were commanding fabulous prices in San
Francisco. If onions could be persuaded to
come, enormous profit would accrue. Onion
seed, therefore, was fetched from town with
other agricultural stock.  The onions
rewarded a great deal of care by really sprouting;
but, before they were ready for the
market, the gray squirrels interfered with the
foresight of the farmers, just as they had set
at nought the foresight of the carpenters.
They munched them and wagged their heads
over them until the lield was stripped of all
its produce.

By that time, however, Mr. Marryat was
being led into a new track. He had gone to
San Francisco, there to meet an iron-house
that had been sent to him from Europe. It
was landed, and proving mere rubbish, was
left to be thrown into the quay. A speculation
of a larger kind in iron buildings followed:
and here let us stop to back the author's
recommendation to all emigrants in no case
to go out like snails with houses on their
backs.

Of iron-houses, after much experience, he
speaks in the most disparaging way. Under
sun-shine they are too hot; as night advances
they cool too rapidly, and towards dawn they
are ice houses. When warm the anti-corrosive
paint upon them emits a sickening smell, the
rain falls on the roof noisily like small shot,
and, if such houses become implicated in a
fire they first expand, then collapse, and tumble
down with astonishing rapidity. In one
of the San Franciscan fires, of which Mr.
Marryat had some experience, the American
iron-houses, of which the plates were nearly
an inch thick, and the castings of apparently
unnecessary weight, collapsed like a
preserved-meat can, and destroyed six person,
who, believing it to be fire-proof, remained
inside.

While the onions were coming up, and
Mr. Marryat was at San Francisco, a storeship
laden with iron-houses, belonging to a
friend of his, sunk at her moorings in a
heavy gale. When raised, her cargo, crusted
with mud and peopled with small crabs,
was unsaleable at San Francisco. At that
time, the state of California had secured
certain ground, the property of General Vallejo
as the site for a capital, a seat for government,
of which Vallejo was to be the
name. The ground had already been
surveyed and staked off into botanic gardens,
theatres, churches, orphan asylums,
townhalls, and schools for the indigent blind. The
bright idea therefore occurred to Mr. Marryat
of landing those muddy materials on the beach
at Vallejo, leaving them there for the tide
to scour, and then using them for the construction
of some building in the rising capital.
At the end of six months he had accordingly
converted them into a capacious hotel,
well finished and painted, and furnished
handsomely, according to the proper Californian
style. At this juncture the government
altered its mind relative to the site of the new
capital, and selected Benicia. So much of the
city of Vallejo as had been built was thereupon
pulled down and sold for old materials.
The hotel, we should say, was just before the
crisis seized in execution for two ponies'
tails. Its owner—who had proposed to himself
to let it at a great rent—had been travelling
with a friend in a drag, to which he harnessed
two horses of his own, while his friend added
to the beam a pair of Canadian switchtail
ponies. The friend upon the journey dined
too well; and, after dinner, nothing would
please him but an alteration of the tails of
the two Canadian ponies. They must be
made to match with the tails of the other
pair of horses, which were banged.
Remonstrance was urged against this proceeding,
inasmuch as it would be the spoiling of two
valuable animals, whose chief beauty
consisted in their manes and tails, but the
remonstrance was in vain. The tails were
hacked with a blunt table-knife and when
they were docked (one being left nearly a
foot shorter than the other) the perpetrator
of the mischief admired them, and remarked
after a grave survey, " Oh, no consequence,
s'hey don't b'long to me." The person to
whom they did belong thought it of
consequence and went to law upon the matter.
Thus it came finally to pass that, for the
value of two ponies' tails, the sheriff was put
in possession of the Vallejo hotel, but that
functionary submitted to ejectment by the
owner.

Then, too, the onions failed, and the squatters
gathering about March's mill, proved
Mr. Marryat to be an alien who had no right
of pre-emption, and objected to his retention
of the valley. Moreover, while things were
going awry at Vallejo, and Mr. Marryat was
in that place, a bright glare one night, in the
direction of San Francisco, warned him of
another conflagration of the town, to which
he hurried, and at which he arrived, after his
lodging there with all the possessions it
contained (journal included) were destroyed.
By a few steel buttons only that remained
upon the ground could he discover where
his property had stood. What one of these
all-devouring fires is like the traveller shall
tell us, for of a calamity like this none who
are inexperienced can speak with half the
force of an eye-witness. It is another
conflagration—one that occurred while he was
living in San Francisco—to which Mr.
Marryatt refers in the succeeding passage:—

"On third of May, at eleven in the evening,
the fire-bell again startled us; but on this
occasion the first glance at the lurid glare
and heavy mass of smoke that rolled towards
the bay evidenced that the fire had already a
firm grip on the city. The wind was unusually
high, and the flames spread in a broad sheet
over the town. All efforts to arrest them
were useless; houses were blown up and torn
down in attempts to cut off communication;