the same time more exciting
to the mind.

Crowds of ducks and sea-gulls hover over the sea.

Sandpipers trot in and out by troops after the retiring waves,
trilling together in a chorus of infinitesimal song.

Strange sea- tangles,
new
to the European eye,
the bones of whales,
or sometimes a whole whale's carcase,
white
with carrion-gulls and poisoning the wind,
lie scattered here and there along the sands.

The waves come in slowly,
vast and green,
curve their translucent necks,
and burst
with a surprising uproar,
that runs,
waxing and waning,
up and down the long key-board of the beach.

The foam of these great ruins mounts in an instant
to the ridge of the sand glacis,
swiftly fleets back again,
and is met and buried by the next breaker.

The interest is perpetually fresh.

On no other coast that I know shall you enjoy,
in calm,
sunny weather,
such a spectacle of Ocean's greatness,
such beauty of changing colour,
or such degrees of thunder in the sound.

The very air is more than usually salt by this Homeric deep.Inshore,
a tract of sand-hills borders on the beach.

Here and there a lagoon,
more or less brackish,
attracts the birds and hunters.

A rough,
undergrowth partially conceals the sand.

The crouching,
hardy live-oaks flourish singly or in thickets - the kind of wood
for murderers
to crawl among - and here and there the skirts of the forest extend downward from the hills
with a floor of turf and long aisles of pine-trees hung
with Spaniard's Beard.

Through this quaint desert the railway cars drew near
to Monterey from the junction at Salinas City - though that and so many other things are now
for ever altered - and it was from here that you had the first view of the old township lying in the sands,
its white windmills bickering in the chill,
perpetual wind,
and the first fogs of the evening drawing drearily around it from the sea.The one common note of all this country is the haunting presence of the ocean.

A great faint sound of breakers follows you high up in
to the inland canons;
the roar of water dwells in the clean,
empty rooms of Monterey as in a shell upon the chimney;
go where you will,
you have but
to pause and listen
to hear the voice of the Pacific.

You pass out of the town
to the south-west,
and mount the hill among pine-woods.

Glade,
thicket,
and grove surround you.

You follow winding sandy tracks that lead nowhither.

You see a deer;
a multitude of quail arises.

But the sound of the sea still follows you as you advance,
like that of wind among the trees,
only harsher and stranger
to the ear;
and when at length you gain the summit,
out breaks on every hand and
with freshened vigour that same unending,
distant,
whispering rumble of the ocean;

for now you are on the top of Monterey peninsula,
and the noise no longer only mounts
to you from behind along the beach towards Santa Cruz,
but from your right also,
round by Chinatown and Pinos lighthouse,
and from down before you
to the mouth of the Carmello river.

The whole woodland is begirt
with thundering surges.

The silence that immediately surrounds you where you stand is not so much broken as it is haunted by this distant,
circling rumour.

It sets your senses upon edge;
you strain your attention;
you are clearly and unusually conscious of small sounds near at hand;
you walk listening like an Indian hunter;
and that voice of the Pacific is a sort of disquieting company
to you in your walk.When once I was in these woods I found it difficult
to turn homeward.

All woods lure a rambler onward;
but in those of Monterey it was the surf that particularly invited me
to prolong my walks.

I would push straight
for the shore where I thought it
to be nearest.

Indeed,
there was scarce a direction that would not,
sooner or later,
have brought me forth on the Pacific.

The emptiness of the woods gave me a sense of freedom and discovery in these excursions.

I never in all my visits met but one man.

He was a Mexican,
very dark of hue,
but smiling and fat,
and he carried an axe,
though his true business at that moment was
to seek
for straying cattle.

I asked him what o'clock it was,
but he seemed neither
to know nor care;
and when he in his turn asked me
for news of his cattle,
I showed myself equally indifferent.

We stood and smiled upon each other
for a few seconds,
and then turned without a word and took our several ways across the forest.One day - I shall never forget it - I had taken a trail that was new
to me.

After a while the woods began
to open,
the sea
to sound nearer hand.

I came upon a road,
and,

to my surprise,
a stile.

A step or two farther,
and,
without leaving the woods,
I found myself among trim houses.

I walked through street after street,
parallel and at right angles,
paved
with sward and dotted
with trees,
but still undeniable streets,
and each
with its name posted at the corner,
as in a real town.

Facing down the main thoroughfare - "Central Avenue," as it was ticketed - I saw an open-air temple,

with benches and sounding-board,
as though
for an orchestra.

The houses were all tightly shuttered;
there was no smoke,
no sound but of the waves,
no moving thing.

I have never been in any place that seemed so dreamlike.

Pompeii is all in a bustle
with visitors,
and its antiquity and strangeness deceive the imagination;
but this town had plainly not been built above a year or two,
and perhaps had been deserted overnight.

Indeed,
it was not so much like a deserted town as like a scene upon the stage by daylight,
and
with no one on the boards.

The barking of a dog led me at last
to the only house still occupied,
where a Scotch pastor and his wife pass the winter alone in this empty theatre.

The place was "The Pacific Camp Grounds,
the Christian Seaside Resort."

Thither,
in the warm season,
crowds come
to enjoy a life of teetotalism,
religion,
and flirtation,
which I am willing
to think blameless and agreeable.

The neighbourhood at least is well selected.

The Pacific booms in front.

Westward is Point Pinos,

with the lighthouse in a wilderness of sand,
where you will find the lightkeeper playing the piano,
making models and bows and arrows,
studying dawn and sunrise in amateur oil-painting,
and
with a dozen other elegant pursuits and interests
to surprise his brave,
old-country rivals.


to the east,
and still nearer,
you will come upon a space of open down,
a hamlet,
a haven among rocks,
a world of surge and screaming sea- gulls.

Such scenes are very similar in different climates;
they appear homely
to the eyes of all;

to me this was like a dozen spots in Scotland.

And yet the boats that ride in the haven are of strange outlandish design;
and,
if you walk in
to the hamlet,
you will behold costumes and faces and hear a tongue that are unfamiliar
to the memory.

The joss-stick burns,
the opium pipe is smoked,
the floors are strewn
with slips of coloured paper - prayers,
you would say,
that had somehow missed their destination - and a man guiding his upright pencil from right
to left across the sheet,
writes home the news of Monterey
to the Celestial Empire.The woods and the Pacific rule between them the climate of this seaboard region.

On the streets of Monterey,
when the air does not smell salt from the one,
it will be blowing perfumed from the resinous tree-tops of the other.


for days together a hot,
dry air will overhang the town,
close as from an oven,
yet healthful and aromatic in the nostrils.

The cause is not far
to seek,

for the woods are afire,
and the hot wind is blowing from the hills.

These fires are one of the great dangers of California.

I have seen from Monterey as many as three at the same time,
by day a cloud of smoke,
by night a red coal of conflagration in the distance.

A little thing will start them,
and,
if the wind be favourable,
they gallop over miles of country faster than a horse.

The inhabitants must turn out and work like demons,

for it is not only the pleasant groves that are destroyed;
the climate and the soil are equally at stake,
and these fires prevent the rains of the next winter and dry up perennial fountains.

California has been a land of promise in its time,
like Palestine;
but if the woods continue so swiftly
to perish,
it may become,
like Palestine,
a land of desolation.
to visit the woods while they are languidly burning is a strange piece of experience.

The fire passes through the underbrush at a run.

Every here and there a tree flares up instantaneously from root
to summit,
scattering tufts of flame,
and is quenched,
it seems,
as quickly.

But this last is only in semblance.


for after this first squib-like conflagration of the dry moss and twigs,
there remains behind a deep-rooted and consuming fire in the very entrails of the tree.

The resin of the pitch-pine is principally condensed at the base of the bole and in the spreading roots.

Thus,
after the light,
showy,
skirmishing flames,
which are only as the match
to the explosion,
have already scampered down the wind in
to the distance,
the true harm is but beginning
for this giant of the woods.

You may approach the tree from one side,
and see it scorched indeed from top
to bottom,
but apparently survivor of the peril.

Make the circuit,
and there,
on the other side of the column,
is a clear mass of living coal,
spreading like an ulcer;
while underground,

to their most extended fibre,
the roots are being eaten out by fire,
and the smoke is rising through the fissures
to the surface.

A little while,
and,
without a nod of warning,
the huge pine-tree snaps off short across the ground and falls prostrate
with a crash.

Meanwhile the fire continues its silent business;
the roots are reduced
to a fine ash;
and long afterwards,
if you pass by,
you will find the earth pierced
with radiating galleries,
and preserving the design of all these subterranean spurs,
as though it were the mould
for a new tree instead of the print of an old one.

These pitch-pines of Monterey are,

with the single exception of the Monterey cypress,
the most fantastic of forest trees.

No words can give an idea of the contortion of their growth;
they might figure without change in a circle of the nether hell as Dante pictured it;
and at the rate at which trees grow,
and at which forest fires spring up and gallop through the hills of California,
we may look forward
to a time when there will not be one of them left standing in that land of their nativity.

At least they have not so much
to fear from the axe,
but perish by what may be called a natural although a violent death;
while it is man in his short-sighted greed that robs the country of the nobler redwood.

Yet a little while and perhaps all the hills of seaboard California may be as bald as Tamalpais.I have an interest of my own in these forest fires,

for I came so near
to lynching on one occasion,
that a braver man might have retained a thrill from the experience.

I wished
to be certain whether it was the moss,
that quaint funereal ornament of Californian forests,
which blazed up so rapidly when the flame first touched the tree.

I suppose I must have been under the influence of Satan,

for instead of plucking off a piece
for my experiment what should I do but walk up
to a great pine-tree in a portion of the wood which had escaped so much as scorching,
strike a match,
and apply the flame gingerly
to one of the tassels.

The tree went off simply like a rocket;
in three seconds it was a roaring pillar of fire.

Close by I could hear the shouts of those who were at work combating the original conflagration.

I could see the waggon that had brought them tied
to a live oak in a piece of open;
I could even catch the flash of an axe as it swung up through the underwood in
to the sunlight.

Had any one observed the result of my experiment my neck was literally not worth a pinch of snuff;
after a few minutes of passionate expostulation I should have been run up
to convenient bough.
to die
for faction is a common evil;
But
to be hanged
for nonsense is the devil.I have run repeatedly,
but never as I ran that day.

At night I went out of town,
and there was my own particular fire,
quite distinct from the other,
and burning as I thought
with even greater vigour.But it is the Pacific that exercises the most direct and obvious power upon the climate.

At sunset,

for months together,
vast,
wet,
melancholy fogs arise and come shoreward from the ocean.

From the hill-top above Monterey the scene is often noble,
although it is always sad.

The upper air is still bright
with sunlight;
a glow still rests upon the Gabelano Peak;
but the fogs are in possession of the lower levels;
they crawl in scarves among the sandhills;
they float,
a little higher,
in clouds of a gigantic size and often of a wild configuration;

to the south,
where they have struck the seaward shoulder of the mountains of Santa Lucia,
they double back and spire up skyward like smoke.

Where their shadow touches,
colour dies out of the world.

The air grows chill and deadly as they advance.

The trade-wind freshens,
the trees begin
to sigh,
and all the windmills in Monterey are whirling and creaking and filling their cisterns
with the brackish water of the sands.

It takes but a little while till the invasion is complete.

The sea,
in its lighter order,
has submerged the earth.

Monterey is curtained in
for the night in thick,
wet,
salt,
and frigid clouds,
so
to remain till day returns;
and before the sun's rays they slowly disperse and retreat in broken squadrons
to the bosom of the sea.

And yet often when the fog is thickest and most chill,
a few steps out of the town and up the slope,
the night will be dry and warm and full of inland perfume.

MEXICANS,
AMERICANS,
AND INDIANS
The history of Monterey has yet
to be written.

Founded by Catholic missionaries,
a place of wise beneficence
to Indians,
a place of arms,
a Mexican capital continually wrested by one faction from another,
an American capital when the first House of Representatives held its deliberations,
and then falling lower and lower from the capital of the State
to the capital of a county,
and from that again,
by the loss of its charter and town lands,

to a mere bankrupt village,
its rise and decline is typical of that of all Mexican institutions and even Mexican families in California.Nothing is stranger in that strange State than the rapidity
with which the soil has changed-hands.

The Mexicans,
you may say,
are all poor and landless,
like their former capital;
and yet both it and they hold themselves apart and preserve their ancient customs and something of their ancient air.The town,
when I was there,
was a place of two or three streets,
economically paved
with sea-sand,
and two or three lanes,
which were watercourses in the rainy season,
and were,
at all times,
rent up by fissures four or five feet deep.

There were no street lights.

Short sections of wooden sidewalk only added
to the dangers of the night,

for they were often high above the level of the roadway,
and no one could tell where they would be likely
to begin or end.

The houses were,

for the most part,
built of unbaked adobe brick,
many of them old
for so new a country,
some of very elegant proportions,

with low,
spacious,
shapely rooms,
and walls so thick that the heat of summer never dried them
to the heart.

At the approach of the rainy season a deathly chill and a graveyard smell began
to hang about the lower floors;
and diseases of the chest are common and fatal among house-keeping people of either sex.There was no activity but in and around the saloons,
where people sat almost all day long playing cards.

The smallest excursion was made on horseback.

You would scarcely ever see the main street without a horse or two tied
to posts,
and making a fine figure
with their Mexican housings.

It struck me oddly
to come across some of the CORNHILL illustrations
to Mr. Blackmore's EREMA,
and see all the characters astride on English saddles.

As a matter of fact,
an English saddle is a rarity even in San Francisco,
and,
you may say,
a thing unknown in all the rest of California.

In a place so exclusively Mexican as Monterey,
you saw not only Mexican saddles but true Vaquero riding - men always at the hand-gallop up hill and down dale,
and round the sharpest corner,
urging their horses
with cries and gesticulations and cruel rotatory spurs,
checking them dead
with a touch,
or wheeling them right-about-face in a square yard.

The type of face and character of bearing are surprisingly un-American.

The first ranged from something like the pure Spanish,

to something,
in its sad fixity,
not unlike the pure Indian,
although I do not suppose there was one pure blood of either race in all the country.

As
for the second,
it was a matter of perpetual surprise
to find,
in that world of absolutely mannerless Americans,
a people full of deportment,
solemnly courteous,
and doing all things
with grace and decorum.

In dress they ran
to colour and bright sashes.

Not even the most Americanised could always resist the temptation
to stick a red rose in
to his hat-band.

Not even the most Americanised would descend
to wear the vile dress hat of civilisation.

Spanish was the language of the streets.

It was difficult
to get along without a word or two of that language
for an occasion.

The only communications in which the population joined were
with a view
to amusement.

A weekly public ball took place
with great etiquette,
in addition
to the numerous fandangoes in private houses.

There was a really fair amateur brass band.

Night after night serenaders would be going about the street,
sometimes in a company and
with several instruments and voice together,
sometimes severally,
each guitar before a different window.

It was a strange thing
to lie awake in nineteenth-century America,
and hear the guitar accompany,
and one of these old,
heart-breaking Spanish love-songs mount in
to the night air,
perhaps in a deep baritone,
perhaps in that high- pitched,
pathetic,
womanish al
to which is so common among Mexican men,
and which strikes on the unaccustomed ear as something not entirely human but altogether sad.The town,
then,
was essentially and wholly Mexican;
and yet almost all the land in the neighbourhood was held by Americans,
and it was from the same class,
numerically so small,
that the principal officials were selected.

This Mexican and that Mexican would describe
to you his old family estates,
not one rood of which remained
to him.

You would ask him how that came about,
and elicit some tangled story back-foremost,
from which you gathered that the Americans had been greedy like designing men,
and the Mexicans greedy like children,
but no other certain fact.

Their merits and their faults contributed alike
to the ruin of the former landholders.

It is true they were improvident,
and easily dazzled
with the sight of ready money;
but they were gentlefolk besides,
and that in a way which curiously unfitted them
to combat Yankee craft.

Suppose they have a paper
to sign,
they would think it a reflection on the other party
to examine the terms
with any great minuteness;
nay,
suppose them
to observe some doubtful clause,
it is ten
to one they would refuse from delicacy
to object
to it.

I know I am speaking within the mark,

for I have seen such a case occur,
and the Mexican,
in spite of the advice of his lawyer,
has signed the imperfect paper like a lamb.


to have spoken in the matter,
he said,
above all
to have let the other party guess that he had seen a lawyer,
would have "been like doubting his word."

The scruple sounds oddly
to one of ourselves,
who have been brought up
to understand all business as a competition in fraud,
and honesty itself
to be a virtue which regards the carrying out but not the creation of agreements.

This single unworldly trait will account
for much of that revolution of which we are speaking.

The Mexicans have the name of being great swindlers,
but certainly the accusation cuts both ways.

In a contest of this sort,
the entire booty would scarcely have passed in
to the hands of the more scupulous race.Physically the Americans have triumphed;
but it is not entirely seen how far they have themselves been morally conquered.

This is,
of course,
but a part of a part of an extraordinary problem now in the course of being solved in the various States of the American Union.

I am reminded of an anecdote.

Some years ago,
at a great sale of wine,
all the odd lots were purchased by a grocer in a small way in the old town of Edinburgh.

The agent had the curiosity
to visit him some time after and inquire what possible use he could have
for such material.

He was shown,
by way of answer,
a huge vat where all the liquors,
from humble Gladstone
to imperial Tokay,
were fermenting together.

"And what," he asked,
"do you propose
to call this?"

"I'm no very sure," replied the grocer,
"but I think it's going
to turn out port."

In the older Eastern States,
I think we may say that this hotch-potch of races in going
to turn out English,
or thereabout.

But the problem is indefinitely varied in other zones.

The elements are differently mingled in the south,
in what we may call the Territorial belt and in the group of States on the Pacific coast.

Above all,
in these last,
we may look
to see some monstrous hybrid - Whether good or evil,
who shall forecast?

but certainly original and all their own.

In my little restaurant at Monterey,
we have sat down
to table day after day,
a Frenchman,
two Portuguese,
an Italian,
a Mexican,
and a Scotchman:

we had
for common visitors an American from Illinois,
a nearly pure blood Indian woman,
and a naturalised Chinese;
and from time
to time a Switzer and a German came down from country ranches
for the night.

No wonder that the Pacific coast is a foreign land
to visitors from the Eastern States,

for each race contributes something of its own.

Even the despised Chinese have taught the youth of California,
none indeed of their virtues,
but the debasing use of opium.

And chief among these influences is that of the Mexicans.The Mexicans although in the State are out of it.

They still preserve a sort of international independence,
and keep their affairs snug
to themselves.

Only four or five years ago Vasquez,
the bandit,
his troops being dispersed and the hunt too hot
for him in other parts of California,
returned
to his native Monterey,
and was seen publicly in her streets and saloons,
fearing no man.

The year that I was there,
there occurred two reputed murders.

As the Montereyans are exceptionally vile speakers of each other and of every one behind his back,
it is not possible
for me
to judge how much truth there may have been in these reports;
but in the one case every one believed,
and in the other some suspected,
that there had been foul play;
and nobody dreamed
for an instant of taking the authorities in
to their counsel.

Now this is,
of course,
characteristic enough of the Mexicans;
but it is a noteworthy feature that all the Americans in Monterey acquiesced without a word in this inaction.

Even when I spoke
to them upon the subject,
they seemed not
to understand my surprise;
they had forgotten the traditions of their own race and upbringing,
and become,
in a word,
wholly Mexicanised.Again,
the Mexicans,
having no ready money
to speak of,
rely almost entirely in their business transactions upon each other's worthless paper.

Pedro the penniless pays you
with an I O U from the equally penniless Miguel.

It is a sort of local currency by courtesy.

Credit in these parts has passed in
to a superstition.

I have seen a strong,
violent man struggling
for months
to recover a debt,
and getting nothing but an exchange of waste paper.

The very storekeepers are averse
to asking
for cash payments,
and are more surprised than pleased when they are offered.

They fear there must be something under it,
and that you mean
to withdraw your custom from them.

I have seen the enterprising chemist and stationer begging me
with fervour
to let my account run on,
although I had my purse open in my hand;
and partly from the commonness of the case,
partly from some remains of that generous old Mexican tradition which made all men welcome
to their tables,
a person may be notoriously both unwilling and unable
to pay,
and still find credit
for the necessaries of life in the stores of Monterey.

Now this villainous habit of living upon "tick" has grown in
to Californian nature.

I do not mean that the American and European storekeepers of