rench singers sang French songs upon the stage--it was
not much larger than a sounding-board.

An air of gaiety prevailed; for I imagine the majority of the _habitues_
were from the French Quarter of the city. Of course there were birds and
beasts, and cages populous with monkeys; and there was an emeu--the
weird bird that can not fly, the Australian cassowary. This bird
inspired Bret Harte to song, and in his early days he wrote "The Ballad
of the Emeu";

O say, have you seen at the willows so green,
So charming and rurally true,
A singular bird, with the manner absurd,
Which they call the Australian emeu?
Have you
Ever seen this Australian emeu?

I fear the poet was moved to sarcasm when he sang of "the willows so
green, so charming and rurally true." Surely they were greener than any
other trees we had in town; for we had almost none, save a few dark
evergreens. Well, the place was charming in its way, and as rurally true
as anything could be expected to be on that peninsula in its native
wilderness. The Willows and Russ' Garden had their day, and it was a
jolly day. They were good for the people--those rural resorts; they were
rest for the weary, refreshment for the hungry and thirsty--and they
have gone; even their very sites are now obliterated, and the new
generation has perhaps never even heard of them.

How we wondered at and gloried in the Oriental Hotel! It was the queen
of Western hostelries, and stood at the corner of Battery and Bush
Streets. And the Tehama House, so famous in its day! It was Lieutenant
G.H. Derby, better known in letters as John Phoenix, and Squibob--names
delightfully associated with the early history of California,--it was
this Lieutenant Derby, one of the first and best of Western humorists,
who added interest to the hotel by writing "A Legend of the Tehama
House." It begins, chapter first:

"It was evening at the Tehama. The apothecary, whose shop formed the
southeastern corner of that edifice, had lighted his lamps, which,
shining through those large glass bottles in the window, filled with
red and blue liquors--once supposed by this author, when young and
innocent, to be medicines of the most potent description,--lit up the
faces of the passers-by with an unearthly glare, and exaggerated the
general redness and blueness of their noses."

The third and last chapter concludes with these words: "The Tehama House