drunk too mucli. A man accustomed to self-examination will be conscious when he is drunk, though an habitual drunkard will not be conscious of it. I knew a physician who for twenty years was not sober."
In the cities and towns there was a noticeable absence of homes. Stores, saloons, restaurants, boardino'-houses, and hotels made a metropolis, and to this day the habits of herding then contracted hang upon the people. In 1849 almost every house and tent, public and private, received lodgers for pay. A regular lodging-house consisted of one room, with shelf-like bunks ranged round the sides, each of which held a straw mattress reeking with filth and vermin, and a pair of musty blankets. Cots occupied the centre of the room, and sleeping-places were chalked out on the floor, where, after the beds were filled, others might stretch themselves in their own blankets at a dollar a night. Merchants slept in their offices, with their employes scattered about the premises on counters, benches, tables, trunks, boxes, or bunks. Cooking was also done in many places of business. Then eating-houses arose of every grade, from the Chinese chow-chow to the Montgomery street saloon where, in 1854, a hundred attaches waited on three thousand hungry applicants daily.
The so-called hotels which sprang up in the mining camps were usually built of rough boards, being of one story, with a common sleeping-room, or of two stories with separate apartments above. The front door opened into the bar-room, which was also office and billiard and gambling saloon. There execrable wine and spirits were sold at twenty-five or fifty cents a glass to the filthiest scum of human kind that ever congregated to eat, drink, smoke, chew, spit, gamble, shoot, stab, and blaspheme. Adjoining was the diningroom, where, on a long clothless table, flanked by wooden benches, beefsteak, beans, boiled potatoes, dried-apple sauce, dusky bread, pickles, and molasses,
