a few years older, is altogether
different in appearance, as otherwise; personally handsomer, and
intellectually superior. His features better formed, are more purely
Spanish; their outline oval and regular the jaws broad and balanced; the
chin prominent; the nose high, without being hooked or beaked; the brow
classically cut, and surmounted by a thick shock of hair, coal-black in
colour, and waved rather than curling. Heavy moustaches on the upper
lip, with an imperial on the under one--the last extending below the
point of the chin--all the rest of his face, throat, and cheeks, clean
shaven. Such are the facial characteristics of Don Francisco de Lara,
who is a much larger, and to all appearance stronger, man than his
travelling companion.

Calderon, as said, is a gentleman by birth, and a _ganadero_, or
stock-farmer, by occupation. He inherits a considerable tract of
pasture-land, left him by his father--some time deceased--along with the
horses and horned cattle that browse upon it. An only son, he is now
owner of all. But his ownership is not likely to continue. He is fast
relinquishing it, by the pursuit of evil courses--among them three of a
special kind: wine, women, and play--which promise to make him bankrupt
in purse, as they already have in character. For around San Francisco,
as in it, he is known as _roue_ and reveller, a debauchee in every
speciality of debauch, and a silly fellow to boot. Naturally of weak
intellect, and dissipation has made it weaker.

Of as much moral darkness, though different in kind, is the character of
Don Francisco de Lara--"Frank Lara," as he is familiarly known in the
streets and saloons. Though Spanish in features, and speaking the
language, he can also talk English with perfect fluency--French too,
when called upon, with a little Portuguese and Italian. For, in truth,
he is not a Spaniard, but only so by descent, being a Creole of New
Orleans--that cosmopolitan city _par excellence_--hence his philological
acquirements.

Frank Lara is one of those children of chance, wanderers who come into
the world nobody knows how, when, or whence; only, that they are in it;
and while there, performing a part in accordance with their mysterious
origin--living in luxury, and finding the means for it, by ways that
baffle conjecture.

He is full thirty years of age; the last ten of which he has spent on
the shores of San Francisco Bay. Landing there from an American
whaling-ve