The Niantic had a curious history, even for a San Francisco hotel. This refuge for the traveller, or rather a portion of it, had originally been the British ship _Niantic_ which arrived at Valparaiso from Liverpool just as the California gold fever was at its height. She was bought by a Chilean merchant and started for Panama, where she loaded a cargo of tropical fruits and two hundred and forty-eight passengers, and arrived at San Francisco, July 5, 1849. Most of the fruit had either been devoured by the passengers or become so decayed that it was thrown overboard, and as soon as the anchor was down, the captain and all hands cleared out for the mines, leaving the ship to take care of herself. After some months of neglect, she was bought by a real estate speculator, who hauled her broadside to on the beach, at what was then the foot of Clay Street, and turned her into a warehouse. By degrees the old craft found herself embedded in some ten or twelve feet of sand and mud at a considerable distance from the water-front, but she made more money for her owner here than at any other time in her career, until one of the periodical fires swept away her top sides. The rest of her hull, which being below ground had escaped destruction, became the cellar of the Niantic Hotel, erected over her remains, and had the reputation of being the only tight and dry cellar in the neighborhood. In the course of time the Niantic Hotel was torn down to make room for a more substantial building, and upon clearing away the débris to secure a more solid foundation, thirty-five baskets of champagne were discovered hidden away among the floor timbers of the old hull, where they had remained unmolested for some twenty-one years. So faithfully had the wine been bottled and so dry had been its resting-place, that there was not a speck of rust on the wires securing the corks, and the labels were as fresh as the day they were put on, while the wine was found to have retained much of its original sparkle and _bouquet_. It was the then celebrated Jacquesson Fils brand, which at the time of its arrival might easily have been sold for $25 a bottle. I am not sure that it did not sell at nearly its former value, for almost every one in San Francisco in 1870 needed at least one bottle with which to celebrate the anniversary of his arrival “in the fall of Forty-nine or the spring of Fifty,” and thirty-five baskets would seem a small allowance for that vast and increasing multitude.