it was summed
up--again after the usual Californian epigrammatic style--by the remark
that "whatever were the comparative merits of Chinese and American
practice, a simple perusal of the list would prove that the Chinese were
capable of producing the most powerful emetic known." The craze subsided
in a single day; the interpreters and their oracle vanished; the Chinese
doctors' signs, which had multiplied, disappeared, and San Francisco
awoke cured of its madness, at the cost of some thousand dollars.

My Bohemian wanderings were confined to the limits of the city, for the
very good reason that there was little elsewhere to go. San Francisco
was then bounded on one side by the monotonously restless waters of the
bay, and on the other by a stretch of equally restless and monotonously
shifting sand dunes as far as the Pacific shore. Two roads penetrated
this waste: one to Lone Mountain--the cemetery; the other to the Cliff
House--happily described as "an eight-mile drive with a cocktail at
the end of it." Nor was the humor entirely confined to this felicitous
description. The Cliff House itself, half restaurant, half drinking
saloon, fronting the ocean and the Seal Rock, where disporting seals
were the chief object of interest, had its own peculiar symbol. The
decanters, wine-glasses, and tumblers at the bar were all engraved
in old English script with the legal initials "L. S." (Locus
Sigilli),--"the place of the seal."

On the other hand, Lone Mountain, a dreary promontory giving upon the
Golden Gate and its striking sunsets, had little to soften its weird
suggestiveness. As the common goal of the successful and unsuccessful,
the carved and lettered shaft of the man who had made a name, and the
staring blank headboard of the man who had none, climbed the sandy
slopes together. I have seen the funerals of the respectable citizen who
had died peacefully in his bed, and the notorious desperado who had
died "with his boots on," followed by an equally impressive cortege of
sorrowing friends, and often the self-same priest. But more awful than
its barren loneliness was the utter absence of peacefulness and rest
in this dismal promontory. By some wicked irony of its situation and
climate it was the personification of unrest and change. The incessant
trade winds carried its loose sands hither and thither, uncovering the
decaying coffins of early pioneers, to bury the wreaths and flowers,
laid on a grave of to-day, under their