IN AND AROUND SAN FRANCISCO. 261 



can hardly realize that California was only ten years old on 

 my arrival, and that I came within that time of being a " Forty- 

 niner." But remember, taking into account the fires, tlie vigi- 

 lante hangings, the jobbery and corruption of the metropolis, 

 and the murders and Chinese persecutions in the mining dis- 

 tricts, with its accompanying music from pistol crack and 

 swish of bowie, California had then passed a century of the 

 life of our more prosy States; hence the time, though seeming 

 long, was brief. 



At that time California had no literature. Among its scenery 

 and people there were mines of romance and poetry as rich in 

 their way as even the plains and mountains of gold, and as 

 virgin of efi'orts at development as they had been so lately. 

 The author of " Ramona " had not risen to so pathetically de- 

 pict the wrongs of the despised, though semi-civilized Indians. 

 That gifted, though shameless, vagabond, " The Poet of the 

 Sierras," had not woven his poetic warp through the woof of 

 its longitudinal valleys and mountains to draw in its meshes 

 before our eyes his creative imagery from 



" The quail who was piping all day long, 

 For the rabbit to -dance in the chaparral," 



and that being but little higher in the scale of life, the " Dig- 

 ger " Indian, to the best types of Californian humanity, and 

 from the lowliest valleys to the loftiest mountain peaks. Bret 

 Harte had not come to arrange the rough miner, the polished 

 gambler, the proud Spaniard and humble half-breed, the pious 

 Father, the vulgar new-enriched woman, the respectable 

 though scheming " school-marm " and the Cyprian adventuress, 

 into a grand octave, and play upon it with his deft fingers such 

 tunes as would echo around the w^orld. It is true that the 

 latter tried to make the one good deed of an Oakhurst cover 

 up the vile doings of a life-time, and that he assumed that 

 whoever made a profession was necessarily a hypocrite. But 



