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 effects to the mines.  They were made welcome, and in turn furnished us news of the outer world, and distributed worn copies of American and foreign newspapers, which our hungry-minded pioneers read and re-read so long as the lines held together.

Those light-hearted newcomers, who danced and gayly sang,

        O Susannah, don’t you cry for me! 
    I’m bound to Californy with a tin pan on my knee,

were the first we saw of that vast throng of gold-seekers, who flocked to our shores within a twelvemonth, and who have since become idealized in song and story as the “Argonauts,” “the Boys of ’49.”