unts on a
machine like a gridiron with buttons strung on its bars; the different
rows represented units, tens, hundreds and thousands. He fingered them
with incredible rapidity--in fact, he pushed them from place to place as
fast as a musical professor's fingers travel over the keys of a piano.

They are a kindly disposed, well-meaning race, and are respected and well
treated by the upper classes, all over the Pacific coast. No Californian
gentleman or lady ever abuses or oppresses a Chinaman, under any
circumstances, an explanation that seems to be much needed in the East.
Only the scum of the population do it--they and their children; they,
and, naturally and consistently, the policemen and politicians, likewise,
for these are the dust-licking pimps and slaves of the scum, there as
well as elsewhere in America.

CHAPTER LV.

I began to get tired of staying in one place so long.

There was no longer satisfying variety in going down to Carson to report
the proceedings of the legislature once a year, and horse-races and
pumpkin-shows once in three months; (they had got to raising pumpkins and
potatoes in Washoe Valley, and of course one of the first achievements of
the legislature was to institute a ten-thousand-dollar Agricultural Fair
to show off forty dollars' worth of those pumpkins in--however, the
territorial legislature was usually spoken of as the "asylum"). I wanted
to see San Francisco. I wanted to go somewhere. I wanted--I did not
know what I wanted. I had the "spring fever" and wanted a change,
principally, no doubt. Besides, a convention had framed a State
Constitution; nine men out of every ten wanted an office; I believed that
these gentlemen would "treat" the moneyless and the irresponsible among
the population into adopting the constitution and thus well-nigh killing
the country (it could not well carry such a load as a State government,
since it had nothing to tax that could stand a tax, for undeveloped mines
could not, and there were not fifty developed ones in the land, there was
but little realty to tax, and it did seem as if nobody was ever going to
think of the simple salvation of inflicting a money penalty on murder).
I believed that a State government would destroy the "flush times," and I
wanted to get away. I believed that the mining stocks I had on hand
would soon be worth $100,000, and thought if they reached that before the
Constitution was adopted, I would sell out and make