ve;
injury to another is a legal wrong whose proper prov- ince it is the law's to check. With diminished at- tempts at religious proselyting, a laissez-faire system in personal morals, and less political engineering, our civilization would speedily assume fairer and purer proportions. Let parents and teachers build up them- selves and the young in the strength of personal re- sponsibility and moral rectitude, for in no other way can certain evils be overcome ; then we may leave law for thieves and murderers. On the steamer, bets were made on daily distances, on the time of arrival at any point, on the height or weight of any person or thing, on the time in which coat and boots could be taken off and put on, and on anything that hap- pened to strike the fancy, however absurd.
During the long voyage there was ample time to take a survey of the past, to reckon accounts with providence, to apply the touchstone of experience to natural qualities; a farther vision opened to the eye, sight was not bounded by the horizon. The im- prisoned traveller saw clearly back to his boyhood in a swift series of pictures like those which flash upon the brain of a drowning man ; and when his thoughts were turned toward the future, it was with a clearer and more discriminating survey than any hitherto made.
In these early days of California voyaging, there were always two or three among the passengers who set up for geniuses, self-constituted court fools. Usu- ally they were young men rustically or provincially bred, who were now for the first time absent from home, and who seemed to feel that the time and place had arrived in which their talents should unfold. They sought fame in various ways — by much and heavy walking about the ship, by scowling, by swag- gering, by boisterous talking and coarse laughing, and by practical jokes played to the infinite disgust of their supposed admirers. Sometimes they were joined by brazen-faced or ambitious young
