brightened, and she nodded assent. Then turning to the groom, he called in a tone fierce and threatening, “You like ’um she?” and Ah Sam--who was now only a passive object in the hands of Spoke, forced and galvanized into matrimony--dared not do otherwise than give in his adhesion, upon which the Justice pronounced them man and wife; whereupon two Virginians present with their violins (all Virginians fiddle and shoot well) struck up the “Arkansas Traveller;” and the audience--which was now large, every bar-room in Jamestown having emptied itself to witness our Chinese wedding--inspired by one common impulse, arose and marched seven times about the couple. Ah Sam was now informed that he was married “American fashion,” and that he was free to depart with his wedded encumbrance. But Ah Sam, whose intoxication had broken out in full acquiescence with these proceedings, now insisted on making a midnight tour of all the saloons in camp, and treating everybody to the deathly whiskey vended by them, to which the crowd--who never objected to the driving of this sort of nails in their own coffins--assented, and the result of it was (Ah Sam spending his money very freely) that when daylight peeped over the eastern hills the Bella Union saloon was still in full blast; and while the Justice of the Peace was winning Spoke’s thirty hard-earned dollars in one corner, and the two Virginians still kept the “Arkansas Traveller” going on their violins in another, Stephen Scott (afterward elected to Congress) was weeping profusely over the bar, and on being interrogated as to the cause of his sadness by General Wyatt, ex-member of the State Senate, Scott replied that he could never hear played the air of “Home, Sweet Home” without shedding tears. Ah Sam departed with his bride in the morning, and never were a man’s prospects brighter for a happy honeymoon until the succeeding night, when he was waylaid by a band of disguised white men in the temporary service and pay of old Ching Loo; and he and Hi Sing were forced so far apart that they never saw each other again. Ah Sam returned to the attorney, apparently deeming that some help might be obtained in that quarter; but Spoke intimated that he could no longer assist him, since it was every man’s special and particular mission to keep his own wife after being married; although he added, for Ah Sam’s comfort, that this was not such an easy matter for the Americans themselves, especially in California. Upon this Ah Sam apparently determined to be satisfied with his brief and turbulent career in matrimony; and betaking himself again to Swett’s Bar cooked in such a villainous fashion and desperate vigor, finding thereby a balm for an aching heart, that in a twelvemonth several stalwart miners gave up their ghosts through indigestion, and the little graveyard on the red hill thereby lost forever its distinctive character of affording a final resting place only to those who had died violent deaths. CHAPTER XXI.