the pioneers, the evidences whereof remain
unto this day. The swinging signs over the hotels for one; another, the
prevalence in all the mining towns of Bass's pale ale. You will find it
in the most unpretentious hotels and restaurants. An Englishman expects
his ale or beer, as a matter of course, whether at the Equator or at
the Arctic Circle. When I first arrived in California in 1868, I drifted
down into the then sheep and cattle country in the lower end of Monterey
County. An English family living on an isolated ranch sent home for a
girl who had worked for them in the old country. Upon her arrival, the
first question she asked was: "How far is it to the church?" The second:
"Where can I get my beer?" When informed there was no church within
a hundred miles and that it was at least fifteen miles to the nearest
saloon, the poor woman felt that she was indeed all abroad! Bereft, at
one blow of the Established Church and English Ale, the solid ground
seemed to have given way from under her feet. For her, these two
particulars comprised the whole of the British Constitution.

Smartsville possessed a sentimental interest for me, for the reason
that in the sixties my father mined and taught a private school in an
adjoining camp bearing the derogatory appellation "Sucker Flat." What
mischance prompted this title will never now be known. In my father's
time, it contained a population of nearly a thousand persons; and
judging from the manner in which the gulch and the contiguous flat have
been torn, scarred, burrowed into and tunneled under, if gold there was,
most strenuous efforts had been made to bring it to light.

I asked if there was anyone in Smartsville who would be likely to
remember my father, and was referred by Mr. Peardon to "Bob" Beatty,
who, he said, had, lived in Smartsville all his life and knew everybody.
As Mr. Beatty was within a stone's throw, at the Excelsior Store, I had
no difficulty in finding him. Introducing myself, I asked Mr. Beatty if
he remembered my father. "To be sure I do," he exclaimed, "I went to his
school, and," laughing heartily, "well I remember a licking he gave me!"
He said that among the boys who attended that school, several in after
years, as men, had become prominent in the history of the State.

Mr. Beatty--now a pleasant, genial gentleman of fifty-two--very kindly
walked with me to the brow of the hill commanding a view of Sucker Flat,
and pointed out the exact spot where the