Friday evening, 26th August, we entered the Golden Gate, passed
the light-houses and forts, and clipper ships at anchor, and came
to our dock, with this great city, on its high hills and rising
surfaces, brilliant before us, and full of eager life.
Making San Francisco my head-quarters, I paid visits to various
parts of the State,-- down the Bay to Santa Clara, with its live
oaks and sycamores, and its Jesuit College for boys; and San Jose,
where is the best girls' school in the State, kept by the Sisters
of Notre Dame,-- a town now famous for a year's session of ``The
legislature of a thousand drinks,''-- and thence to the rich
Almaden quicksilver mines, returning on the Contra Costa side
through the rich agricultural country, with its ranchos and the
vast grants of the Castro and Soto families, where farming and
fruit-raising are done on so large a scale. Another excursion was
up the San Joaquin to Stockton, a town of some ten thousand
inhabitants, a hundred miles from San Francisco, and crossing the
Tuolumne and Stanislaus and Merced, by the little Spanish town of
Hornitos, and Snelling's Tavern, at the ford of the Merced, where
so many fatal fights are had. Thence I went to Mariposa County,
and Colonel Fremont's mines, and made an interesting visit to
``the Colonel,'' as he is called all over the country, and Mrs.
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