one of them played the flute exceedingly well, the other two accompanied him on the guitar. How they executed their pieces seemed, in fact, all the same, as the Americans said themselves they only wanted a noise; and as these hells in some streets. stood house by house, or rather tent by tent, the reader may judge what a deafening mass of sounds. continually floated through the air.

By Monday, the 10th of December, Huhne and I had paid all our own and the sick man's debts; and knowing him to be in good hands for at least the next one or two weeks, I determined on going down to San Francisco, and accepting the friendly invitation of some fellow-passengers, the Messrs. von Witzleben, who had established a brewery on the Mission Dolores, about three miles distant from San Francisco. At the same time, I could find a place for our sailor, who would get well, I had not the least doubt, as soon as he could obtain good medicine and the necessary accommodations. But he needed none of them long, for I had hardly left Sacramento city when he died. Poor fellow! how were the dreams now realised with which he had come to this golden land? A small cold grave was dug for him, and far away from his home and friends he sleeps in the ground it had been his ambition to reach.

CHAPTER IV.

MISSION DOLORES.

THE steamer I went down with to San Francisco was the Senator,' one of the largest, and, in fact, the largest boat, then running either on the Sacramento or Joaquin River. The passage was a trip of about sixteen hours, and cost twenty-five dollars, without bed or food. Those boats gained an immense quantity of money at that time, and they were always crowded with passengers and freight.

We reached San Francisco late in the evening in very bad weather, so we had to drop our anchor, and wait till daylight to thread our way through the shipping. That night a storm raged, several vessels were wrecked outside the harbour, and in town three or four houses fell down. People even talked of some shocks which they had felt like an earthquake, but I slept all night as soundly as possible under one of the cabin-tables, rolled up in my blanket, and only woke when the rattling of the heavy

We

chain on deck told me that day had dawned. dropped anchor again near the wharf, and had to pay another dollar per head to be carried over to the landing.

But what a change had come over San Francisco. I had left tents, and low huts, and shantees, only two months before, and there were now regular streets of high wooden, and even here and there, brick buildings; but if the habitations had improved, the streets had become proportionately worse. In October, not a drop of rain had fallen, and the streets were hard and dry. Now they seemed to be only a liquid and moving mass of soft, chocolate-coloured mud. In going from one house to another you had to wade through it, and crossing a street seemed a matter of life and death. Many places became really impassable, and in Clay and Montgomery Street, mules were several times drowned in the middle of the road. Necessity, however, is the mother of invention, and the inhabitants of San Francisco had commenced forming a perfectly new kind of trottoir, so that they could pass where these had been laid, in a comparatively dry state, from one house to another. These consisted of small pieces of wood -old staves decidedly having the preferencewhich were fastened upon cross-pieces that rested on piles. In such places a man could walk dry, and with the pleasant feeling of having a sure footing

as long as they lasted; but they did not do much good as yet, for where they ended, you had to jump down in the mud again, and deliver yourself, without discretion, to the mercy of the softest place you could pick out from above. No wonder high water-boots cost, at that time, as much as two hundred dollars a pair; and one hundred and twenty dollars was, for several months, the regular price.

San Francisco seemed also to be crowded with labourers, who had sought the shelter of the town, preferring a smaller, but surer gain to the uncertain toil of gold-digging in the wet mountains. But San Francisco also offered them a larger field, the town itself employing a great many labourers in improving, as far as they could, the state of the streets, and the shipping required a good many hands.

But as I did not intend to go to work again, as I had done in Sacramento, when I was obliged to provide for the sick man, I changed, before all other things, my dress-and I could have called it more properly rags for dry clothing, and then went out to the Mission Dolores, which lay about three miles distant from the city and towards the south, upon the small strip of land which forms a kind of long peninsula between the Bay of San Francisco and the Pacific Ocean. The road led at that time through a perfect desert of sandy hills,

partly overgrown with low, stunted oaks and laurels; and the mission itself, as the old church and about twenty or twenty-five low stone huts were called, seemed to be chiefly inhabited by Spaniards and Indians. Only here and there Americans had commenced settling among them, without having built as yet a single house of their own. They only paid a rent for what they inhabited to the Spaniards or Californians, and therefore the whole place had nearly entirely retained its original character.

The Mission Dolores, or the original building which contained the church and the habitation of the priests, was an old crazy adobe building, and had, when gold was first discovered in California, been almost uninhabited, except by some Indians, who lived, or rather camped, in the old dark and damp rooms, using them, at the same time, for parlour and stable. But if one of those old priests who sleep their long, long sleep in the little graveyard of that once so lonely place beneath crumbling mound and a half-rotten head-board in the form of a cross, should get up now and see what a change only a few years—ay, even months

-have brought over the sanctuary of former days, would he not clasp his bony hands in mute astonishment and dread at the sacrilege the worse than heathens had committed in this holy building.