crets of their old-world, mysterious race. Lady Hester Stanhope believed she could make something great of the Cornish ; for my part, I can make nothing of them at all. A division of races, older and more original than that of Babel, keeps this close, esoteric family apart from neighboring Englishmen. Not even a Red Indian seems more foreign in my eyes. This is one of the lessons of travel that some of the strangest races dwell next door to you at home.

its. When I was ill, coming through Wyoming, I was astonished - fresh from the eager humanity on board ship-to meet with little but laughter. One of the young men even amused himself by incommoding me, as was then very easy; and that not from ill-nature, but mere clod-like incapacity to think, for he expected me to join the laugh. I did so, but it was a phantom merriment. Later on, a man from Kansas had three violent epileptic fits, and though of course there were not wanting some to help him, it was The rest were all American born, but rather superstitious terror than sympathy they came from almost every quarter of that his case evoked among his fellow-that continent. All the States of the passengers. "Oh, I hope he's not going to die!" cried a woman; "it would be terrible to have a dead body!" And there was a very general movement to leave the man behind at the next station. This, by good fortune, the conductor negatived.

North had sent out a fugitive to cross the plains with me. From Virginia, from Pennsylvania, from New York, from far western Iowa and Kansas, from Maine that borders on the Canadas, and from the Canadas themselves some one or two were fleeing in quest of a better land and. There was a good deal of story-telling better wages. The talk in the train, like in some quarters; in others, little but the talk I had heard on the steamer, ran silence. In this society, more than any upon hard times, short commons, and other that ever I was in, it was the nar- hope that moves ever westward. I rator alone who seemed to enjoy the nar- thought of my shipful from Great Britain rative. It was rarely that any one lis- with a feeling of despair. They had come. tened for the listening. If he lent an ear three thousand miles, and yet not far to another man's story, it was because he enough. Hard times bowed them out of was in immediate want of a hearer for one the Clyde, and stood to welcome them at of his own. Food and the progress of Sandy Hook. Where were they to go? the train were the subjects most generally Pennsylvania, Maine, Iowa, Kansas? treated; many joined to discuss these These were not places for immigration, who otherwise would hold their tongues. but for emigration, it appeared; not one One small knot had no better occupation of them, but I knew a man who had lifted than to worm out of me my name; and up his heel and left it for an ungrateful the more they tried the more obstinately country. And it was still westward that fixed I grew to baffle them. They as they ran. Hunger, you would have sailed me with artful questions and insid- thought, came out of the east like the sun, ious offers of correspondence in the and the evening was made of edible gold. future; but I was perpetually on my And, meantime, in the car in front of guard, and parried their assaults with me, were there not half a hundred emi. inward laughter. I am sure Dubuque grants from the opposite quarter? Hunwould have given me ten dollars for the gry Europe and hungry China, each secret. He owed me far more, had he pouring from their gates in search of understood life, for thus preserving him provender, had here come face to face. a lively interest throughout the journey. The two waves had met; East and West I met one of my fellow-passengers months had alike failed; the whole round world. after, driving a street tramway car in San had been prospected and condemned; Francisco; and, as the joke was now out there was no El Dorado anywhere; and of season, told him my name without sub-till one could emigrate to the moon, it terfuge. You never saw a man more chapfallen. But had my name been Demogorgon, after so prolonged a mystery he had still been disappointed.

seemed as well to stay patiently at home. Nor was there wanting another sign, at once more picturesque and more disheartening; for as we continued to steam westward toward the land of gold, we were continually passing other emigrant trains upon the journey east; and these others were as crowded as our own. Had all these return voyagers made a fortune in the mines? Were they all bound for

strips in a crowded boat-house; but he who is unwashed slinks in and out of bed without uncovering an inch of skin. Lastly, these very foul and malodorous Caucasians entertained the surprising illusion that it was the Chinese wagon, and that alone, which stank. I have said already that it was the exception, and notably the freshest of the three.

Paris, and to be in Rome by Easter? It are in their persons, the more delicate is would seem not, for whenever we met their sense of modesty. A clean man them the passengers ran on to the platform and cried to us through the windows, in a kind of wailing chorus, to come back." On the plains of Nebraska, in the mountains of Wyoming, it was still the same cry, and dismal to my heart, "Come back!" That was what we heard by the way "about the good country we were going to." And at that very hour the Sand-lot of San Francisco was crowded with the unemployed, and the echo from the other side of Market Street was repeating the rant of demagogues.

If, in truth, it were only for the sake of wages that men emigrate, how many thousands would regret the bargain! But wages, indeed, are only one consideration out of many; for we are a race of gipsies, and love change and travel for themselves.

DESPISED RACES.

These judgments are typical of the feeling in all western America. The Chinese are considered stupid, because they are imperfectly acquainted with English. They are held to be base, because their dexterity and frugality enable them to underbid the lazy, luxurious Caucasian. They are said to be thieves; I am sure they have no monopoly of that. They are called cruel; the Anglo-Saxon and the cheerful Irishman may each reflect before he bears the accusation. It comes amiss from John Bull, who the other day forced Of all stupid ill-feelings, the sentiment that unhappy Zazel, all bruised and totterof my fellow-Caucasians towards our com- ing from a dangerous escape, to come panions in the Chinese car was the most forth again upon the theatre, and constupid and the worst. They seemed never tinue to risk her life for his amusement; to have looked at them, listened to them, or from Pat, who makes it his pastime to or thought of them, but hated them a shoot down the compliant farmer from priori. The Mongols were their enemies behind a wall in Europe, or to stone the in that cruel and treacherous battle-field solitary Chinaman in California. I am of money. They could work better and told, again, that they are of the race of cheaper in half a hundred industries, and river pirates, and belong to the most dehence there was no calumny too idle for spised and dangerous class in the Celesthe Caucasians to repeat, and even to be- tial Empire. But if this be so, what relieve. They declared them hideous ver-markable pirates have we here! and what min, and affected a kind of choking in the throat when they beheld them. Now, as a matter of fact, the young Chinese man is so like a large class of European Awhile ago it was the Irish, now it is women, that on raising my head and sud- the Chinese, that must go. Such is the denly catching sight of one at a consider- cry. It seems, after all, that no country able distance, I have for an instant been is bound to submit to immigration any deceived by the resemblance. I do not more than to invasion: each is war to the say it is the most attractive class of our knife, and resistance to either but legitiwomen, but for all that many a man's wife mate defence. Yet we may regret the is less pleasantly favored. Again, my free tradition of the republic, which loved emigrants declared that the Chinese were to depict herself with open arms, welcomdirty. I cannot say they were clean, foring all unfortunates. And certainly, as a that was impossible upon the journey; man who believes that he loves freedom, but in their efforts after cleanliness they I may be excused some bitterness when I put the rest of us to shame. We all pigged and stewed in one infamy, wet our hands and faces for half a minute daily on the platform, and were unashamed. But the Chinese never lost an opportunity, and you would see them washing their feet- an act not dreamed of among our selves and going as far as decency permitted to wash their whole bodies. I may remark by the way, that the dirtier people |

must be the virtues, the industry, the education, and the intelligence of their superiors at home!

find her sacred name misused in the contention. It was but the other day that I heard a vulgar fellow in the Sand-lot, the popular tribune of San Francisco, roaring for arms and butchery. "At the call of Abraham Lincoln," said the orator, “ye rose in the name of freedom to set free the negroes; can ye not rise and liberate yourselves from a few dhirty Mongolians?" It exceeds the license of an

Irishman to rebaptise our selfish interests | have touched any thinking creature; but by the name of virtue. Defend your bel- my fellow-passengers danced and jested lies, if you must; I, who do not suffer, am round them with a truly cockney baseno judge in your affairs; but let me de-ness. I was ashamed for the thing we fend language, which is the dialect and one of the ramparts of virtue.

call civilization. We should carry upon our consciences so much, at least, of our forefather's misconduct, as we continue to profit by ourselves.

and indignity such as a man must be in some ways base if his heart will suffer him to pardon or forget. These old, wellfounded, historical hatreds have a savor of nobility for the independent. That the Jew should not love the Christian, nor the Irishman love the English, nor the Indian brave tolerate the thought of the American, is not disgraceful to the nature of man; rather, indeed, honorable, since it depends on wrongs ancient like the race, and not personal to him who cherishes the indignation.

For my own part, I could not look but with wonder and respect on the Chinese. Their forefathers watched the stars be- If oppression drives a wise man mad, fore mine had begun to keep pigs. Gun- what should be raging in the hearts of powder and printing, which the other day these poor tribes, who have been driven we imitated, and a school of manners back and back, step after step, their promwhich we never had the delicacy so much |ised reservations torn from them one after as to desire to imitate, were theirs in a another as the States extended westward, long-past antiquity. They walk the earth until at length they are shut up into these with us, but it seems they must be of a dif- hideous mountain deserts of the centre ferent clay. They hear the clock strike and even there find themselves invaded, inthe same hour, yet surely of a different sulted, and hunted out by ruffianly dig epoch. They travel by steam conveyance, gers? The eviction of the Cherokees (to yet with such a baggage of old Asiatic name but an instance), the extortion of Inthoughts and superstitions as might check dian agents, the outrages of the wicked, the the locomotive in its course. Whatever ill faith of all, nay, down to the ridicule of is thought within the circuit of the Great such poor beings as were here with me upWall; what the wry-eyed, spectacled on the train, make up a chapter of injustice schoolmaster teaches in the hamlets round Pekin; religions so old that our language looks a halfling boy alongside; philosophy so wise that our best philosophers find things therein to wonder at; all this travelled alongside of me for thousands of miles over plain and mountain. Heaven knows if we had one common thought or fancy all that way; or whether our eyes, which yet were formed upon the same design, beheld the same world out of the railway windows. And when either of us turned his thoughts to home and childhood, what a strange dissimilarity must As for the Indians, there are of course there not have been in these pictures of many unteachable and wedded to war and the mind when I beheld that old, grey, their wild habits; but many also who, castled city, high throned above the firth, with fairer usage, might learn the virtues with the flag of Britain flying, and the red- of the peaceful state. You will find a valcoat sentry pacing over all; and the manley in the county of Monterey, drained by in the next car to me would conjure up the river of Carmel a true Californian some junks and a pagoda and a fort of valley, bare, dotted with chapparal, overporcelain, and call it, with the same affec- looked by quaint, unfinished hills. The tion, home! Carmel runs by many pleasant farms, a Another race shared among my fellow-clear and shallow river, loved by wading passengers in the disfavor of the Chinese; and that, it is hardly necessary to say, was the noble red man of old story he over whose own hereditary continent we had been steaming all these days. I saw no wild or independent Indian; indeed, I hear that such avoid the neighborhood of the train; but now and again at way-stations, a husband and wife and a few children, disgracefully dressed out with the sweepings of civilization, came forth and stared upon the emigrants. The silent stoicism of their conduct, and the pathetic degradation of their appearance, would

kine; and at last, as it is falling towards a quicksand and the great Pacific, passes a ruined mission on a hill. From the church the eye embraces a great field of ocean, and the ear is filled with a contin. uous sound of distant breakers on the shore. The roof has fallen; the ground squirrel scampers on the graves; the holy bell of St. Charles is long dismounted; yet one day in every year the church awakes from silence, and the Indians return to worship in the church of their converted fathers. I have seen them trooping thither, young and old, in their

clean print dresses, with those strange, have it not, and lay down a quarter, the handsome, melancholy features, which barkeeper or shopman calmly tenders seem predestined to a national calamity; you a dime by way of change; and thus and it was notable to hear the old Latin you have paid what is called a long bit, words and old Gregorian music sung, and lost two and a half cents, or even, by with nasal fervor, and in a swift, staccato comparison with a short bit, five cents. style, by a trained chorus of red Indian In country places all over the Pacific men and women. In the huts of the coast, nothing lower than a bit is ever Rancherie they have ancient European asked or taken, which vastly increases the Mass-books, in which they study together cost of life; as even for a glass of beer to be perfect. An old blind man was you must pay fivepence or sevenpencetheir leader. With his eyes bandaged, half-penny, as the case may be. You and leaning on a staff, he was led into his would say that this system of mutual rob. place in church by a little grandchild. bery was as broad as it was long; but I He had seen changes in the world since have discovered a plan to make it broader, first he sang that music sixty years ago, with which I here endow the public. It when there was no gold and no Yankees, is brief and simple-radiantly simple. and he and his people lived in plenty under There is one place where five cents are the wing of the kind priests. The mis- recognized, and that is the post-office. A sion church is in ruins; the Rancherie, quarter is only worth two bits, a short and they tell me, encroached upon by Yankee a long. Whenever you have a quarter, new-comers; the little age of gold is over go to the post-office and buy five cents' for the Indian; but he has had a breath- worth of postage-stamps; you will reing-space in Carmel valley before he goes ceive in change two dimes, that is, two down to the dust with his red fathers. short bits. The purchasing power of your money is undiminished. You can go and have your two glasses of beer all the same; and you have made yourself a present of five cents' worth of postagestamps into the bargain. Benjamin Franklin would have patted me on the head for this discovery.

TO THE GOLDEN GATE.

A little corner of Utah is soon traversed, and leaves no particular impressions on the mind. By an early hour on Wednesday morning we stopped to breakfast at Toano, a little station on a bleak, high-lying plateau in Nevada. The man who kept the station eating-house was a Scot, and learning that I was the same, he grew very friendly, and gave me some advice on the country I was now entering. "You see," said he, "I tell you this being, after our manner, outside the station, cause I came from your country." Hail, brither Scots!

His most important hint was on the moneys of this part of the world. There is something in the simplicity of a decimal coinage which is revolting to the human mind; thus the French, in small affairs, reckon strictly by halfpence; and you have to solve, by a spasm of mental arithmetic, such posers as thirty-two, forty-five, or even a hundred halfpence. In the Pacific States they have made a bolder push for complexity, and settle their affairs by a coin that no longer exists the bit, or old Mexican real. The supposed value of the bit is twelve and a half cents, eight to the dollar. When it comes to two bits, the quarter-dollar stands for the required amount. But how about an odd bit? The nearest coin to it is a dime, which is short by a fifth. That, then, is called a short bit. If you have one, you lay it triumphantly down, and save two and a half cents. But if you

From Toano we travelled all day through deserts of alkali and sand, horri. ble to man, and bare sage-brush country that seemed little kindlier, and came by supper-time to Elko. As we were stand

I saw two men whip suddenly from underneath the cars, and take to their heels across country. They were tramps, it appeared, who had been riding on the beams since eleven of the night before; and several of my fellow-passengers had already seen and conversed with them while we broke our fast at Toano. These land stowaways play a great part over here in America, and I should have liked dearly to become acquainted with them.

At Elko an odd circumstance befell me. I was coming out from supper, when I was stopped by a small, stout, ruddy man, followed by two others taller and ruddier than himself.

"Ex-cuse me, sir," he said, "but do you happen to be going on?"

I said I was, whereupon he said he hoped to persuade me to desist from that intention. He had a situation to offer me, and if we could come to terms, why, good and well." You see," he continued, “I'm running a theatre here, and