s well as the artistic importance of the Royal
Academy; and you confess, that a London season would be shorn of its
brightest feature if you shut the gates of the National Gallery.

A. B. R.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Associates Royal Academy, and Royal Academicians.

BILL WILLIAMS:

A STORY OF CALIFORNIA.

It was in the first flush of the Californian fever, when moderate
people talked of making one's fortune in a fortnight, and the more
sanguine believed that golden pokers would soon become rather common,
that the _Betsy Jones_ from London to New Zealand, with myself on
board as a passenger, dropped anchor in the bay of San Francisco, and
master and man turned out for the diggings. It is my impression that
not a soul remained on board but the surgeon, who was sick, and the
negro cook, who wouldn't leave him; and the first man I met on the
deck of the _Go-Ahead_ steamer, which took as up to Sacramento, was
our enterprising captain, clad in a canvas jacket and trousers, with
the gold-washing apparatus, two shirts, and a tin kettle, slung at his
back. The crew followed his example, and all the passengers. The
latter were some thirty men, from every corner of Britain, and of
various birth and breeding. There were industrious farm-servants and
spendthrift sons of gentlemen among them. Some had sailed with money,
to purchase land in the southern colony, some were provided only with
their hopes and sinews; but California was an irresistible temptation
to them all, and by general desire, they had come to try their luck at
the washing. We had mere boys and men of grizzling hair in our
company. Two were married, but they wisely left their wives in San
Francisco, where, having brought with them some spare blankets and
crockery, the ladies improvised a boarding-house, and I believe
realised more than their wandering lords. Nevertheless, we, one and
all, went up the broad river with loftier expectations than the
prudent among us cared to make public.

There was one who made no secret of his hopes. The man's name was Bill
Williams. I had had a loose acquaintance with Bill from school-time,
for we had been brought up in the same good town of Manchester, where
his father was a respectable tradesman, and his three brothers were
still in business. Many a town and many a trade had Bill tried to
little purpose. Never doing what his relatives could call well, he had
gone through a serie