Page:A La California.djvu/344

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290
A CRUISE ON THE BARBARY COAST.

catchee him next time!" Not if we know ourself, oh ingenuous and unsophisticated son of the Occident! That game is played out, so far as we are concerned! We have seen all we can see, and learned all we care to learn here, so we will go on somewhere else in our search for useful knowledge. "Good night, John"—to the banker. "Good night, John; please you come again uddah time!" he replies, and we part company, with assurances of distinguished consideration all round, and emerge on the street again.

Our policeman rejoins us, and we go on down to Pacific street, the roughest and least pacific of the streets on the Barbary Coast. The whole street, for half a dozen blocks, is literally swarming with the scum of creation. Every land under the sun has contributed toward making up the crowd of loafers, thieves, low gamblers, jay-hawkers, dirty, filthy, degraded, hopeless bummers, and the unsophisticated greenhorns from the mines, or from the Eastern States, who, drawn here by curiosity, or lured on by specious falsehoods told them by pretended friends met on the ocean or river steamers, are looked upon as the legitimate prey of all the rest. The number of prematurely-old young men, mere boys in years, but centenarians in vice and crime; sallow, wrinkled, pimpled, dirty, stoop-shouldered, disgusting in language and action, who drift up and down the Coast as we stand looking on, astonishes you. They seem to make up the bulk of the passers on the sidewalks. You never see this class of fellows even in this locality by day; they seem to shun the light of the sun, and only crawl