We saw the picturesque thatched huts of the natives here and there along the way, and called to mind the stories of the terrible mortality among these people while the little railroad was being built. My heart was touched by the sight of so many of these poor people in their apparent heathen simplicity, and I wondered if they had a missionary among them. At Panama we embarked on the fine double-decked passenger steamer _Golden Age_. At this point crowds joined us who had come by ships from England, and we were told we had fifteen hundred aboard. Our fine-looking ship was evidently not built to stand much stormy weather, but they pushed along up the coast of Mexico, meeting no difficulties, and presently we put into the harbor of Acapulco to coal. As the ship lay at anchor crowds of natives surrounded the vessel with their little canoes. The passengers threw five and ten-cent pieces into the sea, and the natives, heedless of the sharks that were swimming about, would jump out of the canoes and dive like fish for the money, bringing the pieces up in their teeth, shaking their heads and still beckoning for more, as they were ready for another dive. One of the brethren who followed me tells the story that while his ship was coaling in this same harbor the sharks were so numerous that the passengers became alarmed for the safety of the little chaps, who as usual were diving for the money. Rushing to the side of the vessel, in great excitement, some of them cried out: “My! my! That shark is going to have that fellow.” “Naw,” drawled a gruff old tar, “he won’t touch him.” “Why not? Look! Look! He’s just going to catch him now.” “Naw,” said the sailor, looking on without concern. “He stinks too much of tobacco. He’ll never touch him.” Soon we sighted the Golden Gate, and later entered it in our ship the _Golden Age_. One could not but think there was much that was golden in those days of gold hunting, and yet many a poor fellow found out to his own sorrow that “it is not all gold that glitters.” Thousands of men filled the streets of ’Frisco, nearly all bound for the Fraser River or Cariboo, as British Columbia was called in those days. The steamboats, some of them not very seaworthy, were all overcrowded, bound north. A short time before the old steamer _Republic_, with eight hundred passengers, and the old _Sierra Nevada_, with nine hundred, had gone “up.” And now another old coffin, the _Brother Jonathan_, which had passed the Customs to carry only two hundred and fifty, took on eleven hundred men and was still selling tickets. Some of our acquaintances who went north on board of her state that “they were stowed away like pigs, two in a bunk,” and they did not dare to leave their bunks for fear they would lose them. They were eight days on the trip, and hundreds of them never saw daylight but once, when they put in to Astoria for a few hours.