thers; and, indeed, it was
all a mystery to us. Cards were being dealt at the faro tables, and
dealt by beautiful women in bewildering attire. They also turned the
wheels of fortune or misfortune, and threw dice, and were skilled in all
the arts that beguile and betray the innocent. The town was filled with
such resorts; some were devoted to the patronage of the more exclusive
set; many were traps into which the miner from the mountain gulches fell
and where he soon lost his bag of "dust,"--his whole fortune, for which
he had been so long and so wearily toiling. There he was shoulder to
shoulder with the greaser and the lascar, the "shoulder-striker" and the
hoodlum; and they were all busy with monte, faro, rondo, and
rouge-et-noir.

There was no limit to the gambling in those days. There was no question
of age or color or sex: opportunity lay in wait for inclination at the
street corners and in the highways and the byways. The wonder is that
there were not more victims driven to madness or suicide.

The pictures were not all so gloomy. Six times San Francisco was
devastated by fire, and all within two years--or, to speak accurately,
within eighteen months. Many millions were lost; many enterprising and
successful citizens were in a few hours rendered penniless. Some were
again and again "burned out"; but they seemed to spring like the famed
bird, who shall for once be nameless, from their own ashes.

It became evident that an efficient fire department was an immediate and
imperative necessity. The best men of the city--men prominent in every
trade, calling and profession--volunteered their services, and headed a
subscription list that swelled at once into the thousands. Perhaps there
never was a finer volunteer fire department than that which was for many
years the pride and glory of San Francisco. On the Fourth of July it was
the star feature of the procession; and it paraded most of the streets
that were level enough for wheels to run on--and when the mud was
navigable, for they turned out even in the rainy season on days of civic
festivity. Their engines and hose carts and hook and ladder trucks were
so lavishly ornamented with flowers, banners, streamers, and even pet
eagles, dogs, and other mascots, that they might without hesitation have
engaged in any floral battle on any Riviera and been sure of victory.

The magnificence of the silver trumpets and the quantity and splendor of
the silver trappings of those f