From Daily Alta California, June 30th, 1867. Written May 19th.

[This incident is reported in the second chapter of The Innocents Abroad.]

The people are leaving here by ship-loads for France. It is a perfect exodus. Every sailing vessel goes out full, a thing which is a pleasant novelty to them, no doubt, for they have long been unused to it, and if you want to travel by the great steamer lines you must engage your state-room a month before hand and pay for it. The idea of the Exposition proving a failure, as was the talk a while back, is absurd, if other countries are rushing money and people over there as fast as we are doing. We are shipping ten and maybe even twelve thousand persons a month from the port of New York alone, and if all our other ports together are doing half as much, America will have sent considerably over a hundred thousand persons to Europe, (chiefly to Paris,) this year before the time for travel in that direction is up. It is as much as I can do to scare up an individual who will acknowledge in a calm, unprejudiced manner that he is not going to Paris this year. I cannot begin to estimate the number of people to whom I have given the probable date of my arrival in the French capital, and who said I must hunt them up there. It is Wonderful! Thought I had run across about all acquaintances who were going, and yet when I took a lady friend down last Saturday, to ship her on the Ville de Paris, I found quite a number housed on board who never had said anything about going.

Mr. Brown, of whom you have heard, has come finally to consider the whole nation as packing up for emigration to France. He bought a handkerchief yesterday, and when the man could not make change, Brown said:

"Never mind, I'll hand it to you in Paris."

"But I am not going to Paris."

"How is—what did I understand you to say?"

"I said I am not going to Paris."

"Not going to Paris! Not g—well then, where in the very nation are you going to?"

"Nowhere at all."

"Not anywhere whatsoever?—honest Injun, now—not any place on earth but this?"

"Not any place at all but just this—stay here all summer."

I looked for an explosion here—a boisterous display of admiration on Brown's part, a wringing of the man's hand, and all that sort of thing. But nothing of the kind occurred. My comrade took his purchase and walked out of the store without a word—walked out with an injured look upon his countenance. Up the street apiece he broke silence and said impressively: "It was a low, mean, disgraceful lie—that is my opinion of it!"