the an-
ticipated profits of his paper, cried out, "Side-wheel steamer 1 " The house, and the actor's arms, came down simultaneously. A story is like-wise told of a newly arrived emigrant across the plains, who, in ap- plying this chart to the interpretation of the signals, niisto(jk a windmill which stood near by for the arms of the telegraph, and counthig up the fans concluded that a fleet of clippers was coming in.
Twice or thrice a month the mail steamers, connect- ing San Francisco with New York by way of Panama, departed and arrived. Both were peculiar and nota- ble occasions. It is difficult for one who has not lived it through to realize with what nervous pulsations these vessels were watched as they came and went. California was then well-nigh out of the world, be- yond the pale of civilization, of sabbath and home in- fluence, of all the sweet memories and amenities that make life endurable. Her people were voluntary exiles, cut oft' from friends and all congenial society, doomed for a period to a life of self-abnegation and hard labor, and these days of steamer arrivals and departures were as links in the life-chain that was to bind the future to the past. The present went for nothing, or worse than nothing, perhaps ; for it might be a nightmare, a horrible dream, a something^ to be blotted from the memory as soon as ended. When the steamer came in with passengers from home — the wliole eastern seaboard, and west to the Missouri river, was then home to the expatriated of California — with perhaps friends on board, but above all with letters, what a flood of tender recollection rushed in upon the soul !
Therefore when the signal flag was unfurled, and the wind-mill looking indicator on telegraph hill stretched forth its long ungainly wooden arms and told the town of a steamer outside, a thrill went through the heart like that which Gabriel's trumpet sends into the fleshless bones of the dead. Some
