When we were on the railway, bound for San Francisco, we had a little taste of the life of the Wild West. At a roadside station a great, burly man got into the car, very rough, very dirty, very drunk and very quarrelsome. Things had apparently not gone smoothly with him, and he was thirsting for the blood of an enemy, failing whom, brandishing a revolver, he declared himself determined to slay someone in the car. His language was savage, indecent, and blasphemous. The women began to scream and hide their children in their petticoats; but as quick as thought the guard, a tiny little man, went up to the big bully twice his size, disarmed him and turned him out cowering at the next station. Not much of an adventure, but characteristic of the place and time. San Francisco was amazing. It is probably much more marvellous now, since its resurrection from the ruins of the great earthquake. But to me, who could recollect the gold fever in the forties, when I was old enough to take interest in the pictures of the _Illustrated London News_—the only illustrated paper out at that time—it seemed simply miraculous to see that city of palaces risen barely twenty-five years before out of the sand-heaps of the Pacific Coast. The greatest marvel of all were the men. I had letters for Mr. Ralston, the manager of the Bank of California; Mr. Gänsel, the agent of the Rothschilds, and others; and through their good offices I made the acquaintance with most of the heroes whose toil and industry had landed them winners in these great welter races of prosperity. It is notorious that new communities, especially those where there are pigeons ready for the plucking, attract the failures of the world, the flotsam and jetsam of the sea of rascaldom. The worst case that I ever came across was Port Said in 1870, where the griffins on their way out to India, and older men homeward bound on furlough, who might be accredited with having shaken such poor remnants of fruit as might yet hang here and there on the pagoda tree, fell easy victims to the croupiers of the hells and the sirens of the _cafés-chantants_. San Francisco, in its salad days, was no exception to the rule. Gamblers, professors of poker, of euchre and other games, were there by the hundred; bullies, and swindlers, men living upon their wits, but chiefly on the lack of wits in others; hawks ready to pounce upon any simple miner with brains lighter than his pouch who might come under the clutch of their talons. Evil men enough and to spare, but happily many more good ones, rare pioneers, endowed with that grip and holdfast purpose which have raised the United States to their proud position among the nations under the sun.