e population.

Mexicans were there enveloped in their sarapes; Chinamen in their
large-sleeved tunics, pointed shoes, and conical hats; one or two
Kanucks from the coast; and even a sprinkling of Black Feet,
Grosventres, or Flatheads, from the banks of the Trinity river.

The scene is in San Francisco, the capital of California, but not at the
period when the placer-mining fever was raging--from 1849 to 1852. San
Francisco was no longer what it had been then, a caravanserai, a
terminus, an _inn_, where for a night there slept the busy men who were
hastening to the gold-fields west of the Sierra Nevada. At the end of
some twenty years the old unknown Yerba-Buena had given place to a town
unique of its kind, peopled by 100,000 inhabitants, built under the
shelter of a couple of hills, away from the shore, but stretching off to
the farthest heights in the background--a city in short which has
dethroned Lima, Santiago, Valparaiso, and every other rival, and which
the Americans have made the queen of the Pacific, the "glory of the
western coast!"

It was the 15th of May, and the weather was still cold. In California,
subject as it is to the direct action of the polar currents, the first
weeks of this month are somewhat similar to the last weeks of March in
Central Europe. But the cold was hardly noticeable in the thick of the
auction crowd. The bell with its incessant clangour had brought
together an enormous throng, and quite a summer temperature caused the
drops of perspiration to glisten on the foreheads of the spectators
which the cold outside would have soon solidified.

Do not imagine that all these folks had come to the auction-room with
the intention of buying. I might say that all of them had but come to
see. Who was going to be mad enough, even if he were rich enough, to
purchase an isle of the Pacific, which the government had in some
eccentric moment decided to sell? Would the reserve price ever be
reached? Could anybody be found to work up the bidding? If not, it would
scarcely be the fault of the public crier, who tried his best to tempt
buyers by his shoutings and gestures, and the flowery metaphors of his
harangue. People laughed at him, but they did not seem much influenced
by him.

"An island! an isle to sell!" repeated Gingrass.

"But not to buy!" answered an Irishman, whose pocket did not hold enough
to pay for a single pebble.

"An island which at the valuation will not fetch six dollars an acre!