The San Francisco Call. Newspaper, January 10, 1897, Page 19

— | THE SAN FRANCISCO CALL, SUNDAY, JANUARY 10, 1897. Away on yonder peaceful sea, | Beyond the sailor There floats the Is! Where winas are born | Dispatches e | Th | | | | monns, i ned to song; | low tones © them along wind sighs, the oc ist Thus comes he to this lotusland, Nor idle is the while we sleep; A shepherd’s wand within bis hand, He drives the flock of misty sheep | Across the field of stars, and when The sheep are gone he comes to strew The flowers in the paths of men, And 8l their cups with noney dew. He flits along the vine-clad hills, And breathes his life 1o all that grows; The grapes with nectar wine he fills, And paints the blushes on the rose. The drowsy poppy hears him pass, And trembics in her golden dream; Arip irs the lake of glass, And mirrored stars s-quiver gleam. The golden-fruited orchards sway In rhyt o the tuneful breeze, flets dance the night away, 1 birds are cradled in the trees: Apollo’s rosy runners speed ra and her blu-hinz tratn— world awakes, and here indeed ysian plain. I;Ie WasAéound ';o Save His Sala y man is inordi- | d. He has the staken—that he can tell s grow by the taste. Atany | 1y's st vays at a certain | ace in San F! At any hour of | gnt his raging appetite for assertitself. In a way he ia‘ a victim of the mor- | Hence he carries shrimps v across the bay,and his become equally addicted to the | food. | nights ago Calkins, the | , was with two men friends | slavi e Western Addition making a Knowing that it would be quite late when he started for the boat he carried | his shrimps to the front door of the house in a bag and concealed them in a dark corner. ‘The call being over he looked at his watch 1 sa that he must speed or be left all night on this side of the bay. He seizad his bag of shrimps and the three men ced for California street to get & car. kins is the speedier and sprinted shead, but w half hlock in the lead he w denly stop and | ess sounding seriously t The next minute Calkins was on his | knees, using a piece of a box siat making | a scraping noise on the sidewalk. His companions bounded past him and board- ed a car that came along just then. Then they looked for Calkins, who came up on the car platform with the bound of a greyhound. In his gloved hands he held tightly a dilapidated pa- per from which torn and mangled shrimps protruded. A stray shrimp b mardibles from the corner overcoat pocket. The car and several ladies knew Calkins. A was were smile | processes and at a profit. broadened as it went from one lady to another, but Calkins was flustrated only for & minute. He borrowed a news- paper and carried the fishy wreck in triumph home, and he had shrimp salad before he slept as a recompense for his trials. Economy in the Mining of Gold One of the most remarkabie instances of the application of science to the industrial arts, and the advantages resulting there- from, is afforded by a comparison of the methods of reducing gold from quartz now and say a quarter of a century ago. When quariz mining was inaugurated in California, ore that ran below a common standard of §50 a ton was committed to the dumps as being too low-grade to work. Millions and millions of dollars of ore running from $10 to $50 a ton were thus cast aside, and enough yet remains to enrich the State on the deserted piles of discarded cre from the old mines which were operated many years ago. The contrast also in the extravagant cost of plants for hoisting and handling ores is even more marked. When the Allison Ranch mines were tirst opened the cost of the plant for operating forty stamps was fully $250,000. The mill then gave em- ployment to forty men, who were paid wages of from $5 to $20 a day. A new plant of even larger capacity was recently placed in another mine, which cost less than $30,000, with better ma- chinery and more perfect appliances for extracting ore than the old ones, and such is the perfection to which automatic de- vices have been applied to this class of machinery that two men and a boy | operated all the machinery and quite as | effectivel y as forty men used to operate the old style. The ore which the first miners neglected as heing too poor to be worked is now regarded as rich enough for the present generation. Even ore thar runs $4 per ton can be worked by present Years ago if 75 per cent of gold was saved, it was consid- ered a fairly good result; now a manager | who cannot save from 90 to 95 per cent of gold is regarded s not being up to pres- ent standards, and has to back out. The parfection to which gold extraction | has been brought and the economy with which mining operations are now con- ducted are most encouraging. The in- creasing gold production of the State is thus accounted for. 'How He Kept Her Memory Green A most conspicuous and tender instance of paternai affection was Ly chance brought to the attention of the writer a few days ago as he sat in a barber-chair patiently awaiting the removal of the superfluous growth irom a neglected chin. While thus employed a man, apparently a German, entered the shop and handed a razor to the barber, with a request that he would put it in order as soon as possible, **And,” added he, “‘be sure and not lose that razor. I would not lose that razor for $10.”" Naturally the barber was curions to know why so extravagant a value should be placed upon an ordinary razor and in- quired the reason. _ “Why,” responded the German, ‘‘that is the razor that the sailor killed my daughter with. You can see the blood- spots upon the blade now. There they are. Those black stains are my daughter’s blood. Tbey will never come out. My daughter was a good girl. Ever since she was killed I never shave with no other razor. Tloves her so much. Aslongas I live I use this razor in memory of my girl.” Iiisdifficuit to astonish an ordi- nary barber, but this one was s#ruck dumb for a while. Finally he did recoperate sufficiently to exclaim: “Well, I'll be danged.” The statement of the owner of the precious razor was found on inquiry to be quite troe. Two years ago the whole water front was - shocked by the foul murder of a young 15-year-ola girl under ’circum- stances of singular atrocity. Her father was the keeper of a sailor boarding-house, patronized by whalers aimost exclusively. The girl had attracted the attention of a bhalf - breed Kanaka who wanted to marry her, but the girl would not consent and repulsed him Wwith horror and dis- dain. In a moment cf jealous fury the maa Kanaka seized the girl as she was at- tending to some housebold affairs and cut her throat, almost severing the head from the body. The razor about which the aged German was so solicitons was the real, actual instrument of the crime. “It takes all kinds of people to make a world,” said the rent collector, “but I do think that fellows in our line of business When a chap begins he is generally pretty soft-hearted and easily fooled and his feel- ings get all torn up a dozen times a day, but after a while he gets kind of deaf and callous, and then he pays no attention to anything but the hard cash and getsalong first rate. You see folks in general are cranks the best way you can fix it, and a rent collector sees the crankiest side of ‘em, and when you work fora firm that rents places for folks to live in all the way from $2a month up to $200 you see all kinds. There are rich people in this City who have money toburn and yet they take a delight in staving off a ‘rent man’ from day today with any excuse that comes bandy. Houses that rent for over a hun- dred are not so easily filled once they get empty, and so we can’t ‘speak our minds’ 1o such tenants any time we feel like it, and some of ’em just keep us waitingand dancing around until they get good and ready—just for the fun of the thing, it seems. “Then there are lots of folks who are chronically hard up and put us off—poor things!—because they have to, and when they do pay they generally pay in install- ——— N A AT T UL A —_— QAR are faced up {0 the very queerestof them! | ments, and in ‘chicken feed’—like they’d gone through the young ones’ banks to make it ap! “Sometimes we come across folks who want to give us their whole personal his- tory and a gaze at their genealogical tree, and impress upon us that aithough they may be slightly embarrassed as to money matters at the present moment, in times past they were simply rolling in wealth and luxury, as were their fathers and grandfathers before them. Sometimes we find women who are determined to ‘make mashes’ on us with a view, ap- parently, to a lowering of the rent. Poor things!—they don’t realize that senti- ment and business don’t trot in double harness, and that a collector has nothing to do about the rents except collect ’em. “Then we come up with other folks who pay their rents all right but are con- tinually giving us & song and dance about repairs and changes. The fences, the gates, the doors, the windows, the locks, the roof, and the plumbing always needs attention, according to them, and if you would pay attention to their complaints and demands you would use up the rent money, and more, t0o, every month in fixing things to suit ’em and then they wouldn’t. “Then there’s folks who are always com- plaining about their neighbors and have a continual grievance about something that has been done or said or thought, in the flat above, or the flat below, or in the house next door to them. They’re tar- tars, they are, and they’ll make your life a misery if you pay any attention to them. You soon learn, though, to sympathize with them just while you are making out their receipts, and then let them fight it out among themselves after you have | gone about your business. lnterfering in nelghbors’ quarrels doesn’t pay, and strict neutrality is a collector’s rule unless things get too steep—hair-pulling, hot water and such—and then he don’t take sides or join in the fray, but simply re- ports the matter at the office and leaves the straightening of things to the man- ager. *‘One of the funniest persons that ever 1 met in the business was a pleasant looking old lady who moved into one of our houses and paid her rent as regular as clockwork for the first three months. The fourth month it heppened to come around that I had to call upon her, and when she opened the door and saw me standing there, receipt-book in hand, she looked at me with a very set and stony know—and she says: ‘What is it? “‘Rent, ma’am,” says I, as polite as | could be, and then she bucked right there. | " deny the existence of rent, sne | says. ‘There is no such thing as rent; | there never was such a thing, and there | never will be.’ *T hope it isn’t so bad as that, ma’am,’ said I, for she seemed to be taking a kind of gloomy view of things; ‘times are pretty hard all over, but I guess you’ll manage (o raise it some way. Supposing I call agein to-morrow ?' +She fair'y glared at me. ‘I refuse to accept the idea of your existence,’ she de- clared. ‘Youdo not exist: you never did exist, and yoa never will exist! I refuse | to entertain the idea of your presence here on my front steps; it is unpleasant and unprofitable, and I am going to close my door.’ And she did. “I thought she was locoed, and sent the head collector up to see about her, but by the time he got around—two or three days later—she had dug up some cash and paia the bill like a little man. Come to find out, she was only one of those scientific people who believein ‘afirming’ and ‘deny- | ing’ things just as the notion takes'em, and she was just practicing her prirciples on me. . ““When we get hold of tenants whoare in real distress it comes a little hard to slip | those yellow Dbilletdoux under their doors, but we can’t help it, for we have our | orders and must carry 'em out. A great many people are inclined always to blame the agents for the cases of hardship which now and then come to light, but in 99 cases out of 100 the agent is not atall to blame. Itisthe owner who stands be- hind him and gives the orders—the agent’s business is s.mply to carry them out. “Ever read ‘Little Dorrit’? Well, that saphead of a Flora Finching’s fatler is a pretty good picture of some property- owners. They look very piousand benevo- lent, but if some Panks would cut their | hair off, figuratively speaking, you'd be | astonisheG at what you would eee. “About the worst place to collect in is Chinatown. We have to do our collecting up there in the evening to catch our ten- ants at home, and we have to go up there three or four strong or we'd get wiped out completely. “The other night three of us went up to one of those big beehives, and we got along all right until we came to one door, and when we knocked there a Chinaman ovened it a little ways and began chopping | at us with one of the ugliestand wickedest looking cieavers that you ever saw in your life. That was his gentle and innocent way of suggesting to us that hie didn’t feel inclined to pay any rent that evening— was a little shy on specie, ana would pre- fer to have us call again. expression —a regular ‘glassy eve,’ you | The Woes of the Rent-Collector “We understood him well enouzh, but, as he came near shaving the arm off the fel- low next‘the door, we all three made a rush at him. One of us hit him in the eye and knocked him inside his den, and then we took the cleaver away from him, and while the heaviest fellow sat on him to keep him from being too fractious the others went through his outfit to sse what other weapons he had in stock. He begged like a dog before we got through with him, and promised all manner of thines if we'd oniy stop using him for a divan and go away peaceably, and at last we let up on him. ““The next day hecame around to the office with his eye in a sling and paid his rent as pleasant as pie, and when the manager asked him about the matter he justsaid: ‘Me foolee littee; Melican boy foolee heap too muchee. Me no foolee ’gain, you bettee shoe-stlings!’ And I don't believe he ever will—at least not with that particular set of boys. “Rent-collectorsdon’t have time to stand round and let the grass grow under their feet, I can tell you. It'sa rustling and hustling kind of a business, and the fel- low who can’t rustle and hustle has got to drop out. The first and fifteenth of the month are our specially busy times, and often I have collected and given receipts for over 300 rents during a single day. It makes a pretty bigand heavy bag of specie tefore I get through, but so far I've managed to get it into the office safe every time. “Risky? Well, yes; of course there’s always a risk that some one may spot and trail you, but you can't be guaranteed absolute satety in any business. Every one of us collectors is well armed, and we know how to use our weapons, t0o, or we shouldn’t be riaing round in these nice little carts of ours.” FLORENCE PERCY MATHESON. The Dream-Town Show. There is an island in Slumber Sea Where the drollest things are done, And we will smil there, if the winds are fair, Just efter the set of the sun. *Tis the loveliest place in the whole wide world Or anyway, so it seems; And the folks there play at the end of each day In a curious show called “Dreams.” Wo sail right into the evening skies, And the very first thing we know We are there at the port and ready for sport, Where the dream folks give their show. And what do you think they did last night When I crossed their harbor bars ? They hoisted a plank on a greet cloud bank ‘And teetered among the stars. And they sat on the moon and swung their feet Like pendulums to and fro; Down Slumber Sea is the sail for me, And I wish you were ready to go, For the dream folks there on this curious isle Begin their performance at eight; g Theraare no encores, and they close their doors On every one who is late. The sun is sinking behind the hills, The seven o'clock bells chime; 1 kaow by the chart that we ought to start 1f we would be there in time. Oh, fair is the trip down Slumber Sea: Sot sall and away we go; The anchor is drawn. we are off and gone To the wonderful Dream-Town shotw. ErLa WHEELER WILCOX, in New York Sun, The Other One. Sweet little maid with winsome eyes That laugh all day through the tangled bair; Gazing with baby Jooks so wise, Over the arm of the oaken chair; Dearer then you is none to me, Dearer than you there can be none; Since in your laughing face I see Eyes that tell of another one, Here where the firelight softly glows, Sneltered and safe and snug and warm; What to you is the wind that blows, Driving the sleet of the winter storm? Round your head the ruddy light Glints on the gold from your tresses spun; But deep is the drifting snow to-night Over the brow of the other one. Hold me close as you sagely stand, Watching the dying embers shine; Then shall I feel another hand That nestled once 1n this hand of mine. Poor little hand, so cold and chill, Shut from the light of stars and sun, Clasping the withered roses stiil That hide the face of the sleeping one. Laugh, little maid, while laugh you may! Sorrow comes to us all, I know; Better perhaps for her 0 stay Under the drifting robe of snow. Sing while you may your baby songs! Sing till your baby days are done! But oh! tha ache of the heart that longs Day and night for the owner onel Beneaf de Orange Blossom. 1 kissed Miss Jane one day in May, Beneaf de ural blossom: I kissed her, but 'twas jest in play, Beneat de orange blossom; She blushed at fust and deu looked shy, An’ den de fire flashed frum her eye: 1 kissed her, but I said goodby, Beneaf de orange blossom. 1 kissed Miss Jane anodder day, Benea! de orange blossom "Twuz in de winter, not in May, Beneaf de orange dlossom Ob course ma heart wuz swelled wid pride. For law, Miss Jane wuz by ma side; 1 wuz de groom an’ she de bride, Beneaf de orange blossom. —New Orleans Times-Democrat. PAn 0ld Wedding-Ring. What a symbol of love s that circle of gold, By the token of which our devotion was told! How our youthful affection shines out, as it scems, i In the light of the romance around it that gleams; And it knows no beginning or ending, or why Its continuing course should not run till we die. And a sign and s seal of our reverence, too, Had a part in our creed when that old ring was new, When a slender, light hand was upraised to our 1ips And our kisses were pressed on its slim finger tips. For that circlo of gold seemed a hallowing | pledge 0f a homage profounder than words dared al- legé. But the metal that’s purest wears quickest away, | And that old ‘wedding-ring has grown thinner to-day; Yet the hand which it graced graces itin its turn With & magic the alchemist vainly would learn. For sweet charity’s touch has so filled it with gold That that hand never lacked to the hungry and cold. How beautiful the storm has been! Half an hour ago the sky was dark and frowning, and the rain descended * tor- rentially. Now the silver drifts are mar- shaling out to sea, and the sun is touch- ing everything into cheer. The soaked earth breathes out fragrance; the wet trees sparkle rainbow-wise; and the whole world looks .dripping and sunshiny, like a good baby smiling through its tears. We are having a singularly forward springtime. The first catkins showed on the willows a week ago. The poppies have a good start, and in one of my rambles the | other day I found the brodiwa thrusting | up tiny baby fingers through the grass, and the fdrage piants of the hillside are already well-grown, sweet and nutritious. A black-and-yellow-winged butterfly, that for two months past has lain apparently lifeless on a window ledge in my study, yesterday spread his wings and took flight across the room, and I saw, only yester- day, what looked like a white-crowned sparrow, perched high above my head, but whether he was a new-comer or a( lingering winter guest I have no way of | knowing. Last summer while the hillside was bare | and brown a road was cut along it, the | plow going deep to lighten the heavy grade. In some places the bank was cut down several feet. The land has been in cultivation for years. Successive crops | of barley and oats, potatoes, and of late | years persistent Canada thistles have covered it, but now from the cut bank along the edges and even in the middle of the seldom-used roadway a luxuriant crop of ierns has sprung up. Whence have they come, one wonders. It seems hardly possible that the spores have been dormant during all these years that have elapsed since these smiling billside fields and orchards were the mossy, wet, laurel- grown sides of a canyon through which a sparkling stream rushed down o join the great watersof the bay. But nature car- ries on wonderful processes in her great laboratory. She is infinitely variable and I suspect that with all our wisdom we are yet as far as ever from exhausting her re- sources. Was it not when Franklin flew his kite and coaxed the lighining from the sky that some wiseacre declared his conviction that discovery had probably reached its ultimate limit? Here upon the gray, moss-grown rock where 1 am Sitting a little lizard has crawled out to get a brief sunning. He sees me, but is too torpid with cold to be frigntened. I can even take him between | my paims, that the little chitl-blooded fellow may grow warm therein, without causing him any epparent alarm. He does not get warmer to the touch. I do not think these little lizards ever do, but he comes gradually out of his torpor. He turns his head quickly from side to side, watching me with his sparkling jewels of eyes, and his throat begins to pulsate, al- ways a sign of excitement in the lizard. He is warm enough to think now, and he evidently thinks about getting away if be can only find a way of escape from this queer corner where he lies; so I open my hands and he flashes forth upon the rock. In nearly every order of life we fina some small specimen that, by reason of its beauty and harmlessness, seems to claim and win exemption from the harm | that usually besets its kind. Among the | birds the little hummer charms and de- Jights us by its winning, fearless grace. | What the humming-bird is among its| kind the Douglass squirrel always seems | tome to be among animals, and some of | the dainty little lizards among the rep- tiles. My small friend of the rock lere is as | graceful in his way as any humming-bird. Indeed there is something very birdlike in the bright, fearless way he regards me as, with lifted head, he seems to listen as well as to watch for further developments, If I were to move he would suddenly | whisk into some cranny and continue to watch me, but I questica if he would be greatly alarmed. I cannot understand the shuddering horror with which some people regard the whole reptile tribe, As a matter of fact most of its representatives are harmless and many of them are very beautiful. For my own part I question whether the ancient story of the serpent’s bad behavior in Eden is the real explana- tion of our dislike for all crawling crea- tures. The buman dread is probably a survival of the terror which our pre- historic arboreal ancestors felt for their nereditary. enemies, the snakes. Yet, singularly enough, these creatures | are very friendly inclined toward hu-| manity, once they make our acquaint- ance. There is no branch of the various lizard families a member of which in | captivity does not come to know and take some sort of interest in the human being with whom it is associated. Theirs 13 not cupboard friendship either, for they are as nearly independent of food as living creatures can well be, and can subsist for months without nourishment. Even the horrible-looking Gila monster is not with- out susceptibility to kindness. : A young girl of my acquaintance once had one of these objects for a pet and for months handled it, fed it and cared for it aaily. It never resented familiarity, even when roughly handled. Had it done so the result might have been tragical, for, popular assertion to the contrary notwit! standing, the Gila monster is unquestion- ably venomous. I have repeatedly seen the fact contradicted in Californian publi- cations, but the creature has a well-devel- oped poison apparatus, and scientific an- nals show plenty of instances of the-death- dealing power of its bite. There is no other poisonous lizard, however, known to science. The horned toad, which is not a toad at all, but a liz- ard, 18 a startling enough looking chap, but he is harmless, inteiligent and even capable of becoming attached toa human being. The little green, blue and gray hzards so common about our rocks and trees are very useful members of society and should And the summers may come and the sum- mers may go, And the winters may whiten the hajr with their snow; Still the hand which a lover delighted to kiss Wears the signet of half of & century's biiss, And no earnest of joy in the heavens above Is more sure than that ring and its cycle of love. 1 W. D. ELLWANGER, in New York Sun, never be harmed, for they do great good as insect-destroyers. The small creature at my hand, bere, just ran out his light- ning-like tongue and guthered in a scurry- ing bug that had ventured out across the rock. Evidently friend lizard had for- gotten me for an instant, but, as if sud- denly recollecting me, bhe gave a little start and then disappeared. I winked recipe for fern seed? Did he walk invisi- ble? But, no; he had not stirred. He had only become absolutely motionless. ‘There is something very wonderful in this power of the small, wild creatures to keep still. We noisy, restless humans, who have it not, find it hard to under- stand, and when, by reason of it, the woods dwellers become invisible to us we talk wisely about their changing color. My little lizard has not changed a whit. He is still a delicate, beautiful grayish green, but so still is he, so flat and motion- less against the rock, that did I not know he is there he might wholly escape obser- vation. So a bird will lie low among the moss ana leaves, and you, looking for her, will pass unseeing; a snake coiled along a branch will escape observation, not because he 1s like the branch, but because he keeps still. Forest dwellers know this and those versed in woodcraft. An acqueintance of mine, who has ex- perimented not a little along this line, tells me that he has frequently sat motion- less in a streetcar, keeping even his thoughts, by a sheer effort of will, away from himself and upon outside matters, and that under these circumstances he is almost invariably overloosed by the con- ductor on his fare-collecting rounds. I do not throw this out as a suggestion to would-be free passengers, but the idea is not without a certain psychologic sig- nificance whether its relations are clear to us or not. The lizard would have small chances for safety were it not for his protective coloring, which really changes very little, and for this trick of quietude, for he has no means whatever of seli-defense. His little teeth could hardly scratch the deli- cate skin of a baby, nor does he ever seem to think of biting when captured. Some of them have a queer power to shed their tails when caught, and as their tails are by far the longest part of them and con- tinue to wriggle and move for some mo- ments after separation the effect of this maneuver is startlingly as if the creature had broken in two. - But while the foe is triumphantly eating the tail the lzard makes good his escape and grows another caudal appendage. It is this habit of some lizards that has given,rise to the popular belief in a reptile called the glass snake, that has the power to drop into fragments when attacked, and to reunite the pieces when the danger is over. The glass snake, however, is only a very harm- less variety of lizarda—the blind worm of England and of the Southwest. He isnot even blind, but, like all his tribe, has very bright and useful eyes, which do him far better service than our own eyes are apt to whenever we take our walks abroad. Daring Ride of an Athenian Girl Miss Marrowfat lives in Oakland. That isnot her name, of course, but it will do, because the title cloaks a real identity. She has the intrepid spirit of Hannibal in Italy, Napoleon crossing the Alps, Cwsar in Britain, Bolivar batiling for liberty, Grant in the Wilderness and Dr. Mary Walker—alt in one. She would certainly not shrink from taming lions alongside of and in competition with Mrs. Captain Daniel Boone, and probably would not shriek if she saw a movse—if it had a string tiea to it. “Fear,” she contemptu- ously says, “belongs to the weaker sex,” meaning man. This story is about her daring ride on a bicycle, an up-to-date Al wheel, with all the modern fixings and appurtenances, a wheel to depend upon in an emergency. The deck officer of one of the Oakland ferry-boats had signaled to go out from the pier at the foot of Market street, one day the past week. The boat started to move at the customary rate toward the Athens of the Pacific. Seemingly all the passengers were on board, but no, just as the wheels beeun to turn Miss Marrowfat appeared, riding her trusty wheel directly toward the boat. Her small feet moved regularly and speedily. *Hi!” said a warning shout. “Stop!” yelled a deckhand. «Turn back!” groaned an excited pase senger. Miss Marrowlat never turns back. On she went at headlong speed across the apron of the slip. She was off her wheel and leaping boldly in the air in a second. An impetuous deckhand seized ber wheel, leaping for it. An equaily impgtuous deckhand seized her person to prevent her from falling. To the two decknands she turned with a sweet smile and thanks. Her hat was on a little awry, but she only smiled. Her hair was rumpled, but she did not frown. Her face was flushed, but she was not annoyed. She was as cool as Sheridan on his Winchester ride. “Gosh !" said a bystander, “but she is jan angel "’ A bur-r-d is what Icall her,” responded the officer of the deck. She will long be known to the crew as the young woman who could not be prevented from catching her boat by fear of a dip in the bav. ~ 2 bard in my astonisbment. Had he the