Roughing It
leading the party with the little girl in her arms. And presently a huge
miner, bearded, belted, spurred, and bristling with deadly weapons—just
down from a long campaign in the mountains, evidently&mdashbarred the
way, stopped the servant, and stood gazing, with a face all alive with
gratification and astonishment. Then he said, reverently:
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“Well, if it ain’t a child!” And then he snatched a little leather sack
out of his pocket and said to the servant:
“There’s a hundred and fifty dollars in dust, there, and I’ll give it to
you to let me kiss the child!”
That anecdote is _true_.
But see how things change. Sitting at that dinner-table, listening to
that anecdote, if I had offered double the money for the privilege of
kissing the same child, I would have been refused. Seventeen added years
have far more than doubled the price.
And while upon this subject I will remark that once in Star City, in the
Humboldt Mountains, I took my place in a sort of long, post-office
single file of miners, to patiently await my chance to peep through a
crack in the cabin and get a sight of the splendid new sensation—a
genuine, live Woman! And at the end of half of an hour my turn came, and
I put my eye to the crack, and there she was, with one arm akimbo, and
tossing flap-jacks in a frying-pan with the other.
And she was one hundred and sixty-five [Being in calmer mood, now, I
voluntarily knock off a hundred from that.—M.T.] years old, and hadn’t a
tooth in her head.
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CHAPTER LVIII.
For a few months I enjoyed what to me was an entirely new phase of
existence—a butterfly idleness; nothing to do, nobody to be responsible
to, and untroubled with financial uneasiness. I fell in love with the
most cordial and sociable city in the Union. After the sage-brush and
alkali deserts of Washoe, San Francisco was Paradise to me. I lived at
the best hotel, exhibited my clothes in the most conspicuous places,
infested the opera, and learned to seem enraptured with music which
oftener afflicted my ignorant ear than enchanted it, if I had had the
vulgar honesty to confess it. However, I suppose I was not greatly worse
than the most of my countrymen in that. I had longed to be a butterfly,
and I was one at last. I attended private parties in sumptuous evening
dress, simpered and aired my graces like a born beau, and polked and
schottisched with a step peculiar to myself—and the kangaroo. In a word,
I kept the due state of a man worth a hundred thousand dollars
(prospectively,) and likely to reach absolute affluence when that
silver- mine sale should be ultimately achieved in the East. I spent
money with a free hand, and meantime watched the stock sales with an
interested eye and looked to see what might happen in Nevada.
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Something very important happened. The property holders of Nevada voted
against the State Constitution; but the folks who had nothing to lose
were in the majority, and carried the measure over their heads. But
after all it did not immediately look like a disaster, though
unquestionably it was one I hesitated, calculated the chances, and then
concluded not to sell. Stocks went on rising; speculation went mad;
bankers, merchants, lawyers, doctors, mechanics, laborers, even the very
washerwomen and servant girls, were putting up their earnings on silver
stocks, and every sun that rose in the morning went down on paupers
enriched and rich men beggared. What a gambling carnival it was! Gould
and Curry soared to six thousand three hundred dollars a foot! And
then—all of a sudden, out went the bottom and everything and everybody
went to ruin and destruction! The wreck was complete.
The bubble scarcely left a microscopic moisture behind it. I was an
early beggar and a thorough one. My hoarded stocks were not worth the
paper they were printed on. I threw them all away. I, the cheerful idiot
that had been squandering money like water, and thought myself beyond
the reach of misfortune, had not now as much as fifty dollars when I
gathered together my various debts and paid them. I removed from the
hotel to a very private boarding house. I took a reporter’s berth and
went to work. I was not entirely broken in spirit, for I was building
confidently on the sale of the silver mine in the east. But I could not
hear from Dan. My letters miscarried or were not answered.
One day I did not feel vigorous and remained away from the office. The
next day I went down toward noon as usual, and found a note on my desk
which had been there twenty-four hours. It was signed “Marshall”—the
Virginia reporter—and contained a request that I should call at the
hotel and see him and a friend or two that night, as they would sail for
the east in the morning. A postscript added that their errand was a big
mining speculation! I was hardly ever so sick in my life. I abused
myself for leaving Virginia and entrusting to another man a matter I
ought to have attended to myself; I abused myself for remaining away
from the office on the one day of all the year that I should have been
there. And thus berating myself I trotted a mile to the steamer wharf
and arrived just in time to be too late. The ship was in the stream and
under way.
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I comforted myself with the thought that may be the speculation would
amount to nothing—poor comfort at best—and then went back to my slavery,
resolved to put up with my thirty-five dollars a week and forget all
about it.
A month afterward I enjoyed my first earthquake. It was one which was
long called the “great” earthquake, and is doubtless so distinguished
till this day. It was just after noon, on a bright October day. I was
coming down Third street. The only objects in motion anywhere in sight
in that thickly built and populous quarter, were a man in a buggy behind
me, and a street car wending slowly up the cross street. Otherwise, all
was solitude and a Sabbath stillness. As I turned the corner, around a
frame house, there was a great rattle and jar, and it occurred to me
that here was an item!—no doubt a fight in that house. Before I could
turn and seek the door, there came a really terrific shock; the ground
seemed to roll under me in waves, interrupted by a violent joggling up
and down, and there was a heavy grinding noise as of brick houses
rubbing together. I fell up against the frame house and hurt my elbow. I
knew what it was, now, and from mere reportorial instinct, nothing else,
took out my watch and noted the time of day; at that moment a third and
still severer shock came, and as I reeled about on the pavement trying
to keep my footing, I saw a sight! The entire front of a tall four-story
brick building in Third street sprung outward like a door and fell
sprawling across the street, raising a dust like a great volume of
smoke! And here came the buggy—overboard went the man, and in less time
than I can tell it the vehicle was distributed in small fragments along
three hundred yards of street.
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One could have fancied that somebody had fired a charge of chair-rounds
and rags down the thoroughfare. The street car had stopped, the horses
were rearing and plunging, the passengers were pouring out at both ends,
and one fat man had crashed half way through a glass window on one side
of the car, got wedged fast and was squirming and screaming like an
impaled madman. Every door, of every house, as far as the eye could
reach, was vomiting a stream of human beings; and almost before one
could execute a wink and begin another, there was a massed multitude of
people stretching in endless procession down every street my position
commanded. Never was solemn solitude turned into teeming life quicker.
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Of the wonders wrought by “the great earthquake,” these were all that
came under my eye; but the tricks it did, elsewhere, and far and wide
over the town, made toothsome gossip for nine days.
The destruction of property was trifling—the injury to it was wide-
spread and somewhat serious.
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The “curiosities” of the earthquake were simply endless. Gentlemen and
ladies who were sick, or were taking a siesta, or had dissipated till a
late hour and were making up lost sleep, thronged into the public
streets in all sorts of queer apparel, and some without any at all. One
woman who had been washing a naked child, ran down the street holding it
by the ankles as if it were a dressed turkey. Prominent citizens who
were supposed to keep the Sabbath strictly, rushed out of saloons in
their shirt-sleeves, with billiard cues in their hands. Dozens of men
with necks swathed in napkins, rushed from barber-shops, lathered to the
eyes or with one cheek clean shaved and the other still bearing a hairy
stubble. Horses broke from stables, and a frightened dog rushed up a
short attic ladder and out on to a roof, and when his scare was over had
not the nerve to go down again the same way he had gone up.
A prominent editor flew down stairs, in the principal hotel, with
nothing on but one brief undergarment—met a chambermaid, and exclaimed:
“Oh, what _shall_ I do! Where shall I go!”
She responded with naive serenity:
“If you have no choice, you might try a clothing-store!”
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A certain foreign consul’s lady was the acknowledged leader of fashion,
and every time she appeared in anything new or extraordinary, the ladies
in the vicinity made a raid on their husbands’ purses and arrayed
themselves similarly. One man who had suffered considerably and growled
accordingly, was standing at the window when the shocks came, and the
next instant the consul’s wife, just out of the bath, fled by with no
other apology for clothing than—a bath-towel! The sufferer rose superior
to the terrors of the earthquake, and said to his wife:
“Now that is something _like_! Get out your towel my dear!”
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The plastering that fell from ceilings in San Francisco that day, would
have covered several acres of ground. For some days afterward, groups of
eyeing and pointing men stood about many a building, looking at long
zig- zag cracks that extended from the eaves to the ground. Four feet of
the tops of three chimneys on one house were broken square off and
turned around in such a way as to completely stop the draft.
A crack a hundred feet long gaped open six inches wide in the middle of
one street and then shut together again with such force, as to ridge up
the meeting earth like a slender grave. A lady sitting in her rocking
and quaking parlor, saw the wall part at the ceiling, open and shut
twice, like a mouth, and then drop the end of a brick on the floor like
a tooth. She was a woman easily disgusted with foolishness, and she
arose and went out of there. One lady who was coming down stairs was
astonished to see a bronze Hercules lean forward on its pedestal as if
to strike her with its club. They both reached the bottom of the flight
at the same time,—the woman insensible from the fright. Her child, born
some little time afterward, was club-footed. However—on second
thought,—if the reader sees any coincidence in this, he must do it at
his own risk.
The first shock brought down two or three huge organ-pipes in one of the
churches. The minister, with uplifted hands, was just closing the
services. He glanced up, hesitated, and said:
“However, we will omit the benediction!”—and the next instant there was
a vacancy in the atmosphere where he had stood.
After the first shock, an Oakland minister said:
“Keep your seats! There is no better place to die than this”—
And added, after the third:
“But outside is good enough!” He then skipped out at the back door.
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Such another destruction of mantel ornaments and toilet bottles as the