Chapter LVIII

For a few months I enjoyed what to me was an entirely new phase of
existence--a butterfly idleness; nothing to do, nobody to be responsible
to, and untroubled with financial uneasiness. I fell in love with the
most cordial and sociable city in the Union. After the sage-brush and
alkali deserts of Washoe, San Francisco was Paradise to me. I lived at
the best hotel, exhibited my clothes in the most conspicuous places,
infested the opera, and learned to seem enraptured with music which
oftener afflicted my ignorant ear than enchanted it, if I had had the
vulgar honesty to confess it. However, I suppose I was not greatly worse
than the most of my countrymen in that. I had longed to be a butterfly,
and I was one at last. I attended private parties in sumptuous evening
dress, simpered and aired my graces like a born beau, and polkad and
schottisched with a step peculiar to myself--and the kangaroo. In a
word, I kept the due state of a man worth a hundred thousand dollars
(prospectively,) and likely to reach absolute affluence when that silver-
mine sale should be ultimately achieved in the East. I spent money with
a free hand, and meantime watched the stock sales with an interested eye
and looked to see what might happen in Nevada.

Something very important happened. The property holders of Nevada voted
against the State Constitution; but the folks who had nothing to lose
were in the majority, and carried the measure over their heads. But
after all it did not immediately look like a disaster, though
unquestionably it was one I hesitated, calculated the chances, and then
concluded not to sell. Stocks went on rising; speculation went mad;
bankers, merchants, lawyers, doctors, mechanics, laborers, even the very
washerwomen and servant girls, were putting up their earnings on silver
stocks, and every sun that rose in the morning went down on paupers
enriched and rich men beggared. What a gambling carnival it was! Gould
and Curry soared to six thousand three hundred dollars a foot! And then
--all of a sudden, out went the bottom and everything and everybody went
to ruin and destruction! The wreck was complete.

The bubble scarcely left a microscopic moisture behind it. I was an
early beggar and a thorough one. My hoarded stocks were not worth the
paper they were printed on. I threw them all away. I, the cheerful
idiot that had been squandering money like water, and thought myself
beyond the reach of misfortune, had not now as much as fifty dollars when
I gathered together my various debts and paid them. I removed from the
hotel to a very private boarding house. I took a reporter's berth and
went to work. I was not entirely broken in spirit, for I was building
confidently on the sale of the silver mine in the east. But I could not
hear from Dan. My