Page:Hubert Howe Bancroft His Work and His Method.djvu/3

160 end of eighteen months, recipient of $250 per month. He engaged in private business there, remaining in all two and a half years. But he places a very low estimate on the experience. "The two and a half years I spent in Crescent City were worse than thrown away, although I did accumulate some $6000 or $8000. (139) He explains that he read little but trashy novels, and spent much time at cards and billiards.

After three years in California, young Bancroft, in November, 1855, sailed for his eastern home, where, tiring of visiting in a few months, his sister (Mrs. Derby) asked him to take her money, amounting to $5500, and use it as he thought best. This offer decided him to enter business in San Francisco; so after establishing credit relations with the leading publishing houses of the East, he returned to California, late in 1856.

Engaging a room near the corner of Montgomery and Merchant Street, he began business under the firm name of H. H. Bancroft & Co. At first he made money slowly; but his store expanded and the magnitude of his business increased.

During his eastern trip of 1859, Mr. Bancroft married Miss Emily Ketchum, a devout young woman of Buffalo. In 1862 he took a hurried trip to Europe, and it was then, he declares, "that ambition became fired, and ideas came rushing in on me faster than I could handle them." (155) In 1866-67 he spent a year in Europe with his wife, returning to San Francisco in the autumn of 1868.

His business assuming larger proportions, he soon moved to Market Street, where he had succeeded in obtaining seven lots together (three on Market Street, four on Stevenson). Here was one of the chief turning points of his life. Occasional breaking away from business, thus giving his thoughts time to form for themselves new channels, had tended to make him master of his affairs and not their slave. Building on the new Market Street site began in 1869. But before the stone structure was completed Bancroft was brought suddenly to the lowest state of depression by the death of his wife, in December of the same year. "Other men's wives had died before, and left them, I suppose, as crushed as I was, but mine had never died, and I knew not what it was to disjoin and bury that part of myself. ... It is not a very pleasant sensation, that of being entirely alone in the universe, that of being on not very good terms with the invisible, and caring little or nothing for the visible. Oh the wearisome sun !' I cried, 'will it never cease shining?' Will the evening never cease its visitation, or the river its flow ? Must the green grass always grow, and must birds always sing? True, I had my little daughter; God bless her! But when night after night she sobbed herself to sleep upon my breast,