hair--as a fidgety and vulgar man would bite his
nails. From all of which I gathered that my new acquaintance was an
intensely nervous person,--very sensitive, of course, and no doubt
irritable.

He was accompanied by a--female, much taller than he, and as stalwart
as dear woman can be; an especially common-looking person, bungled as
to her dress, which was tawdry-fine, unseasonable for the place as
well as time, inappropriate to herself, inharmonious in its
composition, and every way most vilely put on; a clumsy and, as I
presently perceived, a loud person, whose face, still showing traces
of the coarse but decided beauty it must once have possessed, fell far
short of compensating for the complete gracelessness of her presence.

Her eyes had a bibulous quality, and the bright redness of her nose
vied vulgarly with the rusty redness of her cheeks. I suspected her
complexion of potations, but charitably let it off with--beer; for she
was, at first glance, English. As she jerked off her flaunting bonnet,
and dragged off her loud shawl, saluting me, as she did so, with an
overdone obeisance, she said, "This San Fanfrisko"--why would she, how
could she, always twist the decent name of the metropolis of the
Pacific into such an absurd shape?--"was a norrid 'ole; she happealed
to the gentleman,"--meaning me,--"didn't 'e find it a norrid 'ole,
habsolutely hawful?" And then she went clattering among tinware and
crockery, and snubbed the gentlemanly boy in a sort of tender
Billingsgate.

While she was thus gracefully employed, the agonized artist, his face
suffused with blushes and fairly ghastly with an enforced smile, was
painfully struggling to abstract himself, by changing the places of
things, shifting the position of his easel, prying in a lost way into
lumbered corners, and pretending to be in search of something,
--ingenious, but unable to disguise his chagrin. He pranced
with his legs, and tumbled his hair, and twitched at his whiskers more
than ever, as he said,--

"My dear," (and the boy had called her Mamma; so, then, it must be a
fancy sketch, after all,) "my dear, no doubt the gentleman is more a
cosmopolite than yourself, and blessed with more facility in adapting
himself to circumstances."

"You know, Madam," I came to his assistance, "we Americans have a
famous trick of living and enjoying a little in advance, of 'going
ahead' of the hour, as it were. We find in San Francisco rather what
it promises to be