as secure
from his prying fingers and curious eyes. He must touch and taste of
everything, and know every secret. But it eluded him; and he lay down
from his giddy chase, tired and unsatisfied, yet still anticipating
that the morning would reveal all. Later he approaches men and things
in a different mood. Experience has taught him so much. He begins to
feel the use of the past. Memory renders many present advantages as
nothing, and there is a rare and peculiar value to every reminiscence
that connects him with the years from which he is so fast receding.
The bower which his own hands wove from birch-trees and interwove with
green brakes, where at the noon-time he was wont to retreat from the
hot school-house, with the little maid of his choice, and beguile the
hour so happily, suggests a spell and charm to preserve him in
perpetual childhood.

* * * * *

PINTAL.

In San Francisco, in 1849, on Dupont Street near Washington, a
wretched tent, patched together from mildewed and weather-worn sails,
was pitched on a hill-side lot, unsightly with sand and thorny bushes,
filthy cast-aways of clothing, worn-out boots, and broken bottles. The
forlorn loneliness of this poor abode, and the perfection of its
Californianness, in all the circumstances of exposure, frailness,
destitution, and dirt, were enough of themselves to make it an object
of interest to the not-too-busy passer; yet, to complete its pitiful
picturesqueness, Pathos had bestowed a case of miniatures and a
beautiful child. Beside the entrance of the tent a rough shingle was
fastened to the canvas, and against this hung an unpainted
picture-frame of pine, in humble counterpart of those gilded rosewood
signs which, at the doors of Daguerreotype galleries, display fancy
"specimens" to the goers-to-and-fro of Broadway. Attracted by an
object so novel in San Francisco then, I paused one morning, in my
walk officeward from the "Anglo-Saxon Dining-Saloon," to examine it.

There were six of them,--six dainty miniature portraits on ivory,
elaborately finished, and full of the finest marks of talent. The
whole were seemingly reproductions of but two heads, a lady's and a
child's,--the lady well fitted to be the mother of the child, which
might well have been divine. There were three studies of each; each
was presented in three characters, chosen as by an artist possessed of
a sentiment of sadness, some touching reminiscence.

In one pi