PENCILINGS IN THE STREETS OF SAN FRANCISCO
BY J. ANTHONY.
BY J. ANTHONY.
Perhaps no other place in the world presents so varied a panorama, so much that is at once striking and uncommon, as the busy thoroughfares of our young city — that giant sprung to life, as we think our metropolis, considering its age, may be not inaptly designated. The uncouth Chinaman, the showy and tawdry Mexican, the tawdry Mexican, the jabbering Frenchman, the hirsute miner, the rough backwoodsman and the elaborately got up gent jostle each other on the footway, whilst the languages of nearly all known nations may be heard on every side.
Faces in which eventful histories are written, heroes who seem just to have walked out of story books, meet you at every step "thick as leaves in Vallambrosa." Here is, indeed, the romance of reality illustrated. There are probably but few amongst us that have sojourned a decade of months in the place, but to whose ears eventful narratives are familiar as household worlds; few but have listened to the adventures, hair breadth escapes by flood and field of some acquaintance, compared to which imagination's fictitious relations are vapid, the manufactured startling effects of the most popular romances spiritless and insane.
The battle of life is or has indeed been here. How many in this arena have succumbed to that black despair which waged dread warfare beneath banners of fire, owning themselves vanquished when seeking in the bottle the appalling consolation of temporary obliviousness? How many again — giants in spirit — the true heroes of the world, who, worsted in the battle, fight on still, undismayed, unconquerable? What histories are unwritten! What biographies, teeming with rich teaching could our young city furnish!
For men of broken fortunes, California would seem to have been peculiarly a place of refuge. We have seen a waiter at one of the leading restaurants, who was at one time a colonel in the Austrian service; another earning his livelihood as a paper-hanger, who had been an aid de camp to Gen. Larmorcier; a doctor of great ability, once eminent in his profession, driving a dray; and another, an Emeralder, a good classic, educated at Trinity, Dublin, in the situation of a barman at a rial drinking house; and doubtless there are amongst us numbers who have passed through even greater changes. Shakespeare, who has something applicable to all classes and conditions, may be supposed to have had such battlers with adversity — especially those whose reverses have been self-entailed — in his mind's eye when he wrote,
Rough hew them as we will." And to them this quotation we would commend — to all the practice of that cheering philosophy which is embodied in the belief that "all's for the best."
The frequent alterations which take place in the stores of our busiest thoroughfares present a striking characteristic of San francisco, effected as they are only less rapidly than the changes in a Pantomime. Indeed, to observe the celerity with which some of these transmutations are accomplished, one might naturally look out in the expectation of seeing Harlequin and Columbine flitting around the shifting scene. On the stage, beneath a single stroke, we see a butcher's changed into a barber's store, and here, where in the morning you may have purchased pastry, in the evening shall be in the hands of one who offers physic. In the same space of time, to a discerning public, liquor shall be submitted in the place of literature.
And then the Chinese, with their frontispieces baffling all metoscopy — whose nomenclature in its strangeness harmonizes well with their very uncouth and grotesque looking selves. In one place we find a descendant subject of the great Fohi, rejoicing under the appleation of Sing rep — another Tong Sing — (we suspect these Sings are the Smiths of China) — another more altisonant whose sign of Kin Zee at the first glance you might take for King Lear, announcing washing at so much per dozen, and last not least we have a celestial, the sign over whose door declares him to belong to no less a body than the well known legion of the Smiths! Yes, a veritable John Smith.