San Francisco was undoubtedly the most disreputable city in the Union.  It is now one of the most reputable.  As I think of it to-day there is no shudder in the thought.  And yet I saw James King of William shot; I saw Casey and Cora transferred from the jail to the headquarters of the Vigilance Committee; and I saw them hanging as the body of James King of William was being borne by a whole city, bowed in grief, to his last resting-place.  And my venerated father was a member of that never-to-be-forgotten Vigilance Committee of San Francisco in the year of Our Lord eighteen hundred and fifty-six.

XII.

THE SURVIVOR’S STORY

It is not much of a story.  It is only the mild adventure of a boy at sea; and of a small, sad boy at that.  This boy had an elder brother who was ill; and the physicians in consultation had decided that a long sea-voyage was his only hope, and that even in this case the hope was a very faint one.

There was a ship at anchor in the harbor of San Francisco,—­a very famous clipper, one of those sailors of the sea known as Ocean Greyhounds.  She was built for speed, and her record was a brilliant one; under the guidance of her daring captain, she had again and again proved herself worthy of her name.  She was called the Flying Cloud.  Her cabins were luxuriously furnished; for in those days seafarers were oftener blown about the world by the four winds of heaven than propelled by steam.  Yet when the Flying Cloud, one January day, tripped anchor and set sail, there were but three strangers on the quarter-deck—­a middle-aged gentleman in search of health, the invalid brother, in his eighteenth year, and the small, sad boy.

[Illustration:  West from Black Point, 1856]

The captain’s wife, a lady of Salem who had followed him from sea to sea for many a year, was the joy and salvation of that forlorn little company.  How forlorn it was only the survivor knows, and he knows well enough.  Forty years have scarcely dimmed the memory of it.  Through all the wear and tear of time the remembrance of that voyage has at intervals haunted him:  the length of it, the weariness of it, and the almost unbroken monotony stretching through the ninety odd days that dawned and darkened between San Francisco and New York; the solitary sail that was blown on and on, and becalmed and buffeted between the blue waste of waters and the blue waste of sky; the lonesomeness of it all—­no land, no lights flashing across the sea in glad assurance; no passing ships to hail us with faint-voiced “Ahoy!”—­only the ever-tossing waves, the trailing sea-gardens, the tireless birds of the air and the monsters of the deep.

Ah, well-a-day!  There was a solemn and hushed circle listening to family prayers that morning,—­the morning of the 4th of January.  The father’s voice trembled as he opened the Bible and read from that beautiful psalm: