EXECUTION AND TRIAL. 655 Next morning the judge awoke feeling unusually well. There are epochs in the experience of a drunkard when the opaque mists befogging the mind vanish, and the return of intelligence opens transparent as an arctic sky in midwinter, and this, too, immediately following a series of debauches. So shone the transplendent discrimination of the Santa Cruz judge as he smilingly took his seat upon the bench next morning sober. The courtroom was neatly appointed. Before the judgment desk sat the busy clerk writing; every officer was in his place, attentive, while the uncovered spectators, awe-inspired of ignorance, stood with under-jaw dropped on their breast, or speaking one with another in low whispers. Glancing over the calendar, the judge called the case of The People versus Pedro Castro. "Your honor," respectfully replied the sheriff, "the man has been hanged." "Hanged!" exclaimed the judge, as forebodings of something fearfully wrong crept over him, "I do not understand you, sir; there has been no trial yet." "No, your honor," said the clerk, "but yesterday, you will remember, your honor waived trial, sentenced the defendant, and peremptorily ordered the sheriff to carry the sentence into immediate execution." "Hanged, did you say?" meditatively remarked the judge as the situation gradually dawned upon him, "well, never mind, let the trial proceed nunc pro tunc. All orders and judgments of this court must be justified by due legal proceedings, and if the sheriff has so far erred in his understanding of the court as to lead to the commission of an unhappy blunder, the court will harbor no anger on that account, but will endeavor, so far as strict probity will admit, to reconcile the acts of the officers with the rulings of the court." The sheriff thus mildly admonished then brought before the judge, whose learned complacency once more fully possessed him. the prisoner, who after a sober but speedy trial was duly condemned and executed. The bench and bar of San José from the first numbered as many able jurists as might be found in any thriving town of equal size in America. To the more refined gravity of sedate societies their manner might seem a little coarse, and their expletives irreverent, but their law, and the practical application of it, could not be questioned. The court of sessions of San José, in 1850, as then organized, exercised jurisdiction in criminal cases of the highest degree. Judge Rogers was a large, broad-featured, big-mouthed, Johnsonian sort of man, able, profane, and almost brutal in his vulgarity, yet withal, below the superficial asperities of his nature, genial and sympathetic. One day it became his painful duty to sentence a Mexican who had been tried before him to death. The prisoner did not speak English, and the judge deemed it proper that the sentence, as delivered, should be done into Spanish. The clerk of the court being competent was asked to act as interpreter, but as he was a man of shrinking sensibilities, he expressed abhorrence at the thought of being the medium of communicating the death intelligence to a human being. There are moods in the temper of strong men in which impediment only excites determination. All early Californians had a smattering of Spanish. When the clerk declined the office of translator, with a big round oath Judge Rogers swore he would make the man understand. "You, sir, get up! levantate! arriba! Sabe? You been tried; tried by jury; damn you! sabe? You have been found-what the devil's the Spanish for guilty? Never mind-sabe? You have been found guilty, and you are going to be hanged; sabe? Hanged? Entiende?" The Mexican was as courageous as the judge was coarse. Evidently he did understand, for with the characteristic nonchalance of his race, he replied, illustrating by signs and gurglings the hanging and choking process: "Si, señor, debo ser colgado con chicote; ahorcado así; no es nada; gracias á Vd." "Yes, sir, I am to be hanged at a rope's end; strangled, so; it is nothing; thank you.' 97 CAL. INT. Poc. 42 CHAPTER XXII. DRINKING. Over wide streams and mountains great we went With Asian elephants: We follow Bacchus! Bacchus on the wing Bacchus, young Bacchus! good or ill betide To our wild minstrelsy. -Keats' Endymion. A NOT unfitting opening for some reflections on life would be a dissertation on death. Were there no death the term life would have no significance. Did we not love life we should not fear death. However full of hateful conditions earthly existence may be, all things having life, man, animals, plants, cling to it; the uncertainties of death are more dreaded than the certain ills of life. Then, too, life is existence, being; a dead thing is nothing, having no existence, no being. Yet further, life feeds on death; life lives on death; by the destruction of life alone is life sustained; were there no death, under the present economy of things, there could be no life, no continuing state of existence. Death is the grand and universal interatance of life; the infant's first breath is the breath of the dying. The whole scheme of animated nature throughout the planet, concocted and put in running order by a so-called beneficent creator, involves the consumma DEATH AND THE DRAM-SHOP. 659 How tion of a hundred deaths to maintain one life. many lives of birds and beasts and fishes are taken to sustain the life of one human being from the cradle to the grave? How many fishes does a whale consume during its lifetime; how many small fishes will one large fish eat; how many smaller fishes will a small fish eat; how many lives does it take to sustain the life of the tiniest insect the eye can distinguish? Is then death so terrible, being so beneficial, so universal? For all that lives is dying; all that to-day is living, to-morrow is dead; all that is living is dying, ergo, living is not living but dying, and there is no such thing as life, all nature being either dead or dying. The dead willow is the symbol of decay and death in Japan; in California if such a symbol was required we would take a dram-shop. In ancient times it was the arrow of Apollo that brought sudden death; in California when a man drops dead upon the street, or otherwise is taken off suddenly, we call it heart disease, apoplexy, the result of high living, usually, though not always, meaning-rum. And men are called fools for drinking themselves to death, when we have just seen death is essential to life, is inevitable to all, does not make a pin's difference whether it comes to-day or to-morrow-particularly to-morrow. Whether we like the idea of death or dislike it, it is not wise greatly to trouble ourselves about it, as we cannot long delay it by any such means. As in the question of life or no life beyond the grave, as it never has been determined, as no one that we know of has ever come back from beyond the grave to tell us, we might as well cease thinking about it, and wait for more light this being what we must do whether we will or not. Those who through some seventh sense, that not every one possesses, have been told to their satisfaction, and can themselves tell to the satisfaction of a hundred houses full, what life and death are, and what the state of affairs beyond, should rest contented; even if, after expecting a future existence, |