office next door. A case, of which no one knew the contents, was being lifted by two clerks, when it exploded, blowing down a portion of the club, and breaking half the windows in the city. On examination it was found to be nitro-glycerine on its way to the mines.

Another accident occurred here yesterday with this same compound. A sharp report was heard on board a ship lying in the docks, and the cook was found dead, below; pieces of a flask had been driven into his heart and lungs. The deposit on the broken glass was examined, and found to be common oil; but this morning, I read in the Alta a report from a chemist that traces of nitro-glycerine have been discovered by him upon the glass, and a statement from one of the hands says that the ship on her way up had called at Manzanilla, where the cook had taken the flask from a merchant's office, emptied it of its contents, the character of which was unknown to him, and filled it with common oil.

Since the great explosion at Aspinwall, nitro-glycerine has been the nightmare of Californians. For earthquakes they care little, but the freaks of the devilish oil, which is brought here secretly, for use in the Nevada mines, have made them ready to swear that it is itself a demon. They tell you that it freezes every night, and then the slightest friction will explode it-that, on the other hand, it goes off if heated. If you leave it standing in ordinary temperatures, the odds are that it undergoes decomposition, and then, if you touch it, it explodes; and no lapse of time has on its power the smallest deteriorating effect, but, on the contrary, the oil will crystallize, and then its strength for harm is multiplied by ten. If San Francisco is ever destroyed by earthquake, old Californians will certainly be found to ascribe the shock to nitro-glycerine.

A day or two after my return from Benicia, I escaped from the city, and again went South, halting at San José, "The Garden City," and chief town of the fertile Guadalupe district, on my way to the quicksilver mines of New Almaden, now the greatest in the world since they have beaten the Spanish mines and Idria. From San José, I drove myself to Almaden along a sun-dried valley with a fertile tawny soil, reaching the delicious mountain stream and the groves it feeds in time to join

my friends at lunch in the shady hacienda. The director took me through the refining works, in which the quicksilver may be seen running in streams down gutters from the furnaces, but he was unable to go with me up the mountain to the mines from which the cinnabar comes shooting by its weight. The superintendent engineer-a meerschaum-equipped Bavarian-and myself mounted, at the Hacienda Gate, upon our savage-looking beasts, and I found myself for the first time lost in the depths of a Mexican saddle, and my feet plunged into the boot-stirrups that I had seen used by the Utes in Denver. The riding feats of the Mexican and Californian boys are explained when you find that their saddle puts it out of the question that they should be thrown; but the fatigue that its size and shape cause to man and horse, when the man is a stranger to New Spain, and the horse knows that he is so, outweighs any possible advantages that it may possess. With their huge gilt spurs, attached to the stirrup, not to the boot, the double peak, and the embroidered trappings, the Mexican saddles are the perfection at once of the cumbersome and the picturesque.

Silently we half scrambled, half rode, up a breakneck path which forms a short cut to the mine, till all at once a charge of our horses at an almost perpendicular wall of rock was followed by their simultaneously commencing to kick and back towards the cliff. Springing off, we found that the girths had been slackened by the Mexican groom, and that the steep bit of mountain had caused the saddles to slip. This broke the ice, and we speedily found ourselves discussing miners and mining in French, my German not being much worse than the Bavarian's English.

After viewing the mines, the walls of which, composed of crimson cinnabar, show bravely in the torchglare, I bade goodbye to what I could see of my German in the fog from his meerschaum, and turned to ride down by the road instead of the path. I had not gone a furlong, when, turning a corner, there burst upon me a view of the whole valley of tawny California, now richly golden in the colours of the fall. Looking from this spur of the Santa Cruz Mountains, with the Contra Costa Range before me, and Mount Hamilton towering from the plain, apart, I could discern below me the gleam of the

Coyote Creek, and of the windows in the church of Santa Clara-in the distance, the mountains and waters of San Francisco Bay, from San Mateo to Alameda and San Pablo, basking in unhindered sun. The wild-oats dried by the heat made of the plain a field of gold, dotted here and there with groups of black oak and bay, and darkened at the mountain foot with "chapparal." The volcanic hills were rounded into softness in the delicious haze, and all nature overspread with a poetic calm. As I lost the view, the mighty fog was beginning to pour in through the Golden Gate to refresh America with dews from the Pacific.

CHAPTER XXIII.

LITTLE CHINA.

"THE Indians begin to be troublesome again in Trinity County. One man and a Chinaman have been killed, and a lady crippled for life."

That the antipathy everywhere exhibited by the English to coloured races was not less strong in California than in the Carolinas I had suspected, but I was hardly prepared for the deliberate distinction between men and yellow men drawn in this paragraph from the California Alta of the day of my return to San Francisco.

A determination to explore Little China, as the celestial quarter of the city is termed, already arrived at, was only strengthened by the unconscious humour of the Alta, and I at once set off in search of two of the detectives, Edes and Saulsbury, to whom I had some sort of introduction, and put myself under their charge for the night.

We had not been half-an-hour in the Chinese theatre or opera-house before my detectives must have repented of their offer to "show me around," for, incomprehensible as it seemed to them with their New England gravity and American contempt for the Chinese, I was amused beyond measure with the performance, and fairly lost myself in the longest laugh that I had enjoyed since I had left the plantations of Virginia.

When we entered the house, which is the size of the Strand Theatre of London, it may have been ten or eleven o'clock. The performance had begun at seven, and was likely to last till two A.M. By the "performance" was meant this particular act or scene, for the piece had been going on every evening for a month, and would be still in progress during the best part of

another, it being the principle of the Chinese drama to take up the hero at an early age, and conduct him to the grave-which he reaches full of years and of honour.

The house was crammed with a grinning crowd of happy "yellow-boys," while the "China ladies" had a long gallery to themselves. No sound of applause is to be heard in a Chinese place of amusement, but the crowd grin delight at the actors, who, for their part, grin back at the crowd.

The feature of the performance which struck me at once was the hearty interest the actors took in the play, and the chaff that went on between them and the pit; it is not only from their numbers and the nature of their trades that the Chinese may be called the Irish of the Pacific: there was soul in every gesture.

On the stage, behind the actors, was a band, which played unceasingly, and so loud, that the performers, who clearly had not the smallest intention of subordinating their parts to the music, had to talk in shrieks in order to be heard. The audience, too, all talked in their loudest natural tones.

As for the play, a lady made love to an old gentleman (probably the hero, as this was the second month or third act of the play), and, bawling at him fiercely, was indignantly rejected by him in a piercing shriek. Relatives, male and female, coming with many howls to the assistance of the lady, were ignominiously put to flight, in a high falsetto key, by the old fellow's footmen, who were in turn routed by a force of yelling spearmen, apparently the county posse. The soldiers wore paint in rings of various colours, put on so deftly, that of nose, of eyes, of mouth, no trace could be discovered; the front face resembled a target for archery. All this time, a steady unceasing uproar was continued by four gongs and a harp, with various cymbals, pavilions, triangles, and guitars.

Scenery there was none, but boards were put up in the Elizabethan way, with hieroglyphics denoting the supposed locality; and another archaic point is, that all the female parts were played by boys. For this I have the word of the detectives; my eyes, had I not long since ceased to believe them, would have given me proof to the contrary.

The acting, so far as I could judge by the grimace, was ex