entire stock of freezers; Californians are always eager to pay for their fun. Every once in a while there were earthquakes. The small ones were ignored, but the large ones would send everyone tumbling out of the buildings onto the sidewalks. It was excitement, and we lived on it. During the Sunday sermon in one of the churches the building began to shake, and it is told that the clergyman rose and said: “Remember that you are in the hands of God here in church as well as outside....” At that a piece of plaster fell on the pulpit and he finished: “But the vestry is good enough for me!” It was through the store that I met Laura Fair. Hers was a tragic life. One of those women born to be a companion to men—she was not strong enough (or was it hard enough) to withstand the buffeting of manmade laws. Up in Virginia City, where she lived when young, it was said that “the front of her house always looked like a country funeral,” so many one-man teams. It was here during the Civil War that she got into her first trouble. Wrapping herself in the Stars and Bars, she paraded the streets, daring anyone to stop her; and over her house, which was the resort of the leading Secessionists, she flew the Confederate flag, saying she would kill anyone who attempted to lower it. One day a Union man pulled it down and she shot him dead. A. P. Crittenden, a lawyer from South Carolina, then championed Mrs. Fair’s cause, and she was acquitted, due to his passionate and eloquent appeal at the trial. A close relationship between the two ensued and they moved to San Francisco, where she was known as the attorney’s common-law wife. After some years, Crittenden decided to send East for his legal wife and family. Laura Fair told him directly that she would kill him if he did. Walking up to the family group as they stood on the Oakland ferryboat, she quickly drew a revolver from beneath her cloak and shot him, saying: “You have ruined the reputation of myself and daughter.” The state of California has never executed a woman, and, while Mrs. Fair was sentenced to be hanged at her first trial, at her second one she was set free. During the ’seventies, she was living quietly, and I had only vaguely heard her mentioned, when one morning my boss came to the back of the store, saying: “You must go out in front and wait on Laura Fair.” I went out to serve this person, who looked more like an elderly aunt than a murderess, and I marveled that any man would be afraid of so mild a creature. She seemed to have no charm whatever.