In giving a _coup d’œil_ at the scene, from the city itself, one is struck by the pointed roof rising above a range of hills which lie to the south west of the noble harbor, and which crowns a dark pile that, on a nearer approach, seems to lean against the side of a mountain upon whose peak linger the last beams of the setting sun. This extensive edifice is the dwelling or homestead of the wealthy and far-famed Senor de Castro, an old resident of the country, and one of the proudest of the ancient lords of the soil. His horses are the best, his table the most sumptuous, and his servants the most numerous of any ranchero in the regions round about California. It was early on one afternoon in June, 18—, that several young men, mostly Americans, were conversing around a table in one of the principle Cafes in the young city of San Francisco; a stout robust man nearly forty years of age, and dressed partly in the English style and partly in that of the country, with leggings and heavy blunt spurs, and a red sash about his middle, was discussing the merit of the auguadent sold in Santiago, a city of Chile, and having become very eloquent on this important topic, he set down his glass upon the table so violently as to shatter it to atoms. ‘Give me your good old-fashioned horn tumbler,’ cried he, with an oath, ‘and leave these baby-toys to the women and children!’ ‘You like to take your liquor in a horn?’ said a young American clerk to a provision dealer, ‘now I prefer a glass, if it were only for the cleanliness of the thing, Yes, by the mass! Give me a glass To toast a lass, In horns should never be, Remembered when We married men Quaff denty or chee chee.’ ‘You married men!’ exclaimed the stouter disputant, laughing. ‘A marriage extempore,’ muttered a saturnine young American, with an enormous head of black hair. ‘When are you going to send that little girl back to her mother?’ ‘Silence, Pothook!’ cried the other, ‘you know that you would have given all the old shoes in your locker to have got one smile from her, yourself—’ ‘Yes, envious Pothook,’ cried another youth, whose accent betrayed the Cockney, ‘if Cardwell has a notion to settle down in the calm of domestic life, and—’ ‘Settle! Ten thousand blunderbusses!’ laughed the stout man, ‘When did you ever know Cardwell to settle anything but his grog bills—them’s the settlements he is most accustomed to.’ ‘But I mean,’ added the Cockney; ‘that he is not running around after every pretty face like—like some people, always excepting the present honorable company, as a matter of course.’ ‘Oh! of course!’ said Pothook feelingly.