Here was a change in my life as complete as it had been sudden.  In the twinkling of an eye I was transformed from a sailor into a ``beach-comber’’ and a hide-curer; yet the novelty and the comparative independence of the life were not unpleasant.  Our hide-house was a large building, made of rough boards, and intended to hold forty thousand hides.  In one corner of it a small room was parted off, in which four berths were made, where we were to live, with mother earth for our floor.  It contained a table, a small locker for pots, spoons, plates, &c., and a small hole cut to let in the light.  Here we put our chests, threw our bedding into the berths, and took up our quarters.  Over our heads was another small room, in which Mr. Russell lived, who had charge of the hide-house, the same man who was for a time an officer of the Pilgrim.  There he lived in solitary grandeur, eating and sleeping alone (and these were his principal occupations), and communing with his own dignity.  The boy, a Marblehead hopeful, whose name was Sam, was to act as cook; while I, a giant of a Frenchman named Nicholas, and four Sandwich-Islanders were to cure the hides.  Sam, Nicholas, and I lived together in the room, and the four Sandwich-Islanders worked and ate with us, but generally slept at the oven.  My new messmate, Nicholas, was the most immense man that I had ever seen.  He came on the coast in a vessel which was afterwards wrecked, and now let himself out to the different houses to cure hides.  He was considerably over six feet, and of a frame so large that he might have been shown for a curiosity.  But the most remarkable thing about him was his feet.  They were so large that he could not find a pair of shoes in California to fit him, and was obliged to send to Oahu for a pair; and when he got them, he was compelled to wear them down at the heel.  He told me once that he was wrecked in an American brig on the Goodwin Sands, and was sent up to London, to the charge of the American consul, with scant clothing to his back and no shoes to his feet, and was obliged to go about London streets in his stocking-feet three or four days, in the month of January, until the consul could have a pair of shoes made for him.  His strength was in proportion to his size, and his ignorance to his strength,—­ ``strong as an ox, and ignorant as strong.’’ He knew how neither to read nor to write.  He had been to sea from a boy, had seen all kinds of service, and been in all sorts of vessels,—­ merchantmen, men-of-war, privateers, and slavers; and from what I could gather from his accounts of himself, and from what he once told me, in confidence, after we had become better acquainted, he had been in even worse business than slave-trading.  He was once tried for his life in Charleston, South Carolina, and, though acquitted, was so frightened that he never would show himself in the United States again.  I was not able to persuade him that he could not be tried a second time for the same offence.  He said he had got safe off from the breakers, and was too good a sailor to risk his timbers again.