and chairs, stood near the centre of the room, where professional gamblers presided, and sometimes two or three billiard tables were placed in the end farthest from the bar. Private rooms for gambling purposes opened from the main saloon, where two or three days were often spent by one party w^ithout intermission. At the back door, huge piles of bottles, casks, cans, and cigar and tobacco boxes conveyed some faint idea of the extent of the business within.
In the larger saloons tobacco and cigars were sold from a stand fitted up in one corner, and an elaborate luncheon was set out on a table once or twice a day, of which he who bought a drink might partake without extra charge. This " free lunch," as it was called, consisted at first of only crackers and cheese, but competition gradually enlarged the ideas of saloon proprietors until finally it grew into a sumptuous repast of soups, fish, roast meats, and side dishes. At these places one could obtain, in addition to a drink which cost perhaps twenty-five cents, a dinner which elsewhere would cost twice or thrice that sum.
As a matter of course there were all grades and descriptions of saloons, from the lowest " bit " house, where "rot-gut" whisky, "strychnine" brandy, and divers other poisonous compounds with slang names were sold, to the most gorgeous drinking palaces, with large mirrors and magnificent oil paintings, and whose fittings and furnishings alone cost sometimes ten, twenty, or thirty thousand dollars. In 1853 there were in San Francisco 537 places where liquor was sold, 46 of which were public gambling houses, 743 bartenders officiating. No wonder that hard times set in. A thousand leeches, poison-mongers, in half a thousand houses, in a comparatively small society, as San Francisco was then, this alone was enough to bring the curse of God upon the place, not to mention prostitution, political bribery, mercantile dishonesty, and twenty other forms of demoralization.
The saloon-keeper was one of the dignitaries of the
