This the Toll House?--with its city throng, its jostling
shoulders, its infinity of instant business in the bar? The mind
would not receive it! The heartfelt bustle of that hour is hardly
credible; the thrill of the great shower of letters from the post-
bag, the childish hope and interest with which one gazed in all
these strangers' eyes. They paused there but to pass: the blue-
clad China-boy, the San Francisco magnate, the mystery in the dust
coat, the secret memoirs in tweed, the ogling, well-shod lady with
her troop of girls; they did but flash and go; they were hull-down
for us behind life's ocean, and we but hailed their topsails on the
line. Yet, out of our great solitude of four and twenty mountain
hours, we thrilled to their momentary presence gauged and divined
them, loved and hated; and stood light-headed in that storm of
human electricity. Yes, like Piccadilly circus, this is also one
of life's crossing-places. Here I beheld one man, already famous
or infamous, a centre of pistol-shots: and another who, if not yet
known to rumour, will fill a column of the Sunday paper when he
comes to hang--a burly, thick-set, powerful Chinese desperado, six
long bristles upon either lip; redolent of whiskey, playing cards,
and pistols; swaggering in the bar with the lowest assumption of
the lowest European manners; rapping out blackguard English oaths
in his canorous oriental voice; and combining in one person the
depravities of two races and two civilizations.
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