n quick!"

By return boat, farmers, shopkeepers, and carpenters hastened to San
Francisco. All were eager for supplies from the first steamship that
had entered the Golden Gate--the first, it may be added, that most of
them, even those of a sea-going past, had ever seen.

During the absence of husbands, we little girls were loaned separately
nights to timid wives who had no children to keep them company. Georgia
went earlier and stayed later than I, because grandma could not spare
me in the evenings until after the cows were turned out, and she needed
me in the mornings before sunrise. Those who borrowed us made our stays
so pleasant that we felt at home in many different houses.

Once, however, I encountered danger on my early homeward trip.

I had turned the bend in the road, could see the smoke curling out of
grandma's chimney, and knew that every nearer house was closed. In
order to avoid attracting the attention of a suspicious-looking cow on
the road, I was running stealthily along a rail fence, when,
unexpectedly, I came upon a family of sleeping swine, and before I was
aware of danger from that direction was set upon and felled to the
ground by a vicious beast. Impelled, I know not how, but quick as
thought, I rolled over and over and over, and when I opened my eyes I
was on the other side of the fence, and an angry, noisy, bristling
creature was glaring at me through the rails.

Quivering like a leaf and for a time unable to rise, I lay upon the
green earth facing the morning sky. With strange sensations and
wonderment, I tried to think what might have happened, if I had not
rolled. What if that space between fence and ground had been too narrow
to let my body through; what if, on the other hand, it had been wide
enough for that enraged brute to follow?

Too frightened to cry, and still trembling, I made my way to the end of
the field and climbed back over the fence near home. Grandma was
greatly startled by my blanched face, and the rumpled and soiled
condition of my clothes. After I related my frightful experience, she
also felt that had it not been for that fence, I should have been torn
to pieces. She explained, however, that I probably would not have been
attacked had I not startled the old mother so suddenly that she
believed her young in danger.

When our menfolk returned from San Francisco, they were accompanied by
many excited treasure-seekers, anxious to secure pack animals to carry
their effe