“The Indians begin to be troublesome again in Trinity County. One man and a Chinaman have been killed, and a lady crippled for life.”

That the antipathy everywhere exhibited by the English to coloured races was not less strong in California than in the Carolinas I had suspected, but I was hardly prepared for the deliberate distinction between men and yellow men drawn in this paragraph from the California Alta of the day of my return to San Francisco.

A determination to explore Little China, as the celestial quarter of the city is termed, already arrived at, was only strengthened by the unconscious humour of the Alta, and I at once set off in search of two of the detectives, Edes and Saulsbury, to whom I had some sort of introduction, and put myself under their charge for the night.

We had not been half-an-hour in the Chinese theatre or opera-house before my detectives must have repented of their offer to “show me round,” for, incomprehensible as it must have seemed to them with their New England gravity and American contempt for the Chinese, I was amused beyond measure with the performance, and fairly lost myself in the longest laugh that I had enjoyed since I had left the plantations of Virginia.