[Footnote 1: The difficulty, I am aware, in venturing on a description is, that it will appear rather a fever of fancy than an accurate chromoscope. I can only point to the fact that the revelation of the intense beauty of the sea has in recent years fallen rather to the naturalist than the poet, the accurate and scientific prose of the former surpassing the idealization of the latter.] [Footnote 2: By recent provision the Chinese are allowed to buy foreign vessels.] POSEY'S NUGGET. When the California "gold fever" broke out in the spring of 1849, Doctor Hanchett was living at Clarksville in Southern Indiana. Doctor Hanchett, it should be stated, had received his professional title not by the favor of any medical college or other learned institution, but through the simpler and less formal method that obtains among the free and generous people amongst whom his lines were cast. The process may be explained in a few words. In the fall of 1846 a recruiting station was established at Vicksburg to enlist volunteers for the war with Mexico, and Hanchett, at that time a resident of Vicksburg, and laboring in a profession--the saltatorial, to wit--a shade less illustrious than that to which he was so soon to attain, was the first man in the city to enlist. This momentous circumstance procured for him not only the prompt recognition of a patriotic press, which blazoned his name abroad with so many eccentricities of spelling that he came near losing his identity, but also gave him a claim in courtesy to such a position in the organization of his company, within the grasp of the mere high private, as he might select. After due deliberation he chose that of company commissary--an office unknown, I think, to the _United States Army Regulations_, but none the less familiar to our volunteer service. To this post he was promptly appointed by his captain; and, thus placed in the line of promotion, he rose rapidly till he attained the rank of hospital steward. The thing was done. Hanchett was Doctor Hanchett from that day, and the title was very much the larger part of the man ever after. How he had lived for forty years or more without it is still a mystery.