consigned to you.  I will pay you $2,000 now on the freight, and before they are all taken off of the ship, I will pay you the balance.  He said, take them all off, and pay the balance at your convenience (we were acquainted and had come up on the same steamer, and played whist together).  It cost me $800 to get them ashore.  There were no wharves then.  They had to be taken ashore on lighters.  I expected my brig down from Stockton soon, with $2,000 freight money, so I was out of the woods financially for the present.  I then made arrangement with the colonel to have them landed on the North Beach on land owned by him, where I could retail out my other six houses, which I had to sell, when I got a proper price for them.  We formed a copartnership.  I was to take one of my smallest houses, and have it erected there, to be used for an office, and to use the grounds as a lumber yard to sell on commission, and as a place for storage, which was very scarce then.  There were quite a number who had taken the liberty of piling lumber and other articles on it, using it as public ground.  I took formal possession of it in the name of Colonel Stevenson, and gave notice to the different parties that if they did not remove their materials from the premises in ten days they would be charged so much for storage.  Some removed, and others did not.  I recollect the German house that did not remove it in thirty days after the ten days of notice.  It was a wealthy house, and I handed them a bill of $250 for storage, at which they demurred very seriously, questioning our title; but they paid it.  When I went out to the ship to see about taking my houses off, I met the first mate, whom I got acquainted with in New York.  I told him I thought the ship had been lost; that all the old tugs of ships had got in ahead of them.  He said to me, I have had the worst time I ever had in my life.  I have had to carry that old man on my shoulders (referring to the captain) all the way.  Whenever we had a good breeze and sails were all full, he would come on deck and order shorten sail to check our speed, or we might have been here a month sooner.  That told the whole story.  I saw them take freight, in my presence, when they were offered $1.50 per foot, when they told me there was no room for the other half of my houses to go on the ship, when I had a legal contract with them at sixty cents per foot.  My freight alone would have made a difference of two or three thousand dollars by excluding it and taking the other in at the difference in the price of it.  There is no doubt they served many other shippers and put their goods on other vessels, and kept theirs back until the other ships would get to San Francisco ahead of them, so that they could deliver the freight according to their bills of lading on the arrival of the Prince de Joinville.  That was why my speculation was ruined by their dishonesty.  Instead of being the fastest ship, it was a fraud, a decoy, a dead trap on those who were unfortunate enough to