who had been talking to the
young maidens could play poker and drink and swear, and on the shop were
dime novels of bloodshed to corrupt the mind of the little boy, and
prurient servant-girl-slush yarns to poison the mind of the girl.
California only laughed grimly. He said that all these little one-house
towns were pretty much the same all over the States.

That night I dreamed I was back in India with no place to sleep in;
tramping up and down the Station mall and asking everybody, "When shall
I see you again?"

No. XXVII

SHOWS HOW I CAUGHT SALMON IN THE CLACKAMAS.

"The race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong; but
time and chance cometh to all."

I have lived! The American Continent may now sink under the sea, for I
have taken the best that it yields, and the best was neither dollars,
love, nor real estate. Hear now, gentlemen of the Punjab Fishing Club,
who whip the reaches of the Tavi, and you who painfully import trout to
Ootacamund, and I will tell you how "old man California" and I went
fishing, and you shall envy. We returned from The Dalles to Portland by
the way we had come, the steamer stopping _en route_ to pick up a
night's catch of one of the salmon wheels on the river, and to deliver
it at a cannery down-stream. When the proprietor of the wheel announced
that his take was two thousand two hundred and thirty pounds' weight of
fish, "and not a heavy catch, neither," I thought he lied. But he sent
the boxes aboard, and I counted the salmon by the hundred--huge
fifty-pounders, hardly dead, scores of twenty and thirty-pounders, and a
host of smaller fish.

The steamer halted at a rude wooden warehouse built on piles in a lonely
reach of the river, and sent in the fish. I followed them up a
scale-strewn, fishy incline that led to the cannery. The crazy building
was quivering with the machinery on its floors, and a glittering bank
of tin-scraps twenty feet high showed where the waste was thrown after
the cans had been punched. Only Chinamen were employed on the work, and
they looked like blood-besmeared yellow devils, as they crossed the
rifts of sunlight that lay upon the floor. When our consignment arrived,
the rough wooden boxes broke of themselves as they were dumped down
under a jet of water, and the salmon burst out in a stream of
quicksilver. A Chinaman jerked up a twenty-pounder, beheaded and
de-tailed it with two swift strokes of a knife, flicked out its internal