year to the same resorts; but incessant war is waged upon them by the sealers and whalers, so that the chances are against the beast where he is not protected by law, and their numbers do not increase. Altogether, the spectacle was one never to be forgotten. A hotel, with oysters awaiting us for a forebreakfast refection in the background, waggons from Michigan, horses from Kentucky, all the apparatus of civilised life close at hand, the Pacific and its strange wild denizens at our feet! "Let us turn in and have an oyster." "What! oysters in June?" "Yes, and good ones too." In this favoured land oysters are in season all the year round. There are no oysters found on the coast, I am told, and they will not breed. They are brought all the way from the Atlantic coast when they are mere oysterlets, and they are laid down in the Pacific, where they grow fat and large, but are not "crossed in love," and therefore are fit to be eaten from January to January. They are about the size of a spring chicken, and need some courage on the part of an assailant who desires to dispose of them as he would a native. This was our last day in the city of the Golden Gate, and the photographers were masters of the situation; and there was much _débris_ of sight-seeing to sweep up--visits to be made, shops to be inspected, among which I must mention specially the Diamond Palace of Colonel Andrews, one of the handsomest jeweller's "stores" in the world, though it is not as large as the establishments of the principal firms in London, Paris, Vienna, or as Tiffany's in New York. The distinctive feature of the interior is the decoration of the paintings of fair women, on the ceiling and the walls above the cases, by necklaces, diadems, zones, and other feminine ornaments of real diamonds, emeralds, rubies, and pearls. The pictures are the work of an Italian artist of merit, and the general effect is very striking; but I doubt whether it is a good way of inducing people to buy the articles which bedeck the ideal beauties. At Bradley and Rulofson's we saw photographs of many of our friends, and had one more proof of the smallness of the world. Every one we knew seemed to have visited San Francisco. There we all submitted to inevitable fate, and left our negatives behind us, but the Duke was captured by a rival photographic institution, and had a sitting all to himself.