They flaunt, by day, toilettes like duchesses' over the muddy streets; their midnight revels outlast the stars sweeping to the pure bosom of the Pacific. The nightly net is drawn till no casting brings new gudgeons. An unparalleled display of wildest license and maddest abandonment marks day and night. Across the square the Bella Union boasts similar glories, equal grandeur, and its own local divinities of the Lampsacene goddess. It is but a stone's throw to the great Arcade. From Clay to Commercial Street, one grand room offers every allurement to hundreds, without any sign of overcrowding. The devil is not in narrow quarters. On the eastern front of the plaza, the pride of San Francisco towers up: the El Dorado. Here every glory of the Adelphi, Arcade, and Bella Union is eclipsed. The unrivalled splendor of rooms, rich decorations, and unexcelled beauty of pictures excite all. The rare liveliness of the attendant wantons marks them as the fairest daughters of Beelzebub. The world waves have stranded these children of Venus on the Pacific shores. Music, recalling the genius of the inspired masters, sways the varying emotions of the multitude. The miners' evenings are given up to roaming from one resort to another. Here, a certain varnish of necessary politeness restrains the throng of men; they are all armed and in the flush of physical power; they dash their thousands against impregnable and exciting gambling combinations at the tables. With no feeling of self-abasement, leading officials, merchants, bankers, judges, officers, and professional men crowd the royal El Dorado. Here they relax the labors of the day with every distraction known to human dissipation. Staggering out broken-hearted, in the dark midnight, dozens of ruined gamesters have wandered from these fatal doors into the plaza. The nearest alley gives a shelter; a pistol ball crashes into the half-crazed brain. Suicide!--the gambler's end! Already the Potter's Field claims many of these victims. The successful murderers and thugs linger in the dark shadows of Dupont Street. They crowd Murderer's Alley, Dunbar's Alley, and Kearney Street. When the purse is emptied, so that the calculating women dealers scorn to notice the last few coins, they point significantly to the outer darkness. "Vamos," is the word. A few rods will bring the plucked fool to the "Blue Wing," the "Magnolia," or any one of a hundred drinking dens. Here the bottle chases away all memories of the night's play. In utter defiance of the decent community, these temples of pleasure, with their quick-witted knaves, and garrisons of bright-eyed bacchanals, ignore the useful day; at night, they shine out, splendid lighthouses on the path to the dark entrance of hell. By mutual avoidance, the good and bad, the bright and dark side of human effort rule in alternation the day and night. Sin rests in the daytime.