“You will be in luck if you don’t fall back on the sidewalk after you have drank it!” growled the doctor.
The colonel took my arm, and as we went down towards Montgomery Street, proceeded, in a confidential manner, to enlighten me on the subject of Pisco. It is really pure, unadulterated brandy, distilled in Peru, from the grape known as Italia, or La Rosa del Peru, and takes its name from the port of Pisco in which it is shipped. It is perfectly colorless, quite fragrant, very seductive, terribly strong, and has a flavor somewhat resembling that of Scotch whiskey, but much more delicate, with a marked fruity taste. It comes in earthen jars, broad at the top, and tapering down to a point, holding about five gallons each. We had some hot, with a bit of lemon and a dash of nutmeg in it, at a marble-paved and splendidly-decorated saloon, near the corner of California and Montgomery Streets. The first glass satisfied me that San Francisco was, and is, a nice place to visit, and that the doctor and the colonel were good fellows to travel with. The second glass was sufficient, and I felt that I could face small-pox, all the fevers known to the faculty, and the Asiatic Cholera, combined, if need be.
The colonel rolled me a cigarito, and insisted on my smoking it. I did my best, choked myself with the fine tobacco, let the paper wrapper unroll, burned my fingers, and failed ignominiously. I was glad to see that, while he pitied me, he did not wholly despise me. These Californians have an appreciably large share of liberality in their composition, and will pardon your ignorance on almost any given specialty of their state, provided you don’t claim that you have something very nearly as good “at the East.” That assumption they cannot, and will not, tolerate on the part of anybody, and I don’t so much blame them, after all.
It was Saturday evening, and the streets were crowded, Montgomery and Kearney Streets swarming, as you may say, with people, well dressed, sociable, orderly, and satisfied with themselves and the rest of mankind. Suddenly the colonel remembered that the wine called Cocomongo, from the vineyard of that name, near San Bernardino, Southern California, was one of the specialties of a saloon which we were passing at the moment, and we went in and had some.
COCOMONGO.
It was a warm, fruity wine, of a dark-amber hue, very strong, and withal palatable, which I did not find to be the case with all the California wines that I tasted. We went up Washington Street to Murderer’s Alley, and turned down it, towards Jackson Street. “There is where the French woman was murdered in the night, within ten feet of where hundreds of people were coming and going all the time; and her murderer, after robbing the place, coolly washed his hands and face of the blood, and walked away. He was never discovered. Here, right where we stand, is where the Chinaman cut his runaway mistress open with a sword. I saw him hanged for it. And there is where the police shot—” I thanked my kind friend for this cheerful information, but suggested that it might be well to keep a little of it back for another time. It was not well to exhaust all the pleasant things of life at one sitting. The subject was obligingly changed.
I am satisfied that the name of the alley is well deserved and appropriate. Swarms of Chinese women, with almond eyes, baby faces, painted red and white in the most lavish manner, lips touched with vermilion, hair black and glossy, with a purplish tinge, like the wing of a raven, and clad in blue satin coats and pants, trotted along the alley, their curious wooden-soled, silk and bullion-embroidered shoes rattling like the hoofs of a flock of sheep as they went. Others tapped upon the window panes, to attract our attention as we passed. Before one house we saw “joss-sticks” burning, and the white cloth festooned over the door, and hanging down on either side, told that death was there. We heard the beating of gongs, the squeaking of one-stringed Chinese fiddles, the sharp notes of the kettle-drum and other discordant instruments, making music inside, and, as we passed, a woman, clad in blue and white, threw a bunch of lighted fire-crackers upon the doorstep, where they went off like a running fire of musketry, much to the edification of a gang of little pig-tailed, almond eyed boys,—“demi-Johns,” I think the doctor called them,—who were gathered around, chattering like so many magpies all the time, in their, to me, uncouth jargon. The Chinese is an ancient language, beyond a doubt; and I don’t see why it has not worn smoother by use in the hundred centuries or more since the “Central Flowery Empire” became “known and feared among the nations.”
A CHINESE THEATRE.—BETEL NUT.
On Jackson Street we stopped a few moments in front of the Chinese Theatre, listening to the unearthly din of gongs, which from time to time announced the change of scene, in a never-ending historical drama, and looking about for a special policeman to take us into an opium den. While we stood there, the colonel called our attention to one of the specialties of the fruit stall, at the entrance of the theatre. Among the dozen nameless prepared delicacies calculated to tickle the Celestial palate, and catch the Mongolian eye, was a row of little conical packages, of about one ounce weight each. These were composed of an outer wrapper of some kind of a queer leaf—I could not make out its exact character, but it was apparently that of a tree not native to America—enclosing two or three narrow slices of fresh cocoa-nut, a few thin slices of some fruit or nut resembling in appearance a fresh nutmeg, and about a teaspoonful of a pink-colored paste. A small bowl, filled with this pink paste, stood beside the packages, ready for use, and some of the nuts ready sliced, but not done up in packages, lay near it. The doctor explained that these packages were chewed by the Chinamen as some Caucasians chew tobacco. The chewing produces a lavish flow of saliva, and the chewer has the appearance of having his mouth full of blood, as if from bronchial hemorrhage.
The small nut was the famous “betel” (pronounced be-tel), and the principal ingredient of the paste was quick-lime. The betel is now raised in California. The colonel said he had always made it a rule to drink the peculiar drinks, and eat the peculiar delicacies, of every country he visited, and he had tried chewing the betel. It only made his gums sore, loosened his teeth a little, and gave him the heartburn. He could conscientiously recommend it as an experiment eminently worthy to be made by anybody in the interest of science, and thought I should try it by all means. I asked him if he had ever attacked a ready-made sausage in a cheap restaurant. He was forced to admit that his faith in human nature, broad and liberal as it is, had never made him equal to the attempt. I told him that in that case he was only a dabbler in the wide field of science, and until he had entered deeper, he was unfit to give advice to others on the subject.