Soon after this Mrs. Shallop joined the group, and they all went out and walked on the wide terrace till dinner was served. Here Millicent met Mr. Shallop for the first time. He was a heavy-featured Irishman, with light-blue eyes, overhanging brows, and thick, coarse brown hair. His badly modelled nose had a decided upward tendency, and the broad mouth disclosed sharp, long teeth, like those of an inferior animal. When he smiled he showed the whole set, which gave him a rather ferocious aspect. His face was clean shaven, save for a fringe of whisker stretching from the lobe of the ear to the lower jaw. With a pipe and a shillelah he would have been an excellent specimen of a patron of Donnybrook Fair. On this occasion he wore irreproachable evening dress. His linen was finer than Graham’s, and the cut of his collar and pattern of his studs were of a later fashion than those worn by Ferrara. A valet’s care had smoothed the rough hair and cared for the ugly hands. One of his peculiarities was to address all ladies as "Marm." His conversation was not unintelligent, and betrayed a keen, sharp mind, which clearly understood those things which came in close contact with it, but whose mental vision was bounded by the physical one. Those things which he had learned by experience he knew absolutely, and he never questioned or theorized on subjects which did not directly touch himself or his own interests. California had been to him a place which held a gold mine, nothing more or less. His history, which he made no effort to conceal, was not an uncommon one. He had come out in ’49, among the fevered crowd of gold-seekers drawn from every country, from every station in life, by the loadstone which had been discovered on the banks, of the American River, by James Marshall. He had come to San Francisco in those early days when law and order were not, save when the conscience of the public, stronger and purer in its united power than in the individuals which compose it, was awakened, and hastened to punish a crime by a rude and swift justice. Shallop had built a cabin in which he lived, and in which he sold, when he was networking in the gulches, any articles of food which he was able to procure. When there were no potatoes or bread, he closed the door of his shanty and started off with pick and washing-pan for the gulches. When these staple edibles were to be had, he made a brisk trade in catering to the half-starved miners. It had been said that though Shallop’s bread was heavy, it cost nearly its weight in gold. In those days he had wooed and married the widow of a brother miner, one of the few women whose sad lot brought them to the land of disorder and bloodshed. A few weeks only elapsed, before the widowed woman gladly changed her state for the protection of the strong arm of Patrick Shallop, to whom she became deeply attached, with a pathetic love resembling that of a dog for a kind master. The bread