s, at night it was impracticable through the dense
sea-fog that stole softly through the Golden Gate at sunset. Thence,
until morning, sea and shore were a trackless waste, bounded only by the
warning thunders of the unseen sea. The station itself, a rudely built
cabin, with two windows,--one furnished with a telescope,--looked like
a heap of driftwood, or a stranded wreck left by the retiring sea; the
semaphore--the only object for leagues--lifted above the undulating
dunes, took upon itself various shapes, more or less gloomy, according
to the hour or weather,--a blasted tree, the masts and clinging spars
of a beached ship, a dismantled gallows; or, with the background of a
golden sunset across the Gate, and its arms extended at right angles,
to a more hopeful fancy it might have seemed the missionary Cross, which
the enthusiast Portala lifted on that heathen shore a hundred years
before.

Not that Dick Jarman--the solitary station keeper--ever indulged this
fancy. An escaped convict from one of her Britannic Majesty's penal
colonies, a "stowaway" in the hold of an Australian ship, he had landed
penniless in San Francisco, fearful of contact with his more honest
countrymen already there, and liable to detection at any moment. Luckily
for him, the English immigration consisted mainly of gold-seekers en
route to Sacramento and the southern mines. He was prudent enough to
resist the temptation to follow them, and accepted the post of semaphore
keeper,--the first work offered him,--which the meanest immigrant,
filled with dreams of gold, would have scorned. His employers asked him
no questions, and demanded no references; his post could be scarcely
deemed one of trust,--there was no property for him to abscond with but
the telescope; he was removed from temptation and evil company in his
lonely waste; his duties were as mechanical as the instrument he worked,
and interruption of them would be instantly known at San Francisco. For
this he would receive his board and lodging and seventy-five dollars a
month,--a sum to be ridiculed in those "flush days," but which seemed to
the broken-spirited and half-famished stowaway a princely independence.

And then there was rest and security! He was free from that torturing
anxiety and fear of detection which had haunted him night and day for
three months. The ceaseless vigilance and watchful dread he had known
since his escape, he could lay aside now. The rude cabin on the sand
dune