1 and 1856," as Hittell
says, "were in many important respects unlike any other extra-judicial
movement to administer justice. They were not common mobs: they were
organized for weeks or months of labor, deliberate in their movements,
careful to keep records of their proceedings, strictly attentive to the
rules of evidence and the penalties for crime accepted by civilized
nations; confident of their power, and of their justification by public
opinion; and not afraid of taking the public responsibility of their
acts."

The committee of 1856 was never formally dissolved. The reformation it
had accomplished rendered it inactive. Some of the worst criminals in
California had been officials. A thousand homicides had been committed
in the city between 1849 and 1856, and there were but seven executions
in seven years.

Richard Henry Dana, Jr., the author of "Two Years before the Mast," who
spent the greater portion of two years--1834-35--on the coast of
California, and who revisited the Pacific coast in 1859, observes:

"And now the most quiet and well-governed city in the United States is
San Francisco. But it has been through its seasons of heaven-defying
crime and violence and blood; from which it was rescued and handed back
to soberness and morality and good government by that peculiar invention
of Anglo-Saxon republican America--the solemn, awe-inspiring Vigilance
Committee of the most grave and respectable citizens; the last resort of
the thinking and the good, taken only when vice, fraud, and ruffianism
had entrenched themselves behind the forms of law, suffrage, and
ballot."

San Francisco was undoubtedly the most disreputable city in the Union.
It is now one of the most reputable. As I think of it to-day there is no
shudder in the thought. And yet I saw James King of William shot; I saw
Casey and Cora transferred from the jail to the headquarters of the
Vigilance Committee; and I saw them hanging as the body of James King of
William was being borne by a whole city, bowed in grief, to his last
resting-place. And my venerated father was a member of that
never-to-be-forgotten Vigilance Committee of San Francisco in the year
of Our Lord eighteen hundred and fifty-six.

XII.

THE SURVIVOR'S STORY

It is not much of a story. It is only the mild adventure of a boy at
sea; and of a small, sad boy at that. This boy had an elder brother who
was ill; and the physicians in consultation had decided that a long
se