the bright cabin windows of the
GOLDEN CITY but night deepening over the water. The only sound was the
pattering rain, and that had grown monotonous for the past two weeks,
and did not disturb the national gravity of my countrymen as they
silently sat around the cabin stove. Some on errands of relief to
friends and relatives wore anxious faces, and conversed soberly on
the one absorbing topic. Others, like myself, attracted by curiosity
listened eagerly to newer details. But with that human disposition to
seize upon any circumstance that might give chance event the exaggerated
importance of instinct, I was half-conscious of something more than
curiosity as an impelling motive.

The dripping of rain, the low gurgle of water, and a leaden sky greeted
us the next morning as we lay beside the half-submerged levee of
Sacramento. Here, however, the novelty of boats to convey us to the
hotels was an appeal that was irresistible. I resigned myself to a
dripping rubber-cased mariner called "Joe," and, wrapping myself in a
shining cloak of the like material, about as suggestive of warmth as
court plaster might have been, took my seat in the stern sheets of his
boat. It was no slight inward struggle to part from the steamer that to
most of the passengers was the only visible connecting link between
us and the dry and habitable earth, but we pulled away and entered the
city, stemming a rapid current as we shot the levee.

We glided up the long level of K Street--once a cheerful, busy
thoroughfare, now distressing in its silent desolation. The turbid water
which seemed to meet the horizon edge before us flowed at right angles
in sluggish rivers through the streets. Nature had revenged herself on
the local taste by disarraying the regular rectangles by huddling houses
on street corners, where they presented abrupt gables to the current, or
by capsizing them in compact ruin. Crafts of all kinds were gliding in
and out of low-arched doorways. The water was over the top of the
fences surrounding well-kept gardens, in the first stories of hotels
and private dwellings, trailing its slime on velvet carpets as well as
roughly boarded floors. And a silence quite as suggestive as the
visible desolation was in the voiceless streets that no longer echoed
to carriage wheel or footfall. The low ripple of water, the occasional
splash of oars, or the warning cry of boatmen were the few signs of life
and habitation.

With such scenes before my e