Chamberss Edinburgh Journal, No. 444 | Page 6

know it for a blessing. Often and often
does it serve as a most creditable lever to break the ice with. The
newspapers long resound with critical columns apropos of Trafalgar
Square. You see 'sixth notice' attached to a formidable mass of print,
and read on, or pass on, as you please. But you distinctly observe, at
any rate, the social and conversational, as well as the artistic
importance of the Royal Academy; and you confess, that a London
season would be shorn of its brightest feature if you shut the gates of
the National Gallery.

A. B. R.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Associates Royal Academy, and Royal Academicians.

BILL WILLIAMS:
A STORY OF CALIFORNIA.
It was in the first flush of the Californian fever, when moderate people
talked of making one's fortune in a fortnight, and the more sanguine
believed that golden pokers would soon become rather common, that
the Betsy Jones from London to New Zealand, with myself on board as
a passenger, dropped anchor in the bay of San Francisco, and master
and man turned out for the diggings. It is my impression that not a soul
remained on board but the surgeon, who was sick, and the negro cook,
who wouldn't leave him; and the first man I met on the deck of the
Go-Ahead steamer, which took as up to Sacramento, was our
enterprising captain, clad in a canvas jacket and trousers, with the
gold-washing apparatus, two shirts, and a tin kettle, slung at his back.
The crew followed his example, and all the passengers. The latter were
some thirty men, from every corner of Britain, and of various birth and
breeding. There were industrious farm-servants and spendthrift sons of
gentlemen among them. Some had sailed with money, to purchase land
in the southern colony, some were provided only with their hopes and
sinews; but California was an irresistible temptation to them all, and by
general desire, they had come to try their luck at the washing. We had
mere boys and men of grizzling hair in our company. Two were
married, but they wisely left their wives in San Francisco, where,
having brought with them some spare blankets and crockery, the ladies
improvised a boarding-house, and I believe realised more than their
wandering lords. Nevertheless, we, one and all, went up the broad river
with loftier expectations than the prudent among us cared to make
public.

There was one who made no secret of his hopes. The man's name was
Bill Williams. I had had a loose acquaintance with Bill from
school-time, for we had been brought up in the same good town of
Manchester, where his father was a respectable tradesman, and his
three brothers were still in business. Many a town and many a trade had
Bill tried to little purpose. Never doing what his relatives could call
well, he had gone through a series of failures, which tired out both
kinsmen and creditors, and at length shipped for New Zealand, leaving
a wife and seven children to the care of the said three brothers, till he
should see how the climate agreed with him, and find a home for them.
Bill did not belong to the extended fraternity of scapegraces. He was
neither wild nor worthless, in the ordinary sense of those terms, but
there was a faith in him, the origin of which baffled his most
penetrating friends, that he was to get money somehow without
working for it by any of the common methods. Unlike many a
professor of better principles, Bill had carried that faith into practice.
Under its influence, he had engaged in every scheme for making
fortunes with incredible rapidity which coffee-house acquaintances or
advertising sheets brought to his knowledge. There was not a banking
bubble by which he had not lost, nor a mining company of vast promise
and brief existence in which he had not held shares. Uncompromisingly
averse to the jog-trot work of ordinary mortals. Bill was neither
indolent nor timid in his own peculiar fashion of seeking riches. He
would have gone up in a balloon to any height, or down in a diving-bell
to depths yet unsounded, had the promise been large enough; and there
was something so suitable to his inclinations in the Californian reports,
that he was the prime mover of our visit to San Francisco, and the
entire desertion of the ship. Strange to say, every man on board
believed in Bill; from the captain to the cabin-boy, they had all listened
to his tales. Where he had learned such a number, fortune knows,
concerning found treasures, and wealth suddenly obtained by
unexpected and rather impracticable ways. That was the whole circle of
Bill's literature, and going over it appeared his chief joy; but the gem of
the collection was a