doorkeepers, who, I observed, were occasionally rewarded for their diligence by the discovery of a pistol secreted in some unusual part of the dress. Some of the shops were very magnificently got up, and would not have been amiss in Regent Street. The watchmakers’ and jewelers’ shops especially were very numerous, and made a great display of immense gold watches, enormous gold rings and chains, with gold-headed canes, and diamond pins and brooches of a most formidable size. With numbers of men who found themselves possessed of an amount of money which they had never before dreamed of, and which they had no idea what to do with, the purchase of gold watches and diamond pins was a very favorite mode of getting rid of their spare cash. Laboring men fastened their coarse dirty shirts with a cluster of diamonds the size of a shilling, wore colossal gold rings on their fingers, and displayed a massive gold chain and seals from their watch-pocket; while hardly a man of any consequence returned to the Atlantic States without receiving from some one of his friends a huge gold-headed cane, with all his virtues and good qualities engraved upon it. A large business was also done in Chinese shawls, and various Chinese curiosities. It was greatly the fashion for men, returning home, to take with them a quantity of such articles, as presents for their friends. In fact, a gorgeous Chinese shawl seemed to be as necessary for the returning Californian as a revolver and bowie-knife for the California emigrant. There was one large bazaar in particular where was exhibited such a stock of the costliest shawls, cabinets, workboxes, vases, and other articles of Chinese manufacture, with clocks, bronzes, and all sorts of drawing-room ornaments, that one would have thought it an establishment which could only be supported in a city like London or Paris. Some of the streets in the upper part of the city presented a very singular appearance. The houses had been built before the grade of the different streets had been fixed by the corporation, and there were places where the streets, having been cut down through the hills to their proper level, were nothing more than wide trenches, with a perpendicular bank on either side, perhaps forty or fifty feet high, and on the brink of these stood the houses, to which access was gained by ladders and temporary wooden stairs, the unfortunate proprietor being obliged to go to the expense of grading his own lot, and so bringing himself down to a level with the rest of the world. In other places, where the street crossed a deep hollow, it formed a high embankment, with a row of houses at the foot of it, some nearly buried, and others already raised to the level of the street, resting on a sort of scaffolding, while the foundation was being filled in under them.