enter the building while the fire was still distant, and his remains were identified by his keys, which were found beneath him.  A poignant interest is added to his untimely fate by the circumstance that he was to have been married on the following day to the widow of his late partner, and that he had, at the call of duty, that very evening left a dinner party given to celebrate the last day of his bachelorhood—­or, as it has indeed proved, of his earthly existence.  Two families are thus placed in mourning, and it is a singular sequel that by this untoward calamity the well-known firm of Farendell & Cutler may be said to have ceased to exist.”

Mr. Farendell started to his feet.  But a lurch of the schooner as she rose on the long swell of the Pacific sent him staggering dizzily back to his seat, and checked his first wild impulse to return.  He saw it all now,—­the fire had avenged him by wiping out his persecutor, Scranton, but in the eyes of his contemporaries it had only erased him!  He might return to refute the story in his own person, but the dead man’s partner still lived with his secret, and his own rehabilitation could only revive his former peril.

*****

Four years elapsed before the late Mr. Farendell again set foot in the levee of Sacramento.  The steamboat that brought him from San Francisco was a marvel to him in size, elegance, and comfort; so different from the little, crowded, tri-weekly packet he remembered; and it might, in a manner, have prepared him for the greater change in the city.  But he was astounded to find nothing to remind him of the past,—­no landmark, nor even ruin, of the place he had known.  Blocks of brick buildings, with thoroughfares having strange titles, occupied the district where his counting-house had stood, and even obliterated its site; equally strange names were upon the shops and warehouses.  In his four years’ wanderings he had scarcely found a place as unfamiliar.  He had trusted to the great change in his own appearance—­the full beard that he wore and the tanning of a tropical sun—­to prevent recognition; but the precaution was unnecessary, there were none to recognize him in the new faces which were the only ones he saw in the transformed city.  A cautious allusion to the past which he had made on the boat to a fellow passenger had brought only the surprised rejoinder, “Oh, that must have been before the big fire,” as if it was an historic epoch.  There was something of pain even in this assured security of his loneliness.  His obliteration was complete.

For the late Mr. Farendell had suffered some change of mind with his other mutations.  He had been singularly lucky.  The schooner in which he had escaped brought him to Acapulco, where, as a returning Californian, and a presumably successful one, his services and experience were eagerly sought by an English party engaged in developing certain disused Mexican mines.  As the post, however, was perilously