By Shore and Sedge

CONTENTS. PAGE AN APOSTLE OF THE TULES 5 SARAH WALKER 61 A SHIP OF 49 97 862315 AN APOSTLE OF THE TULES. ON October 10, 1856, about four hundred people were camped in Tasajara Valley, California. It could not have been for the prospect, since a more barren, dreary, mo- notonous, and uninviting landscape never stretched before human eye it could not have been for convenience or contiguity, as the nearest settlement was thirty miles away it could not have been for health or salubrity, as the breath of the ague-haunted tules in the outlying Stockton marshes swept through the valley it could not have been for space or comfort, for, encamped on an unlimited plain, men and women were hud- cjjled together as closely as in an urban tenement-house, without the freedom or decency of rural isolation it could not have been for pleasant companionship, as dejection, mental anxiety, tears, and lamentation were the dominant expression it was not a hur- ried flight from present or impending ca- lamity, for the camp had been deliberately planned, and for a week pioneer wagons had been slowly arriving it was not an irrevo- cable exodus, for some had already returned to their homes that others might take their places. It was simply a religious revival of one or two denominational sects, known as a camp-meeting. A large central tent served for the assem- bling of the principal congregation smaller tents served for prayer-meetings and class- rooms, known to the few unbelievers as side-shows while the actual dwellings of the worshipers were rudely extemporized shanties of boards and canvas, sometimes mere corrals or inclosures open to the cloud- less sky, or more often the unhitched covered wagon which hadbrought them there. The singular resemblance to a circus, already profanely suggested, was carried out by a straggling fringe of boys and half-grown men on the outskirts of the encampment, acrimonious with disappointed curiosity, lazy without the careless ease of vagrancy, and vicious without the excitement of dissipation. For the coarse poverty and brutal economy of the larger arrangements, the dreary panorania of unlovely and unwholesome domes- tic details always before the eyes, were hardly exciting to the senses. The circus might have been more dangerous, but scae- ly more brutalizing...