inner spiritual experiences were not very unlike those I remembered in Methodist class meetings.

Some of the personal narratives were of thrilling interest, and if America could produce a George Sand, Salt Lake would become a classic land of romance. Some of these men and women had come from remote parts of the world where they had suffered poverty and been brought up in ignorance; they had listened to the tale of some wayside missionary concerning the far land flowing with milk and honey, temporal and spiritual; they had journeyed as poor pilgrims, working their way on boats, climbing mountains, and here had secured comfortable livelihood and education such as would have been impossible in their native countries.

I called by request on an intelligent and handsome woman who had been one of several plural wives from whom a well-to-do Mormon had parted in obedience to the law. She was residing alone in a pleasant home, and told me that nothing could exceed the vigilance and kindness with which her former husband and the one wife remaining to him, and to whom he was perfectly loyal, supported her and the two other wives from whom he had separated. She suffered no disrespect in the community. I have often thought of this happy woman in later years while remarking the little consideration given by Americans in their rage against polygamy to the fate of repudiated wives. A story is told of an American missionary on a savage island who managed to make one convert but refused to baptize him because he had four wives. But one day the convert came and said he had now but one wife. "What has become of the others?" asked the missionary. "I ate them," said the convert.

CHAPTER III

San Francisco-Red Cross Knights-Chinese Joss and theatre - Voyaging southward - Flying fish and sunfish - Delia Bacon - Shakespeare-Baconism Honolulu Sabbath - Captain Cook - Legends

Pele-Jehovah-Rev. Titus Coan-Samoans

Phenomena - New Zea

land-Dr. Richard Garnett-Pearl-divers- Our floating Utopia.

SAN

(AN FRANCISCO blossomed with banners. Five thousand Knights Templars were holding their "Great Triennial" there; the Palace Hotel was sadly congested, and the whole city swarmed with men masquerading in badges, emblems, sashes, swords, and proudly bearing their cross.

When one looks back upon the ages when the Knight Templar was a real figure, and every sword of his fraternity stained with the blood that made the Red Cross, it seemed a strange thing to find them in the far west become pageantry. There are penalties on taking a thing out of its historic habitat. Here was the cross, radiant on caps that called for bells, not only decorating Joss houses, but vile dens, even labelling the whiskey bottles.

In the Chinese temple was a figure of the Joss, in which I recognized a degradation of Buddha. On his altar was a dish containing vari-coloured candies. The Chinese idled around without reverence or solemnity. One told me that it was a three-day festival or mission. At the end of three days I went that way in the evening, and at midnight witnessed a strange procession. The street for two hundred yards was fringed with fire from little bundles of tow, at which hundreds of Chinese were lighting candles, much in the same way as at the festival of torches (Moccoli),

which closes the Carnival at Rome. Between these multitudes marched the procession, with mechanical noises meant for music. Midway in the procession were six or seven priests in red garb, and behind these, uplifted on the shoulders of four men, was the Joss, a variegated dummy with uplifted arms which startled me. It was like some mockery of the Pope borne in on shoulders to bless the crowd on New Year's Day.

I found the Chinese theatre interesting. An attentive Chinaman sat in my box and undertook to explain to me the plot. The interest of this was that the hero and his wife, pursued by enemies, find that they cannot both be saved; he prepares to die, but she seizes his sword and kills herself. But he, still pursued, cannot be saved except by touching the altar of the Joss. In order, however, to seek that asylum he must needs become a priest; but by becoming a priest he divorces himself from his other wife, who is a sister of the Emperor. This highly decorated wife enters the temple and finds her husband beside the altar, turned priest. With loud lamentations she tries to drag him from the altar. Failing that, she tries cajolery, and we witnessed the fascinations of a Chinawoman trying to captivate her lord. My Chinaman again explains: "She velly sorry. She will have him back. She have no priest. She cry good deal." She did cry a good deal, but while the two were talking the curtain came down, and I understood that the conclusion would come next evening. At any rate, I know not to this day whether the heroine coaxed her lord back or not, or whether he was slain by his pursuers. But it was an ancient story, and in it were the ideas of asylum and of priestly celibacy.

San Francisco struck me as cosmopolitan, occupying a place similar to that of ancient Venice. Along its streets

SAN FRANCISCO

49

were costumes and complexions of various tribes, apparently exciting no attention. There was also cosmopolitanism in the absence of any blasé air in those I met,refined and educated people. They appeared notably free from provincialism. Mrs. Norris told me that when Ralph Waldo Emerson was there she asked him how he liked the Yosemite; he replied, "It is the only thing I have seen out here that comes up to the brag." But San Francisco travels fast; it has left brag behind so far that nobody advised me to see Yosemite.

I met some parted from in boyhood and then thought of as if passing into another world. Mr. Valentine Peyton and his sister, relatives whose parting from us in Virginia I could just remember, gave me a grand reception. He had founded a race in San Francisco, and in his house I was surrounded by his children and grandchildren. Mrs. Norris, whom I had known in my student days as the beautiful young wife of Thomas Starr King, entertained me in her mansion, and gave me an amusing account of her journey to the Yosemite with the Emerson party. At the house of Mr. and Mrs. De Young of the "Chronicle" I met people so charming that I began to think San Francisco was after all the proper place to migrate to from London.

Seated on a tug, awaiting mails from the East, with which I am to go out to our royal Pacific ship, an old gentleman beguiled the hours till midnight with his memories of California. He had been one of the " Argonauts; he had sought the Golden Fleece, and could tell me of the many who fleeced and the more who were fleeced. He was unimaginative, but his dry narrative strung facts sufficiently poetic. He named the millionaires whose mansions stand where once they sold whiskey and their wives cooked

for miners. One generation had witnessed the growth of a camp of nomads to a brilliant city, but to this day he said the majority of those who came to San Francisco have deep in them the hope of spending their last years somewhere else.

Presently we accompanied one hundred and fifty huge mail bags to the ship Australia. Every sack was a witness to the vast numbers who had come to the golden shore only to find it a gate to shores beyond.

At one o'clock our ship moved noiselessly along a glittering path toward a moon just risen like a double eagle; but we soon left it behind us, and felt the warm breath of the southern Pacific. Ah, the South! the South! Deep down in every breast there is a Mignon sighing for the finer gold

The land where the citrons bloom,

And the gold orange lights the leafy gloom.

Voyaging these summer seas, gently gliding to soft ripple of bluest waves, between Elysian dawns and Hesperian sunsets, sinking more and more into a sweet daydream, drinking deeper the draught of Lethe,—we on this floating Pacific island learned more in a week than anthropology can tell us about the islanders. We experienced their evolution. By the time we reached the Hawaiians I was one of them. It took only three days to make our upper deck one of the Society Islands. We had no clique nor caste. Our ship rolled out of Frisco waters, but as it approached the tropic its rolls turned to the easy swing of a hammock. We had hammocks swung on deck, but the Australia having turned into one, they were left for the play of the younger children. I say younger, for though some of us are old, yet all children-or nearly all. The husband who watched so anxiously beside a pale wife,