“At last as he wandered on the shore and had almost given up all hope of the schooner, the schooner hove in sight.  To give time for her approach he walked into the woods for a space, that he might not alarm his guardian constable by his attention to her movements.  Again he sauntered down towards the point with apparent carelessness, but with a beating heart.  San Francisco was to be his first destination; and beyond that golden gate lay the great world, and home, and children, and an honourable life.  The boat was coming, manned by three men; and he stepped proudly and resolutely to meet them on the shore.  To be sure there was, somewhere behind him, one miserable constable with his miserable musket, but he had no doubt of being able to dispose of that difficulty with the aid of his allies, the boatmen.  The boat could not get quite close to the beach, because they had to run her into a kind of cove where the water was calm and unencumbered with large tangled weeds.  O’Brien, when he reached the beach, plunged into the water to prevent delay, and struggled through the thick matted seaweed to the boat.  The water was deeper than he expected, and when he came to the boat he needed the aid of the boatmen to climb over the gunwale.  Instead of giving him this aid the rascals allowed him to flounder there, and kept looking to the shore, where the constable had by this time appeared with his musket.  The moment he showed himself, the three boatmen cried out together, ‘We surrender!’ and invited him on board; where he instantly took up a hatchet—­no doubt provided by the ship for that purpose, and stove the boat.  O’Brien saw he was betrayed, and on being ordered to move along with the constable and boatmen towards the station, he refused to stir—­hoping, in fact, by his resistance, to provoke the constable to shoot him.  However, the three boatmen seized on him, and lifted him up from the ground, and carried him wherever the constable ordered.  His custody was thereafter made more rigorous, and he was shortly after removed from Maria Island to Port Arthur station.”

To this brief narrative the following “note” is appended in the work from which we have just quoted:—­

“Ellis, the captain of the schooner, was some months after seized at San Francisco by Mr. M’Manus and others, brought by night out of his ship, and carried into the country to undergo his trial under a tree, whereupon, if found guilty, he was destined to swing.  M’Manus set out his indictment; and it proves how much Judge Lynch’s method of administering justice in those early days of California excelled anything we know of law or justice in Ireland—­that Ellis, for want of sufficient and satisfactory evidence then producible, was acquitted by that midnight court, under that convenient and tempting tree.”