Thus recuperated, I started off to call on Judge ——, to whom I had a letter of introduction from my agents in San Francisco. It did not take long to find the Judge’s quarters, the lanes, streets, and alleys being distinctions without any material differences. The mansion in which his judgeship ‘roomed’ was a small shanty, with a porch or verandah round it, to keep off the sun when it happened to be hot, and the wet when it rained. I knocked with my knuckles—no reply; tried again—still silence; resorted to the handle of my hunting-knife, anything but mildly—that did it. ‘I raither calkilate, stranger, you’d better jist open that door; _I_ ain’t agwine to, you bet your boots.’ I opened it, and walked in. There sat Judge —— in a large armchair, cleverly balanced on the two hind-legs. No, it was not sitting, or lying, or standing, or lounging; it was a posture compounded of all these positions. His (I mean Judge ——’s) legs were extended on a level with his nose, and rested on the square deal table before him. He was smoking an immense cigar, one half of which was stowed away in his cheek, rolled about, and chewed; whilst the other half protruded from the corner of his mouth, and reached nearly to his eye. A little distance from the Judge was an immense spittoon, like a young sponging-bath. He was ‘whittling’ a piece of stick with a pocket-knife, and looked the embodiment of supreme indifference. The chair he occupied and the table—whose only use, as far as I could see, was to rest his legs on—constituted the entire furniture. The Judge himself was a long spare man, and gave me the idea of an individual whose great attribute consisted in possessing length without breadth or thickness; everything about him was suggestive of length. Beginning at his head, his hair was long, and his face was long, and his nose was long, and a long goatee-beard terminated the end of his chin; his arms were long, and his legs were long, and his feet were long; he had a long drawling utterance, and was inordinately long at arriving at a moderate pitch of civility. He eyed me over and drawled out, ‘W-a-e-l!’ I handed my letter, and quietly awaited its effect; as he was long in everything else, he was long in opening it. Having made a minute inspection of the exterior, he slowly took it from its yellow envelope, and gradually seemed to understand from its contents that he was to be civil. ‘So you ain’t bin long in these parts, Cap’en?’ said the Judge, without in the smallest degree shifting his position. I said I was quite a stranger, and should be glad if he would give me some information about the trails and the Indians, along the route I intended taking.