Roughing It
and let it fall on the bummer’s foot. He instantly dropped on the ground
and began to howl in the most heart-breaking way. A sympathizing crowd
gathered around and were going to pull his boot off; but he screamed
louder than ever and they desisted; then he fell to gasping, and between
the gasps ejaculated “Brandy! for Heaven’s sake, brandy!” They poured
half a pint down him, and it wonderfully restored and comforted him.
Then he begged the people to assist him to the stage, which was done.
The express people urged him to have a doctor at their expense, but he
declined, and said that if he only had a little brandy to take along
with him, to soothe his paroxyms of pain when they came on, he would be
grateful and content. He was quickly supplied with two bottles, and we
drove off. He was so smiling and happy after that, that I could not
refrain from asking him how he could possibly be so comfortable with a
crushed foot.
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“Well,” said he, “I hadn’t had a drink for twelve hours, and hadn’t a
cent to my name. I was most perishing—and so, when that duffer dropped
that hundred-pounder on my foot, I see my chance. Got a cork leg, you
know!” and he pulled up his pantaloons and proved it.
He was as drunk as a lord all day long, and full of chucklings over his
timely ingenuity.
One drunken man necessarily reminds one of another. I once heard a
gentleman tell about an incident which he witnessed in a Californian
bar- room. He entitled it “Ye Modest Man Taketh a Drink.” It was nothing
but a bit of acting, but it seemed to me a perfect rendering, and worthy
of Toodles himself. The modest man, tolerably far gone with beer and
other matters, enters a saloon (twenty-five cents is the price for
anything and everything, and specie the only money used) and lays down a
half dollar; calls for whiskey and drinks it; the bar-keeper makes
change and lays the quarter in a wet place on the counter; the modest
man fumbles at it with nerveless fingers, but it slips and the water
holds it; he contemplates it, and tries again; same result; observes
that people are interested in what he is at, blushes; fumbles at the
quarter again—blushes—puts his forefinger carefully, slowly down, to
make sure of his aim—pushes the coin toward the bar-keeper, and says
with a sigh:
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“(’_ic_)Gimme a cigar!”
Naturally, another gentleman present told about another drunken man. He
said he reeled toward home late at night; made a mistake and entered the
wrong gate; thought he saw a dog on the stoop; and it was—an iron one.
He stopped and considered; wondered if it was a dangerous dog; ventured
to say “Be (hic) begone!” No effect. Then he approached warily, and
adopted conciliation; pursed up his lips and tried to whistle, but
failed; still approached, saying, “Poor dog!—doggy, doggy, doggy!—poor
doggy-dog!” Got up on the stoop, still petting with fond names; till
master of the advantages; then exclaimed, “Leave, you thief!”—planted a
vindictive kick in his ribs, and went head-over-heels overboard, of
course. A pause; a sigh or two of pain, and then a remark in a
reflective voice:
“Awful solid dog. What could he ben eating? (’ic!) Rocks, p’raps. Such
animals is dangerous.—’ At’s what I say—they’re dangerous. If a
man—(’ic!)—if a man wants to feed a dog on rocks, let him _feed_ him on
rocks; ’at’s all right; but let him keep him at _home_—not have him
layin’ round promiscuous, where (’ic!) where people’s liable to stumble
over him when they ain’t noticin’!”
It was not without regret that I took a last look at the tiny flag (it
was thirty-five feet long and ten feet wide) fluttering like a lady’s
handkerchief from the topmost peak of Mount Davidson, two thousand feet
above Virginia’s roofs, and felt that doubtless I was bidding a
permanent farewell to a city which had afforded me the most vigorous
enjoyment of life I had ever experienced. And this reminds me of an
incident which the dullest memory Virginia could boast at the time it
happened must vividly recall, at times, till its possessor dies. Late
one summer afternoon we had a rain shower.
That was astonishing enough, in itself, to set the whole town buzzing,
for it only rains (during a week or two weeks) in the winter in Nevada,
and even then not enough at a time to make it worth while for any
merchant to keep umbrellas for sale. But the rain was not the chief
wonder. It only lasted five or ten minutes; while the people were still
talking about it all the heavens gathered to themselves a dense
blackness as of midnight. All the vast eastern front of Mount Davidson,
over-looking the city, put on such a funereal gloom that only the
nearness and solidity of the mountain made its outlines even faintly
distinguishable from the dead blackness of the heavens they rested
against. This unaccustomed sight turned all eyes toward the mountain;
and as they looked, a little tongue of rich golden flame was seen waving
and quivering in the heart of the midnight, away up on the extreme
summit! In a few minutes the streets were packed with people, gazing
with hardly an uttered word, at the one brilliant mote in the brooding
world of darkness. It flicked like a candle-flame, and looked no larger;
but with such a background it was wonderfully bright, small as it was.
It was the flag!—though no one suspected it at first, it seemed so like
a supernatural visitor of some kind—a mysterious messenger of good
tidings, some were fain to believe. It was the nation’s emblem
transfigured by the departing rays of a sun that was entirely palled
from view; and on no other object did the glory fall, in all the broad
panorama of mountain ranges and deserts. Not even upon the staff of the
flag—for that, a needle in the distance at any time, was now untouched
by the light and undistinguishable in the gloom. For a whole hour the
weird visitor winked and burned in its lofty solitude, and still the
thousands of uplifted eyes watched it with fascinated interest. How the
people were wrought up! The superstition grew apace that this was a
mystic courier come with great news from the war—the poetry of the idea
excusing and commending it—and on it spread, from heart to heart, from
lip to lip and from street to street, till there was a general impulse
to have out the military and welcome the bright waif with a salvo of
artillery!
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And all that time one sorely tried man, the telegraph operator sworn to
official secrecy, had to lock his lips and chain his tongue with a
silence that was like to rend them; for he, and he only, of all the
speculating multitude, knew the great things this sinking sun had seen
that day in the east—Vicksburg fallen, and the Union arms victorious at
Gettysburg!
But for the journalistic monopoly that forbade the slightest revealment
of eastern news till a day after its publication in the California
papers, the glorified flag on Mount Davidson would have been saluted and
re-saluted, that memorable evening, as long as there was a charge of
powder to thunder with; the city would have been illuminated, and every
man that had any respect for himself would have got drunk,—as was the
custom of the country on all occasions of public moment. Even at this
distant day I cannot think of this needlessly marred supreme opportunity
without regret. What a time we might have had!
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CHAPTER LVI.
We rumbled over the plains and valleys, climbed the Sierras to the
clouds, and looked down upon summer-clad California. And I will remark
here, in passing, that all scenery in California requires _distance_ to
give it its highest charm. The mountains are imposing in their sublimity
and their majesty of form and altitude, from any point of view—but one
must have distance to soften their ruggedness and enrich their tintings;
a Californian forest is best at a little distance, for there is a sad
poverty of variety in species, the trees being chiefly of one monotonous
family—redwood, pine, spruce, fir—and so, at a near view there is a
wearisome sameness of attitude in their rigid arms, stretched downward
and outward in one continued and reiterated appeal to all men to
“Sh!—don’t say a word!—you might disturb somebody!” Close at hand, too,
there is a reliefless and relentless smell of pitch and turpentine;
there is a ceaseless melancholy in their sighing and complaining
foliage; one walks over a soundless carpet of beaten yellow bark and
dead spines of the foliage till he feels like a wandering spirit bereft
of a footfall; he tires of the endless tufts of needles and yearns for
substantial, shapely leaves; he looks for moss and grass to loll upon,
and finds none, for where there is no bark there is naked clay and dirt,
enemies to pensive musing and clean apparel. Often a grassy plain in
California, is what it should be, but often, too, it is best
contemplated at a distance, because although its grass blades are tall,
they stand up vindictively straight and self-sufficient, and are
unsociably wide apart, with uncomely spots of barren sand between.
One of the queerest things I know of, is to hear tourists from “the
States” go into ecstasies over the loveliness of “ever-blooming
California.” And they always do go into that sort of ecstasies. But
perhaps they would modify them if they knew how old Californians, with
the memory full upon them of the dust-covered and questionable summer
greens of Californian “verdure,” stand astonished, and filled with
worshipping admiration, in the presence of the lavish richness, the
brilliant green, the infinite freshness, the spend-thrift variety of
form and species and foliage that make an Eastern landscape a vision of
Paradise itself. The idea of a man falling into raptures over grave and
sombre California, when that man has seen New England’s meadow-expanses
and her maples, oaks and cathedral-windowed elms decked in summer
attire, or the opaline splendors of autumn descending upon her forests,
comes very near being funny—would be, in fact, but that it is so
pathetic. No land with an unvarying climate can be very beautiful. The
tropics are not, for all the sentiment that is wasted on them. They seem
beautiful at first, but sameness impairs the charm by and by. _Change_
is the handmaiden Nature requires to do her miracles with. The land that
has four well-defined seasons, cannot lack beauty, or pall with
monotony. Each season brings a world of enjoyment and interest in the
watching of its unfolding, its gradual, harmonious development, its
culminating graces—and just as one begins to tire of it, it passes away
and a radical change comes, with new witcheries and new glories in its
train. And I think that to one in sympathy with nature, each season, in
its turn, seems the loveliest.
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San Francisco, a truly fascinating city to live in, is stately and
handsome at a fair distance, but close at hand one notes that the
architecture is mostly old-fashioned, many streets are made up of
decaying, smoke-grimed, wooden houses, and the barren sand-hills toward
the outskirts obtrude themselves too prominently. Even the kindly
climate is sometimes pleasanter when read about than personally
experienced, for a lovely, cloudless sky wears out its welcome by and
by, and then when the longed for rain does come it _stays_. Even the
playful earthquake is better contemplated at a dis—
However there are varying opinions about that.
The climate of San Francisco is mild and singularly equable. The
thermometer stands at about seventy degrees the year round. It hardly
changes at all. You sleep under one or two light blankets Summer and
Winter, and never use a mosquito bar. Nobody ever wears Summer clothing.
You wear black broadcloth—if you have it—in August and January, just the