Here in San Francisco, our National greenbacks were no longer a legal tender, but everything was on a coin basis. Just as in New York, you sell gold and buy greenbacks, if you want a convenient medium of exchange, so here we had to sell greenbacks and buy gold. A dime was the smallest coin, and "two bits" (twenty-five cents) the usual gratuity. A newspaper cost a dime, or two for twenty-five cents--the change never being returned. Fruits and vegetables were cheap, but dry-goods, groceries, clothing, books, etc., about the same in gold, as East in greenbacks. The general cost of living, therefore, seemed to be about the same as in New York, _plus_ the premium on gold. California and the Pacific slope generally had refused to adopt the National currency, and it was still a mooted question whether they had lost or gained by this. At first, they thought it a great gain to be rid of our paper dollars; but public opinion had changed greatly, and many were getting to think they had made a huge mistake, in not originally acquiescing in the national necessity. The prosperity of the East during the war, and the pending sluggishness of trade on the Coast (still continuing), were much commented on, as connected with this question of Coin _vs._ Greenbacks; but it was thought too late to remedy the matter now. This hostility to our Greenbacks did not seem to arise from a want of patriotism, so much as from a difference of opinion, as to the necessity or propriety of their using a paper currency, when they had all the gold and silver they wanted, and were exporting a surplus by every steamer. If there was a speck of Secession there at first, California afterwards behaved very nobly, especially when she came with her bullion by the many thousands to the rescue of the Sanitary Commission; and Starr King's memory was still treasured everywhere, as that of a martyr for the Union. The oncoming Pacific Railroad was constantly spoken of, as a new "bond of union," to link the Coast to the Atlantic States as with "hooks of steel;" and, evidently, nothing (unless it may be the Chinese Question) can disturb the repose of the Republic there, for long years to come. The people almost universally spoke lovingly and tenderly of the East, as their old "home," and thousands were awaiting the completion of the Railroad to go thither once again.