hat strike you?) '_Free luncheon under the greenwood tree. Dance
on the elastic sward. Home again in the Bright Evening Hours_. _Manager
and Honorary Steward, H. Loudon Dodd, Esq., the well-known
connoisseur._'"

Singular how a man runs from Scylla to Charybdis! I was so intent on
securing the disappearance of a single epithet that I accepted the rest
of the advertisement and all that it involved without discussion. So it
befell that the words "well-known connoisseur" were deleted; but that H.
Loudon Dodd became manager and honorary steward of Pinkerton's
Hebdomadary Picnics, soon shortened by popular consent, to The
Dromedary.

By eight o'clock, any Sunday morning, I was to be observed by an
admiring public on the wharf. The garb and attributes of sacrifice
consisted of a black frockcoat, rosetted, its pockets bulging with
sweetmeats and inferior cigars, trousers of light blue, a silk hat like
a reflector, and a varnished wand. A goodly steamer guarded my one
flank, panting and throbbing, flags fluttering fore and aft of her,
illustrative of the Dromedary and patriotism. My other flank was covered
by the ticket-office, strongly held by a trusty character of the Scots
persuasion, rosetted like his superior, and smoking a cigar to mark the
occasion festive. At half-past, having assured myself that all was well
with the free luncheons, I lit a cigar myself, and awaited the strains
of the "Pioneer Band." I had never to wait long--they were German and
punctual--and by a few minutes after the half-hour I would hear them
booming down street with a long military roll of drums, some score of
gratuitous asses prancing at the head in bearskin hats and buckskin
aprons, and conspicuous with resplendent axes. The band, of course, we
paid for; but so strong is the San Franciscan passion for public
masquerade, that the asses (as I say) were all gratuitous, pranced for
the love of it, and cost us nothing but their luncheon.

The musicians formed up in the bows of my steamer, and struck into a
skittish polka; the asses mounted guard upon the gangway and the
ticket-office; and presently after, in family parties of father,
mother, and children, in the form of duplicate lovers or in that of
solitary youth, the public began to descend upon us by the carful at a
time: four to six hundred perhaps, with a strong German flavour, and all
merry as children. When these had been shepherded on board, and the
inevitable belated two or three had ga