SATURDAY, MARCH 18. Horse-stealing has given me more trouble than any other species of offence in California. It has grown out of a loose habit of using the horses of other people without their consent, at a time when they were of very little account; and what was once a venial trespass has become a crime. It is very difficult to arrest it; much must be left to time, the higher influences of moral sentiments, and the administration of more specific laws. Nor are the Americans here a whit better than the natives; they have a facility of conscience which easily suits itself to any prevailing vice. Many of them appear to have left their good principles on the other side of Cape Horn, or over the Rocky Mountains. They slide into gambling, drinking, and cheating, as easily as a frog into its native pond. They seem only the worse for the restraints, which law at home partially exerted. They are like a froward urchin who retaliates the wholesome visits of the birch by some act of fresh audacity the moment he is beyond its reach. But they will find a little law even in California, and this little enforced with some steadiness of purpose. It is not the law which threatens loudest that always exerts the greatest restraint. Thunder, with all its uproar, don’t strike; it is the lightning that cleaves the gnarled oak. THURSDAY, MARCH 23. A clergyman, who had just arrived in California, called on me to-day, with letters of introduction from several of the first rectors in New York. They spoke of him in high terms of commendation, and invited that confidence and regard which might secure him success in his foreign adventure; while they knew him to be a loquacious shallow booby. They had probably been so much annoyed by him in one shape and another, that they had taken this method of getting rid of him, thinking that the afflictions of Providence, like his blessings, should be more equally distributed.