much of a piece with the shirt, and the cravat ditto. A fit of generosity came over me. I had donned a new suit of under-clothing, and the old one was worthless; I could afford to be liberal. Calling a young buck, I bade him strip himself, put the shirt, drawers—what there was left of them—socks and neck-tie upon him, turned the collar of the shirt up so that it reached nearly to the top of his head, and then turned him loose. I saw him going down to the encampment or rancheria all right, with two buxom squaws following admiringly behind him, the condition of his drawers being no draw-back on his appearance in that society. I felt that I had done a noble thing and made a fellow-creature happy. Judge of my surprise, not to say disgust, when I came back an hour later and found him stretched at full length on the dusty earth, playing cards for the various articles of clothing I had bestowed upon him, with a hump-backed squaw and two gallant young bloods belonging to the first families of the Mojaves. They had played everything off him but the neck-tie when I arrived, and, clad in that light and airy costume only, he was then gambling for that, with a fair chance of losing. I almost felt like giving him a new rig, but did not on reflection.
I was once walking along one of the streets of that part of San Francisco most expressively known as the Barbary Coast, where "pirates, rovers and assailing thieves" most do congregate to prey upon the unwary, in company with a friend, a well-known physician, when we heard a shot, and saw a man bare-
