When my father, in one of his numerous trades, bought out the only tinshop and put me in charge he changed my life and endangered my disposition.  The tinsmith left the county and I was left with the tools and the material, the only tinsmith in Humboldt County.  How I struggled and bungled!  I could make stovepipe by the mile, but it was a long time before I could double-seam a copper bottom onto a tin wash-boiler.  I lived to construct quite a decent traveling oilcan for a Eureka sawmill, but such triumphs come through mental anguish and burned fingers.  No doubt the experience extended my desultory education.

The taking over of the tinshop was doubly disappointing, since I really wanted to go into the office of the Northern Californian and become a printer and journalist.  That job I turned over to Bret Harte, who was clever and cultivated, but had not yet “caught on.”  Leon Chevret, the French hotelkeeper, said of him to a lawyer of his acquaintance, “Bret Harte, he have the Napoleonic nose, the nose of genius; also, like many of you professional men, his debts trouble him very little.”

There were many interesting characters among the residents of the town and county.  At times there came to play the violin at our dances one Seth Kinman, a buckskin-clad hunter.  He became nationally famous when he fashioned and presented elkhorn chairs to Buchanan and several succeeding Presidents.  They were ingenious and beautiful, and he himself was most picturesque.

One of our originals was a shiftless and merry Iowan to whose name was added by courtesy the prefix “Dr.”  He had a small farm in the outskirts.  Gates hung from a single hinge and nothing was kept in repair.  He preferred to use his time in persuading nature to joke.  A single cucumber grown into a glass bottle till it could not get out was worth more than a salable crop, and a single cock whose comb had grown around an inserted pullet breastbone, until he seemed the precursor of a new breed of horned roosters, was better than much poultry.  He reached his highest fame in the cure of his afflicted wife.  She languished in bed and he diagnosed her illness as resulting from the fact that she was “hidebound.”  His house he had never had time to complete.  The rafters were unobstructed by ceiling, so she was favorably situated for treatment.  He fixed a lasso under her arms, threw the end around a rafter, and proceeded to loosen her refractory hide.

One of our leading merchants was a deacon in the Methodist church and so enjoyed the patronage of his brother parishioners.  One of them came in one day and asked the paying price of eggs.  The deacon told him “sixty cents a dozen.”

“What are sail-needles?”

“Five cents apiece.”

The brother produced an egg and proposed a swap.  It was smilingly accepted and the egg added to the pile of stock.

The brother lingered and finally drawled, “Deacon, it’s customary, isn’t it, to treat a buyer?”