CALIFORNIA SPECULATION.


Mose Jenkins did not take the California fever when it first broke
out; for he was, as he acknowledged himself, "slow-motioned," and his
skull was of such formidable thickness, that it required a good many
months for an idea to penetrate into his brain. In the interim, he
delved and digged away on a corner of his father's farm, having leased
the land of the old gentleman, and purchased his time of the same
respectable individual for the purpose of working it. But to work a
farm where the rocks are so near together, that the sheep's noses have
to be sharpened before they can graze between them, is not a very
profitable business; and Mose, by dint of hard thinking, arrived at
the conclusion that there might possibly be some other occupation less
laborious and quite as lucrative.

"Confound these granite rocks!" he exclaimed, one day, as he was
ploughing, after he had broken his trace chains for a second time;
"they hev another kind er rocks in Calliforny. Jehosaphat! If I was
only _thar_. There a fellur hez to dig; but he gets pretty good
wages--five thousand dollars a month is middlin', not to say fair."

In short, Mose Jenkins made up his mind to go to San Francisco, having
got the wherewithal to carry him in a packet to the land of promise.
Fearful of opposition, he communicated his project neither to the
author of his days, the venerable Zephaniah Jenkins, nor to the
beloved of his heart, Miss Prudence Salter, a cherry-cheeked damsel
in a state of orphanage; but wrote down to a friend in Boston to
secure a passage. He reserved his communications to the very last