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Larkin told us what we were fully prepared to hear, namely, that wages and salaries of all classes have risen immensely; clerks, he said, were getting from nine hundred to twelve hundred dollars, instead of from four hundred to five hundred and fifty dollars, with their board. Both the Star and Californian newspapers, he said, had stopped.
The country bordering the Upper Sacramento for two hundred miles from the Californian capital is level and comparatively tame, so that no artistic advantage would have resulted from following the bank on horseback. From the little steamer the view became a perpetual pleasure.
The place was held in that mysterious silence which broods over the Californian country and suggests a hushed and ominous attention. It is as if nature were aware of some impending event, imminent and portentous, and waited in tranced expectancy. The outlaw felt it, and moved, disquieted, setting his oppression down to loneliness.
Wherever we went, however grand the domestics, soldiers, or police, Dominico was always high above them, and I could hear him descanting constantly on the wonderful richness of California. Doubtless the strain of his conversation ran about thus: "Behold, gentlemen, I have brought before you a living Californian!
To show how successful was his mental adjustment, it is necessary merely to state one fact: Where he had intended to stop an hour or so, he stayed the afternoon; ate supper there and rode home at sundown, his mind a jumble of sunny Californian days where one may gather star-fishes and oranges, bay leaves and ripe olives at will, and of black and white lambs which always obtrude themselves at the wrong moment and break off little, intimate confidences about life in a real-estate office, perhaps; and of polished finger-nails that never dip themselves in dishwater Andy had come to believe that it would be neither right or just to expect them to do so common a thing.
It is to be hoped the Government will make the price reasonable. The following tariff of charges, collected by the Times' correspondent, is now only valuable in a historical point of view, as, under the healthy competition of the Californian merchants, prices have already found their own level: "Canoes are very scarce; the price has risen from 50 dollars and 80 dollars to 100 dollars each.
Of course I waited, and he soon joined me, dressed much as a Californian, with the peculiar high, broad-brimmed hat, with a fancy cord, and we walked together back to Pryor's, where I left him with General Kearney. We spent several days very pleasantly at Los Angeles, then, as now, the chief pueblo of the south, famous for its grapes, fruits, and wines.
An educated Londoner has difficulty in understanding even the London cockney. Suffolk, Cornish, or Lancashire these are almost foreign tongues to him. The American of the South has at least no difficulty in understanding the New Englander: the New Yorker does not have to make the Californian repeat each sentence that he utters.
'Oh, if you mean that way, I suppose you are; but still papa helped frame the Constitution, and was here on the first Admission Day, and was one of the Vigilantes and I think that makes him more of a real Californian than you. You've just "grown up with the country." 'Bless my soul! What else could I do?
An Irish pork-merchant was seated at dinner next a Jew, who regarded the pig in toto as an abomination a lady, a scion of a ducal family, found herself next to a French cook going out to a San Franciscan eating-house an officer, going out to high command at Halifax, was seated next a rough Californian, who wore "nuggets" of gold for buttons; and there were contrasts even stronger than these.
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