I MET JOHN CARSON FOR THE FIRST TIME on Bush Street in San Francisco, where I was at the time living in a rooming house owned by his wife, Mary Carson. Though born in Ireland, Mary had for some time been a citizen of The City, as she called our rough and misty citadel, as if it was a ship upon the water; which in truth it was, for a few streets west lay the Pacific Ocean, and a few streets east sprawled its impatient bay, like a tiny dinghy bobbing alongside a tremendous parent. To further the image, Mrs Carson's house, tall and thin, stood at the apex of a hill, and swayed like a mast in the afternoon wind, and often featured a sort of sea-beacon at its peak — the night-lamp in my room, where I scribbled the remarkable stories I heard during the day from Mary's husband John.

I was then a penurious man, forced to be so by circumstance, and I had much time on my hands, waiting for a marital entanglement to unbraid itself across the bay, and free the woman who would be my wife; and while I walked the city as much as I could, having learned that cities are best discovered on foot, I also had the open hours and eager ears for Carson's adventures, for he was a terrific teller of tales, and spoke in such a colorful and piercing way, with such adornments of elocution and wonderful mimicry, that whole afternoons passed as unnoticed as the tide, as we sat by the sitting-room fire.

He had been everywhere and done everything, it seemed, and he was eager to tell of countries and peoples, crimes and misdemeanors, mendicants and millionaires, and all the manners of living he had seen, from high to low and every shade between; and while Mrs Carson would occasionally offer tart reproof and call him to task about one detail or another, his flow was never stanched, so long as I was there to listen, and later record what he had said, in prose as close as I could get to the way in which he had said it; for he had an essentially riverine style of speaking, and his reminiscence would wander into pools and oxbows, there to swirl meditatively awhile before returning eventually to the main stem of the story. But then other times he spoke so speedily that you were rushed headlong through the narrative rapids, before being released at last into a placid stretch, there to slowly regain your equilibrium, and smile with pleasure at the unforgettable rush of the voyage.

* * *

I had arrived at Mrs Carson's estimable house in December of the year 1879, and spent the latter half of that month recovering from illness, essentially confined to my attic room, and in little contact with the other residents except for the solicitous Mrs Carson, who was kind enough to bring me small sustenance, and what books she could find unclaimed in the house; during that time I much enjoyed Mr Twain's Roughing It and Tom Sawyer, and Mr Whitman's new Leaves of Grass, and a steady run of excellent books by Mr Henry James, whom I had met in England and very much liked, though he seemed far more English than American to me, and, I suspect, to himself.

Having long been in poor health I was all too familiar with the land of counterpane, and was used to spending my ill hours in bed, writing. I was then by trade a scribbler, a writer of slight essays and occasional pieces for the newspapers, and it was to the hunting of this small game that I devoted my energies that wet December; not until after the new year did I improve enough to shakily go downstairs and sit by the fire, and then stroll the neighborhood, and finally wander the towered salty city itself, from wharves to hilltop thickets and back again. From January to April, then, I roamed as freely as the fog in what proved to be one of the most turbulent and riveting cities I had ever seen — fully as lovely and avaricious as Paris, as arrogant and fascinating as London, as windswept and grim and prim and delightful as my own native Edinburgh. And of those pedestrian journeys there is much to tell; but my most memorable travels in San Francisco that spring were all conducted in a deep chair by the fire in Mrs Carson's house, as I sat mesmerized by the estimable Mr John Carson, gentleman and adventurer.

* * *

I should begin by showing you the man, insofar as I am able, as he was then, at the prime of life and the peak of his powers. Taller than not, and burly rather than thick; as he said himself, while we saw eye to eye as regards our height, he was twice the man I was in volume. A dense head of hair, just beginning to silver at the temples; clean rough clothes somewhere between the utilitarian garb of a sailor and the unadorned simplicity of a reverend; boots that were worn but buffed, boots that had seen something of the world but would never allow themselves to appear in public with stain or scuff. No watch fob, no necktie, no hat; I once remarked to him that I had never once seen him in a hat, and he laughed and said he thought most hats were affectations and aggrandizements, very much like the useless showy feathers that certain birds developed in order to lure unsuspecting females into their sensual bowers; the only hat he had ever worn and liked was a helmet, which had done its work well, and protected him from a shower of blows, any one of which would have been sufficient to make Mrs Carson a widow.

His face was like his clothing, rough but honest and open; no beard, by the express command of Mrs Carson, who disapproved of beards in general as disguises, and disapproved of his in particular as a brambly barrier between man and wife; and as he said with a smile, what sensible man, graced with the affections of the extraordinary Mrs Carson, would fail to do everything he could to encourage and fan those affections?

Sharp amused eyes, of a gray-green color, like the bay in mottled weather; dense eyebrows as thick as bushy caterpillars; large rough hands I would see at work around the house, carpentering this and that; as he often said, to build a house of mere innocent wood, and expect it to withstand a week of San Francisco's weather unscarred, was the airiest folly; it was no accident that Our Lord spent eighteen years apprenticing as a carpenter, for surely the Holy Family was planning to move to San Francisco, where Our Lord would have been able to carve a good living from a career of household woodworking.

An unadorned voice, neither mellifluous nor harsh; his voice was like the man, direct and amused but capable of sharp turns and dangerous calms. A tiny tattoo of a falcon below his left ear, less than an inch long, noticeable only in crisp daylight. A man of measured tastes in food and drink, well read but not scholarly, sociable but not gregarious or garrulous. An aficionado of music, but none that I had ever heard; by his own account he loved the music of lands far away, the aboriginal music of Borneo and Australia in particular, and he rued his lack of instrumental skill, he said, for he would have liked to have that music drifting around the house, reminding him of his travels and his friends in far-flung regions of the world.

He was fond of gently teasing Mrs Carson, and gravely proposing fanciful adventures and enterprises to her, such as purchasing one of the Seal Rocks islands off San Francisco, and building a ship upon it, in such a way that the rough surface of the island was completely covered by the ship, so that while in residence there husband and wife would...