cause he happened to have a little fall of forty or fifty feet, people should represent him as a busy-body and meddler with what did not concern him. With as much gravity as I could command I wrote out his statement almost in the words I have given, read it over to him, received his thanks, and bowed him out of the room. The retraction was published and he was satisfied.
The county jail at Redwood City, San Mateo County, was formerly—and I believe still is—built wholly of this peculiarly brittle and unreliable wood. As a matter of course, a prisoner who could command an ordinary table-knife never tarried long within its walls, unless afflicted with a laziness by no means characteristic of Californians. One night four or five prisoners who had been there for some weeks left in disgust, and the writer chronicled the escape for a San Francisco paper, stating incidentally that it was understood that they dug their way out with the aid of a table-spoon and tenpenny nail. Some days later an indignant denial of this last proposition was received from the skedaddlers, dated at Livermore Pass, Alameda County, then a favorite resort for desperate characters. They protested that they were not jail-breakers in the ordinary acceptation of the term, but unfortunate victims of untoward circumstances. Their version of the case was this. One of their number was standing upon one foot, drawing the boot off the other, when he slipped, and falling backward, went plump through the side of the building, landing on his head outside. Seeing the damage which had been done uninten-
