CISCO.

The telegraph operator at the Golden Gate of San Francisco had long
since given up hope of the Excelsior. During the months of September
and October, 1854, stimulated by the promised reward, and often by
the actual presence of her owners, he had shown zeal and hope in his
scrutiny of the incoming ships. The gaunt arms of the semaphore at
Fort Point, turned against the sunset sky, had regularly recorded the
smallest vessel of the white-winged fleet which sought the portal of the
bay during that eventful year of immigration; but the Excelsior was not
amongst them. At the close of the year 1854 she was a tradition; by the
end of January, 1855, she was forgotten. Had she been engulfed in her
own element she could not have been more completely swallowed up than in
the changes of that shore she never reached. Whatever interest or hope
was still kept alive in solitary breasts the world never knew. By the
significant irony of Fate, even the old-time semaphore that should have
signaled her was abandoned and forgotten.

The mention of her name--albeit in a quiet, unconcerned voice--in the
dress-circle of a San Francisco theatre, during the performance of a
popular female star, was therefore so peculiar that it could only have
come from the lips of some one personally interested in the lost vessel.
Yet the speaker was a youngish, feminine-looking man of about thirty,
notable for his beardlessness, in the crowded circle of bearded and
moustachioed Californians, and had been one of the most absorbed of
the enthusiastic audience. A weak smile of vacillating satisfaction
and uneasiness played on his face during the plaudits of his
fellow-admirers, as if he were alternately gratified and annoyed. It
might have passed for a discriminating and truthful criticism of the
performance, which was a classical burlesque, wherein the star displayed
an unconventional frankness of shapely limbs and unrestrained gestures
and glances; but he applauded the more dubious parts equally with the
audience. He was evidently familiar with the performance, for a look of
eager expectation greeted most of the "business." Either he had not come
for the entire evening, or he did not wish to appear as if he had, as he
sat on one of the back benches near the passage, and frequently changed
his place. He was well, even foppishly, dressed for the period, and
appeared to be familiarly known to the loungers in the passage as a man
of some social popularity.