However, the percentage being sixty-nine against him, the chances are, as a general thing, that “he get whip heself.”  We could not see that these lotteries differed in any respect from our own, save that the figures being Chinese, no ignorant white man might ever hope to succeed in telling “t’other from which;” the manner of drawing is similar to ours.

Mr. See Yup keeps a fancy store on Live Fox street.  He sold us fans of white feathers, gorgeously ornamented; perfumery that smelled like Limburger cheese, Chinese pens, and watch-charms made of a stone unscratchable with steel instruments, yet polished and tinted like the inner coat of a sea-shell.  As tokens of his esteem, See Yup presented the party with gaudy plumes made of gold tinsel and trimmed with peacocks’ feathers.

We ate chow-chow with chop-sticks in the celestial restaurants; our comrade chided the moon-eyed damsels in front of the houses for their want of feminine reserve; we received protecting Josh-lights from our hosts and “dickered” for a pagan God or two.  Finally, we were impressed with the genius of a Chinese book-keeper; he figured up his accounts on a machine like a gridiron with buttons strung on its bars; the different rows represented units, tens, hundreds and thousands.  He fingered them with incredible rapidity—­in fact, he pushed them from place to place as fast as a musical professor’s fingers travel over the keys of a piano.

They are a kindly disposed, well-meaning race, and are respected and well treated by the upper classes, all over the Pacific coast.  No Californian gentleman or lady ever abuses or oppresses a Chinaman, under any circumstances, an explanation that seems to be much needed in the East.  Only the scum of the population do it—­they and their children; they, and, naturally and consistently, the policemen and politicians, likewise, for these are the dust-licking pimps and slaves of the scum, there as well as elsewhere in America.

CHAPTER LV.

I began to get tired of staying in one place so long.

There was no longer satisfying variety in going down to Carson to report the proceedings of the legislature once a year, and horse-races and pumpkin-shows once in three months; (they had got to raising pumpkins and potatoes in Washoe Valley, and of course one of the first achievements of the legislature was to institute a ten-thousand-dollar Agricultural Fair to show off forty dollars’ worth of those pumpkins in—­however, the territorial legislature was usually spoken of as the “asylum").  I wanted to see San Francisco.  I wanted to go somewhere.  I wanted—­I did not know what I wanted.  I had the “spring fever” and wanted a change, principally, no doubt.  Besides, a convention had framed a State Constitution; nine men out of every ten wanted an office; I believed that these gentlemen would “treat” the moneyless and the irresponsible