For a few months I enjoyed what to me was an entirely new phase of existence—­a butterfly idleness; nothing to do, nobody to be responsible to, and untroubled with financial uneasiness.  I fell in love with the most cordial and sociable city in the Union.  After the sage-brush and alkali deserts of Washoe, San Francisco was Paradise to me.  I lived at the best hotel, exhibited my clothes in the most conspicuous places, infested the opera, and learned to seem enraptured with music which oftener afflicted my ignorant ear than enchanted it, if I had had the vulgar honesty to confess it.  However, I suppose I was not greatly worse than the most of my countrymen in that.  I had longed to be a butterfly, and I was one at last.  I attended private parties in sumptuous evening dress, simpered and aired my graces like a born beau, and polkad and schottisched with a step peculiar to myself—­and the kangaroo.  In a word, I kept the due state of a man worth a hundred thousand dollars (prospectively,) and likely to reach absolute affluence when that silver-mine sale should be ultimately achieved in the East.  I spent money with a free hand, and meantime watched the stock sales with an interested eye and looked to see what might happen in Nevada.

Something very important happened.  The property holders of Nevada voted against the State Constitution; but the folks who had nothing to lose were in the majority, and carried the measure over their heads.  But after all it did not immediately look like a disaster, though unquestionably it was one I hesitated, calculated the chances, and then concluded not to sell.  Stocks went on rising; speculation went mad; bankers, merchants, lawyers, doctors, mechanics, laborers, even the very washerwomen and servant girls, were putting up their earnings on silver stocks, and every sun that rose in the morning went down on paupers enriched and rich men beggared.  What a gambling carnival it was!  Gould and Curry soared to six thousand three hundred dollars a foot!  And then —­all of a sudden, out went the bottom and everything and everybody went to ruin and destruction!  The wreck was complete.

The bubble scarcely left a microscopic moisture behind it.  I was an early beggar and a thorough one.  My hoarded stocks were not worth the paper they were printed on.  I threw them all away.  I, the cheerful idiot that had been squandering money like water, and thought myself beyond the reach of misfortune, had not now as much as fifty dollars when I gathered together my various debts and paid them.  I removed from the hotel to a very private boarding house.  I took a reporter’s berth and went to work.  I was not entirely broken in spirit, for I was building confidently on the sale of the silver mine in the east.  But I could not hear from Dan.  My letters miscarried or were not answered.