e shoemaker, who only
glanced up and replied, "Come to-morrow, and I'll have a piece of
leather big enough."

The next day, he made the same answer, "Come to-morrow," and kept
pegging away as fast as he could on a boot sole. The third time I
appeared before him, he looked up with the ejaculation, "Well, I'll be
damned, if she ain't here again!"

I was well aware that he should not have used that evil word, yet was
not alarmed, for I had heard grandpa and others use worse, and mean no
harm, nor yet intend to be cross. So I stood quietly, and in a trice he
was up, had rushed across the shop, brought back two round pieces of
leather not larger than cookies, and before I knew what he was about,
had turned them into good straight shoestrings. He waxed them, and
handed them to me with the remark, "Tell your grandma that since you
had to wait so long, I charge her only twenty-five cents for them."

[Footnote 16: Now Jamestown.]

CHAPTER XXIV

MEXICAN METHODS OF CULTIVATION--FIRST STEAMSHIP THROUGH THE GOLDEN
GATE--"THE ARGONAUTS" OR "BOYS OF '49"--A LETTER FROM THE STATES--JOHN
BAPTISTE--JAKIE LEAVES US--THE FIRST AMERICAN SCHOOL IN SONOMA.

By the first of March, 1849, carpenters had the frame of grandma's fine
new two-story house enclosed, and the floors partly laid. Neighbors
were hurrying to get their fields ploughed and planted, those without
farming implements following the Mexican's crude method of ploughing
the ground with wooden prongs and harrowing in the seed by dragging
heavy brush over it.

They gladly turned to any tool that would complete the work by the time
the roads to the mountains should be passable, and the diggings clear
of snow. Their expectations might have been realized sooner, if a bluff
old launch captain, with an eye to business for himself and San
Francisco, had not appeared on the scene, shouting, "Ahoy" to
everybody.

"I say, a steamship anchored in the Bay of San Francisco two days ago.
She's the _California_. Steamed out of New York Harbor with
merchandise. Stopped at Panama; there took aboard three hundred and
fifty waiting passengers that had cut across country--a mixture of men
from all parts of the United States, who have come to carry off the
gold diggings, root and branch! Others are coming in shiploads as fast
as they can. Now mark my words, and mark them well: provisions is going
to run mighty short, and if this valley wants any, it had better send
for them pretty dam