and if I would call in the morning for it, it would be an accommodation to him.  I said I wanted to use it.  He commenced weighing it out.  I then thought it would make no difference to me and it was mean not to accommodate him, for I might want some favor of him.  I said, if I can have it in three days without fail it would answer my purpose.  He said, you can have it now, pouring the gold in the scales to weigh it.  I said never mind, I don’t want it now.  The fire came that night, burnt his place up and all his property.  He was a ruined man.  I never saw him afterward.

Mr. G., to whom I had bargained to sell my houses to arrive, (and he backed out) was an Englishman from Liverpool.  He had about all the consignments of shipments from that city (evidently being very popular there), to sell on commission at ten per cent; when the goods came and were sold, instead of remitting the capital to the owners and being satisfied with his commission, he used it in buying property and in erecting buildings in San Francisco.  He had constructed a fire-proof building which he rented to the government for a post-office, at a large sum per month, likewise the first theatre in the city, and other buildings.  He informed me at one time how much his rents amounted to per month; the sum was several thousand dollars.  Money was worth but three to five per cent in England per year to the owners of the merchandise; while in California it was in demand at ten per cent per month.  I suppose he thought he would make a great fortune for himself and then return to England (where he had a wife and children) and pay up all his obligations with extra allowance, for the use of the money, and make all satisfactory; but the great fire destroyed all his buildings, and he was a ruined man, there being no insurance in the city then.  I met a friend in New York about two years after my return from California; I asked him when he saw Mr. G. last.  He said, “it was about 11 o’clock one day at a hotel where he invited some friends to take a drink.  Mr. G. was there, he declined; but afterward called him to one side and asked him to loan him $1, saying he had had no breakfast that morning.”  Such was an example of some of the fluctuations of fortune in those days.

Some parties came with various kinds of machinery that was to make a certain fortune for them, and was taken up into the interior at great expense.  I never knew of one that was successful.  About all the companies that were formed in the States to go around Cape Horn for mining purposes generally dissolved after arriving in California, but what they brought with them for supplies, sold for so high a price that it generally sold for more than the cost of their passage, and they had money coming to them.  Some companies bought the ships as they came in and hired the captain.  I recollect one, called the Mechanics’ Own.  Every person joining their company in the States had to be voted in and pay $1,000.  They put on airs and talked quite aristocratic of their captain as their boy.