ls to tempt him away from his life of letters.
However, later on, it comes about that he accepts the mission of United
States commissioner to the more alluring China, and his long letters to
her from there, as they had been from other foreign lands, were most
entertaining. This rare man grows to be very fond of his young and
brilliant correspondent, and signs himself, "Yours faithfully and
affectionately." But he was well on in years, and she looks upon him
more as a father than as a suitor, and he so understands it. He commits
himself enough to say how much it would be to him to have her near him
as an attachee, and when she hints of her engagement to a young
physician, he jealously begs to know every detail concerning the happy
man.

Shirley married Dr. Fayette Clappe, and in 1849, with the spirit of
romance and the fire of enthusiasm, the joyful young Argonauts set sail
for California in the good ship Manilla.

They found the primitive San Francisco enthralling, but a fire swept
away the new city, and tent-life was accepted as one of many
picturesque experiences. Soon, however, the Doctor's shingle was again
hung out.

Quickly buildings went up, and the little lady with golden curls to her
waist went about, jostling the motley crowd of people, and finding
concern in the active city front, in the gaudy shops, and in the open
faro-banks with their exposed piles of nuggets and bags of gold-dust
freshly dug from the earth.

There was the ever-beckoning to the hills of treasure, with their
extravagant stories of adventure, but the professional man was anchored
in the more prosy city, and buckled down to a commonplace existence.
The exhilarating ozone from the ocean, the wind blowing over the vast
area of sand, the red-flannel-shirted miner recklessly dumping out
sacks of gold-dust with which to pay his board-bill or to buy a pair of
boots, with maybe a nugget for Dr. Clappe when he eased a trivial
pain,--all these thrills were calls to the gold-filled Mother Earth.
Finally, Dr. Clappe's ill-health drove him to the Feather River,--a
high altitude, fifty miles from the summit of the Sierra Nevada, and
the highest point of gold-diggings. There he soon recovered, and to her
joy he wrote his wife to join him. And she had varying experiences in
transit to the prospective home, which was at Rich Bar,--rich indeed,
where a miner unearthed thirty-three pounds of gold in eight days, and
others panned out fifteen hundred dollar