Old Dr. Den will be remembered, not only with esteem, but with affection. He was seldom seen except on horseback, in which fashion he visited his patients, and was, all in all, somewhat a man of mystery. He rode a magnificent coal-black charger, and was himself always dressed in black. He wore, too, a black felt hat; and beneath the hat there clustered a mass of wavy hair as white as snow. In addition to all this, his standing collar was so high that he was compelled to hold his head erect; and as if to offset the immaculate linen, he tied around the collar a large black-silk scarf. Thus attired and seated on his richly-caparisoned horse, Dr. Den appeared always dignified, and even imposing. One may therefore easily picture him a friendly rival with Don Juan Bandini at the early Spanish balls, as he was on intimate terms with Don and Doña Abel Stearns, acknowledged social leaders. Dr. Den was fond of horse-racing and had his own favorite racehorses sent here from Santa Bárbara, where they were bred. Dr. Osburn, the Postmaster of 1853, had two years before installed a small variety of drugs on a few shelves, referred to by the complimentary term of drug store. Dr. Winston also kept a stock of drugs. About the same time, and before Dr. A. W. Hope opened the third drug store in September, 1854, John Gately Downey, an Irishman by birth, who had been apprenticed to the drug trade in Maryland and Ohio, formed a partnership with James P. McFarland, a native of Tennessee, buying some of Winston's stock. Their store was a long, one-story adobe on the northwest corner of Los Angeles and Commercial streets, and was known as McFarland & Downey's. The former had been a gold-miner; and this experience intensified the impression of an already rugged physique as a frontier type. Entering politics, as Osburn and practically every other professional man then did--doubtless as much as anything else for the assurance of some definite income--McFarland secured a seat in the Assembly in 1852, and in the Senate in 1853-54. About 1858, he returned to Tennessee and in December, 1860, revisited California; after which he settled permanently in the East. Downey, in 1859, having been elected Lieutenant-Governor, was later made Governor, through the election of Latham to the United States Senate; but his suddenly-revealed sympathies with the Secessionists, together with his advocacy of a bill for the apprenticing of Indians, contributed toward killing him politically and he retired to private life. Dr. H. R. Myles, destined to meet with a tragic death in a steamboat disaster which I shall narrate, was another druggist, with a partner, Dr. J. C. Welch, a South Carolinian dentist who came here in the early fifties and died in August, 1869. Their drug store on Main Street, nearly opposite the Bella Union, filled the prescriptions of the city's seven or eight doctors. Considerably later, but still among the pioneer druggists, was Dr. V.