Against the actual heathen the feeling was even stronger, and reached its climax one Sunday when a Chinaman was stoned to death by a crowd of children returning from Sunday-school.  I am offering these examples with no ethical purpose, but merely to indicate a singular contradictory condition which I do not think writers of early Californian history have fairly recorded.  It is not my province to suggest any theory for these appalling exceptions to the usual good-humored lawlessness and extravagance of the rest of the State.  They may have been essential agencies to the growth and evolution of the city.  They were undoubtedly sincere.  The impressions I propose to give of certain scenes and incidents of my early experience must, therefore, be taken as purely personal and Bohemian, and their selection as equally individual and vagrant.  I am writing of what interested me at the time, though not perhaps of what was more generally characteristic of San Francisco.

I had been there a week—­an idle week, spent in listless outlook for employment; a full week in my eager absorption of the strange life around me and a photographic sensitiveness to certain scenes and incidents of those days, which start out of my memory to-day as freshly as the day they impressed me.

One of these recollections is of “steamer night,” as it was called,—­the night of “steamer day,”—­preceding the departure of the mail steamship with the mails for “home.”  Indeed, at that time San Francisco may be said to have lived from steamer day to steamer day; bills were made due on that day, interest computed to that period, and accounts settled.  The next day was the turning of a new leaf:  another essay to fortune, another inspiration of energy.  So recognized was the fact that even ordinary changes of condition, social and domestic, were put aside until after steamer day.  “I’ll see what I can do after next steamer day” was the common cautious or hopeful formula.  It was the “Saturday night” of many a wage-earner—­and to him a night of festivity.  The thoroughfares were animated and crowded; the saloons and theatres full.  I can recall myself at such times wandering along the City Front, as the business part of San Francisco was then known.  Here the lights were burning all night, the first streaks of dawn finding the merchants still at their counting-house desks.  I remember the dim lines of warehouses lining the insecure wharves of rotten piles, half filled in—­that had ceased to be wharves, but had not yet become streets,—­their treacherous yawning depths, with the uncertain gleam of tarlike mud below, at times still vocal with the lap and gurgle of the tide.  I remember the weird stories of disappearing men found afterward imbedded in the ooze in which they had fallen and gasped their life away.  I remember the two or three ships, still left standing where they were beached a year or two before, built in between warehouses, their bows projecting into the roadway.  There was the