But how does it happen you never were in San Francisco ?" he said suddenly.
If he would not talk of himself, here at least was a chance for Mrs.
Bunker to say something.

She related how her family had emigrated from Kansas across the plains and had taken up a "location" at Contra Costa.
How she didn't care for it, and how she came to marry the seafaring man who brought her here--all with great simplicity and frankness and as unreservedly as to a superior being--albeit his attention wandered at times, and a rare but melancholy smile that he had apparently evoked to meet her conversational advances became fixed occasionally.

Even his dark eyes, which had obliged Mrs.Bunker to put up her hair and button her collar, rested upon her without seeing her.
"Then your husband's name is Bunker ?" he said when she paused at last.
"That's one of those Nantucket Quaker names--sailors and whalers for generations--and yours, you say, was MacEwan.

Well, Mrs.Bunker, YOUR family came from Kentucky to Kansas only lately, though I suppose your father calls himself a Free-States man.

You ought to know something of farming and cattle, for your ancestors were old Scotch Covenanters who emigrated a hundred years ago, and were great stock raisers." All this seemed only the natural omniscience of a superior being.