My wife, who was a child of but eleven years, was just about to jump with the rest when a providential hand restrained and saved her.
News of the disaster quickly spread, and in a short time the crowd of anxious parents, kinsfolk and friends who had hastened to the scene in every variety of vehicle and on foot, was so dense that the police had the utmost difficulty in removing the wounded, dying and dead.
From Geneva, Switzerland, in 1854, a highly educated French lady, Mlle. Theresa Bry, whose oil portrait hangs in the County Museum, reached Los Angeles, and four years later married François Henriot, a gardener by profession, who had come from _la belle France_ in 1851. Together, on First Street near Los Angeles, they conducted a private school which enjoyed considerable patronage; removing the institution, in the early eighties, to the Arroyo Seco district. This matrimonial transaction, on account of the unequal social stations of the respective parties, caused some little flurry: in contrast to her own beauty and ladylike accomplishments, François's manners were unrefined, his stature short and squatty, while his full beard (although it inspired respect, if not a certain feeling of awe, when he came to exercise authority in the school) was scraggy and unkempt. Mme. Henriot died in 1888, aged eighty-seven years, and was followed to the grave by her husband five years later.
In 1858, the outlook for business brightened in Los Angeles; and Don Abel Stearns, who had acquired riches as a _ranchero_, built the Arcadia Block, on the corner of Los Angeles and Arcadia streets, naming it after his wife, Doña Arcadia, who, since these memoirs were commenced, has joined the silent majority. The structure cost about eighty thousand dollars, and was talked of for some time as the most notable business block south of San Francisco. The newspapers hailed it as an ornament to the city and a great step toward providing what the small and undeveloped community then regarded as a fire-proof structure for business purposes. Because, however, of the dangerous overflow of the Los Angeles River in rainy seasons, Stearns elevated the building above the grade of the street and to such an extent that, for several years, his store-rooms remained empty. But the enterprise at once bore some good fruit; to make the iron doors and shutters of the block, he started a foundry on New High Street and soon created some local iron-casting trade.