We dropped anchor off Galveston just as the sun was setting; and the evening being calm, and the reflection of the houses and steeples in the water sharp and defined, the scene was sufficiently striking. The city itself was more important as to size and wealth than I had anticipated, and the office of the "Texan Expedition," held at the "Moon," a great coffee-house on the Quay, impressed me most favorably with the respectability and pretensions of my "Co-expeditionaries." Old Kit presented me to the secretary--a very knavish-looking fellow in spectacles of black gauze--as the winner of the great prize, which, to my excessive mortification, I learned was at Houston, about eighty miles farther up the Bay. I apologized for my careless dress by stating that my baggage had been unfortunately left behind at New Orleans, and that in my haste I had been obliged to come on board with actually nothing but the few dollars I had in my pocket. "That's a misfortune easily repaired, sir," said the gauze-eyed secretary; "you can have your 'credit' cashed here just as liberally as at any town in the country." "I have no doubt of that," responded I, somewhat tartly, for I did not fancy this allusion to banks and bankers; "but all my papers are in my portmanteau." "Provoking, certainly," said he, taking a long pinch of snuff,--"ain't it, Kit?" But Kit only scratched his nose, and looked puzzled. "Are your bankers Vicars and Bull, sir?" "No," said I, "my credits are all on a Northern house; but I fancy my name is tolerably well known. You 've heard of the Cregans, I suppose." "Cregan--Cregan," repeated he a couple of times; then, opening a huge ledger at the letter C, ran his eye down a long column. "Crabtree--Crossley--Croxam--Crebell--Creffet--Cregmore. It is not Cregmore, sir?" "No, Cregan is the name." "Ah, well, there's no Cregan. There was a Cregmore was 'lynched' here, I see by the mark in the book, and we have a small trunk waiting to be claimed, belonging to him." "That ain't the fellow as purtended to be winner of the wagon team that was lotteried here a twelvemonth since, is it?" said Kit. "Yes, but it is, though. He made out he had the ticket all right and straight, when up comes one Colonel Jabus Harper, and showed the real thing; and the chaps took it up hotly, and they lynched Cregmore that evening." "Yes, sir, that's a fact," quoth Kit. "What was the penalty?" asked I, with a most imposing indifference. "They hanged him up at Hall's Court yonder. I ain't sure if he be n't hanging there still." "And this packet," said I, for the theme was excessively distasteful, "when does she sail?" "She starts to-night at twelve,--first cabin, two dollars; steerage, one-twenty." "Thank you," said I, touching my hat with the condescending air one occasionally employs to humiliate an inferior, by its mingled pride and courtesy; and I turned into the street. "You ain't a-going to Hall's Court, are you?" said Kit, overtaking me.