Page:The Overland Monthly, volume 1, issue 1.djvu/92

 with his fore paw is the result of contact with the degraded aborigine, and the effect of bad example on the untutored ursine mind. Educated, he takes quite naturally to the pole, but has lost his ferocity, which is perhaps after all the most respectable thing about a barbarian. As a cub he is playful and boisterous, and I have often thought was not a bad symbol of our San Francisco climate. Look at him well, for he is passing away. Fifty years and he will be as extinct as the dodo or dinornis.

Before this Magazine reaches the hands of some of its readers the Fourth of July, 1868, will have passed. Those who have brought their eyes uninjured out of this trying patriotic ordeal will naturally look to these pages for some allusion to the day; those who are preparing to celebrate will expect a sustained rhetorical effort, containing an allusion to the American eagle more or less distinct. Rhetoric and finely turned apostrophes are good in their way, but there is something better than that. What is the finest passage in the Declaration of Independence? It is not the premises so grandly stated; it is not any one of the terrible counts of that awful indictment against his majesty George III; it is not the dogma of equal rights, but it is the concluding sentence, wherein "we pledge our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor." How windy our declamation; how tawdry and insincere our most elaborate rhetoric seems, beside the simple and majestic sincerity of this statement. It is not to the elegance of the composition, nor the perfection of the pleadings, but to this pledge alone that we owe our blessed privilege of reading it to-day. No: we will not attempt an oration. We will explode the honest cracker, we will elevate the ambitious rocket, we will let off the playful serpent, and burn our fingers in other ways, but we will not, if you please, write an oration.

WE make history too rapidly in this country, and are too accustomed to changes to notice details. In the continual ebb and flow of life in San Francisco we scarce note an absence. Men go round the world before they are missed from Montgomery street. I am afraid Belisarius would hardly find a friend when he came back, and Ulysses' dog would have been impounded. In respect of the following, Mud Flat is a type of San Francisco: