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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Silverado Squatters, by Robert Louis
+Stevenson, Illustrated by Joseph D. Strong
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: The Silverado Squatters
+
+
+Author: Robert Louis Stevenson
+
+
+
+Release Date: January 29, 2013  [eBook #516]
+[This file was first posted on March 12, 1996]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS***
+
+
+Transcribed from the 1906 Chatto & Windus edition by David Price, email
+ccx074@pglaf.org
+
+ [Picture: Picture of the squatters by Joseph D. Strong.  The title page
+              incorrectly claims it was by Joseph A. Strong]
+
+
+
+
+
+                                   THE
+                           SILVERADO SQUATTERS
+
+
+                                    BY
+
+                          ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
+
+                      [Picture: Decorative graphic]
+
+                             A NEW IMPRESSION
+                 WITH A FRONTISPIECE BY JOSEPH D. STRONG
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+                                  LONDON
+                             CHATTO & WINDUS
+                                   1906
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+    “Vixerunt nonnulli in agris, delectati re sua familiari.  His idem
+    propositum fuit quod regibus, ut ne qua re agerent, ne cui parerent,
+    libertate uterentur: cujus proprium est sic vivere ut velis.”
+
+                                                  —CIC., _De Off._, I. xx.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+IN THE VALLEY:
+       I.  Calistoga                              13
+      II.  The Petrified Forest                   24
+     III.  Napa Wine                              34
+      IV.  The Scot Abroad                        48
+WITH THE CHILDREN OF ISRAEL:
+       I.  To Introduce Mr. Kelmar                59
+      II.  First Impressions of Silverado         68
+     III.  The Return                             92
+THE ACT OF SQUATTING                             103
+THE HUNTER’S FAMILY                              127
+THE SEA FOGS                                     153
+THE TOLL HOUSE                                   171
+A STARRY DRIVE                                   185
+EPISODES IN THE STORY OF A MINE                  197
+TOILS AND PLEASURES                              223
+
+THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
+
+
+THE scene of this little book is on a high mountain.  There are, indeed,
+many higher; there are many of a nobler outline.  It is no place of
+pilgrimage for the summary globe-trotter; but to one who lives upon its
+sides, Mount Saint Helena soon becomes a centre of interest.  It is the
+Mont Blanc of one section of the Californian Coast Range, none of its
+near neighbours rising to one-half its altitude.  It looks down on much
+green, intricate country.  It feeds in the spring-time many splashing
+brooks.  From its summit you must have an excellent lesson of geography:
+seeing, to the south, San Francisco Bay, with Tamalpais on the one hand
+and Monte Diablo on the other; to the west and thirty miles away, the
+open ocean; eastward, across the corn-lands and thick tule swamps of
+Sacramento Valley, to where the Central Pacific railroad begins to climb
+the sides of the Sierras; and northward, for what I know, the white head
+of Shasta looking down on Oregon.  Three counties, Napa County, Lake
+County, and Sonoma County, march across its cliffy shoulders.  Its naked
+peak stands nearly four thousand five hundred feet above the sea; its
+sides are fringed with forest; and the soil, where it is bare, glows warm
+with cinnabar.
+
+Life in its shadow goes rustically forward.  Bucks, and bears, and
+rattlesnakes, and former mining operations, are the staple of men’s talk.
+Agriculture has only begun to mount above the valley.  And though in a
+few years from now the whole district may be smiling with farms, passing
+trains shaking the mountain to the heart, many-windowed hotels lighting
+up the night like factories, and a prosperous city occupying the site of
+sleepy Calistoga; yet in the mean time, around the foot of that mountain
+the silence of nature reigns in a great measure unbroken, and the people
+of hill and valley go sauntering about their business as in the days
+before the flood.
+
+To reach Mount Saint Helena from San Francisco, the traveller has twice
+to cross the bay: once by the busy Oakland Ferry, and again, after an
+hour or so of the railway, from Vallejo junction to Vallejo.  Thence he
+takes rail once more to mount the long green strath of Napa Valley.
+
+In all the contractions and expansions of that inland sea, the Bay of San
+Francisco, there can be few drearier scenes than the Vallejo Ferry.  Bald
+shores and a low, bald islet inclose the sea; through the narrows the
+tide bubbles, muddy like a river.  When we made the passage (bound,
+although yet we knew it not, for Silverado) the steamer jumped, and the
+black buoys were dancing in the jabble; the ocean breeze blew killing
+chill; and, although the upper sky was still unflecked with vapour, the
+sea fogs were pouring in from seaward, over the hilltops of Marin county,
+in one great, shapeless, silver cloud.
+
+South Vallejo is typical of many Californian towns.  It was a blunder;
+the site has proved untenable; and, although it is still such a young
+place by the scale of Europe, it has already begun to be deserted for its
+neighbour and namesake, North Vallejo.  A long pier, a number of drinking
+saloons, a hotel of a great size, marshy pools where the frogs keep up
+their croaking, and even at high noon the entire absence of any human
+face or voice—these are the marks of South Vallejo.  Yet there was a tall
+building beside the pier, labelled the _Star Flour Mills_; and sea-going,
+full-rigged ships lay close along shore, waiting for their cargo.  Soon
+these would be plunging round the Horn, soon the flour from the _Star
+Flour Mills_ would be landed on the wharves of Liverpool.  For that, too,
+is one of England’s outposts; thither, to this gaunt mill, across the
+Atlantic and Pacific deeps and round about the icy Horn, this crowd of
+great, three-masted, deep-sea ships come, bringing nothing, and return
+with bread.
+
+The Frisby House, for that was the name of the hotel, was a place of
+fallen fortunes, like the town.  It was now given up to labourers, and
+partly ruinous.  At dinner there was the ordinary display of what is
+called in the west a _two-bit house_: the tablecloth checked red and
+white, the plague of flies, the wire hencoops over the dishes, the great
+variety and invariable vileness of the food and the rough coatless men
+devoting it in silence.  In our bedroom, the stove would not burn, though
+it would smoke; and while one window would not open, the other would not
+shut.  There was a view on a bit of empty road, a few dark houses, a
+donkey wandering with its shadow on a slope, and a blink of sea, with a
+tall ship lying anchored in the moonlight.  All about that dreary inn
+frogs sang their ungainly chorus.
+
+Early the next morning we mounted the hill along a wooden footway,
+bridging one marish spot after another.  Here and there, as we ascended,
+we passed a house embowered in white roses.  More of the bay became
+apparent, and soon the blue peak of Tamalpais rose above the green level
+of the island opposite.  It told us we were still but a little way from
+the city of the Golden Gates, already, at that hour, beginning to awake
+among the sand-hills.  It called to us over the waters as with the voice
+of a bird.  Its stately head, blue as a sapphire on the paler azure of
+the sky, spoke to us of wider outlooks and the bright Pacific.  For
+Tamalpais stands sentry, like a lighthouse, over the Golden Gates,
+between the bay and the open ocean, and looks down indifferently on both.
+Even as we saw and hailed it from Vallejo, seamen, far out at sea, were
+scanning it with shaded eyes; and, as if to answer to the thought, one of
+the great ships below began silently to clothe herself with white sails,
+homeward bound for England.
+
+For some way beyond Vallejo the railway led us through bald green
+pastures.  On the west the rough highlands of Marin shut off the ocean;
+in the midst, in long, straggling, gleaming arms, the bay died out among
+the grass; there were few trees and few enclosures; the sun shone wide
+over open uplands, the displumed hills stood clear against the sky.  But
+by-and-by these hills began to draw nearer on either hand, and first
+thicket and then wood began to clothe their sides; and soon we were away
+from all signs of the sea’s neighbourhood, mounting an inland, irrigated
+valley.  A great variety of oaks stood, now severally, now in a becoming
+grove, among the fields and vineyards.  The towns were compact, in about
+equal proportions, of bright, new wooden houses and great and growing
+forest trees; and the chapel bell on the engine sounded most festally
+that sunny Sunday, as we drew up at one green town after another, with
+the townsfolk trooping in their Sunday’s best to see the strangers, with
+the sun sparkling on the clean houses, and great domes of foliage humming
+overhead in the breeze.
+
+This pleasant Napa Valley is, at its north end, blockaded by our
+mountain.  There, at Calistoga, the railroad ceases, and the traveller
+who intends faring farther, to the Geysers or to the springs in Lake
+County, must cross the spurs of the mountain by stage.  Thus, Mount Saint
+Helena is not only a summit, but a frontier; and, up to the time of
+writing, it has stayed the progress of the iron horse.
+
+
+
+
+PART I—IN THE VALLEY
+
+
+CHAPTER I—CALISTOGA
+
+
+IT is difficult for a European to imagine Calistoga, the whole place is
+so new, and of such an accidental pattern; the very name, I hear, was
+invented at a supper-party by the man who found the springs.
+
+The railroad and the highway come up the valley about parallel to one
+another.  The street of Calistoga joins the perpendicular to both—a wide
+street, with bright, clean, low houses, here and there a verandah over
+the sidewalk, here and there a horse-post, here and there lounging
+townsfolk.  Other streets are marked out, and most likely named; for
+these towns in the New World begin with a firm resolve to grow larger,
+Washington and Broadway, and then First and Second, and so forth, being
+boldly plotted out as soon as the community indulges in a plan.  But, in
+the meanwhile, all the life and most of the houses of Calistoga are
+concentrated upon that street between the railway station and the road.
+I never heard it called by any name, but I will hazard a guess that it is
+either Washington or Broadway.  Here are the blacksmith’s, the chemist’s,
+the general merchant’s, and Kong Sam Kee, the Chinese laundryman’s; here,
+probably, is the office of the local paper (for the place has a
+paper—they all have papers); and here certainly is one of the hotels,
+Cheeseborough’s, whence the daring Foss, a man dear to legend, starts his
+horses for the Geysers.
+
+It must be remembered that we are here in a land of stage-drivers and
+highwaymen: a land, in that sense, like England a hundred years ago.  The
+highway robber—road-agent, he is quaintly called—is still busy in these
+parts.  The fame of Vasquez is still young.  Only a few years go, the
+Lakeport stage was robbed a mile or two from Calistoga.  In 1879, the
+dentist of Mendocino City, fifty miles away upon the coast, suddenly
+threw off the garments of his trade, like Grindoff, in _The Miller and
+his Men_, and flamed forth in his second dress as a captain of banditti.
+A great robbery was followed by a long chase, a chase of days if not of
+weeks, among the intricate hill-country; and the chase was followed by
+much desultory fighting, in which several—and the dentist, I believe,
+amongst the number—bit the dust.  The grass was springing for the first
+time, nourished upon their blood, when I arrived in Calistoga.  I am
+reminded of another highwayman of that same year.  “He had been unwell,”
+so ran his humorous defence, “and the doctor told him to take something,
+so he took the express-box.”
+
+The cultus of the stage-coachman always flourishes highest where there
+are thieves on the road, and where the guard travels armed, and the stage
+is not only a link between country and city, and the vehicle of news, but
+has a faint warfaring aroma, like a man who should be brother to a
+soldier.  California boasts her famous stage-drivers, and among the
+famous Foss is not forgotten.  Along the unfenced, abominable mountain
+roads, he launches his team with small regard to human life or the
+doctrine of probabilities.  Flinching travellers, who behold themselves
+coasting eternity at every corner, look with natural admiration at their
+driver’s huge, impassive, fleshy countenance.  He has the very face for
+the driver in Sam Weller’s anecdote, who upset the election party at the
+required point.  Wonderful tales are current of his readiness and skill.
+One in particular, of how one of his horses fell at a ticklish passage of
+the road, and how Foss let slip the reins, and, driving over the fallen
+animal, arrived at the next stage with only three.  This I relate as I
+heard it, without guarantee.
+
+I only saw Foss once, though, strange as it may sound, I have twice
+talked with him.  He lives out of Calistoga, at a ranche called
+Fossville.  One evening, after he was long gone home, I dropped into
+Cheeseborough’s, and was asked if I should like to speak with Mr. Foss.
+Supposing that the interview was impossible, and that I was merely called
+upon to subscribe the general sentiment, I boldly answered “Yes.”  Next
+moment, I had one instrument at my ear, another at my mouth and found
+myself, with nothing in the world to say, conversing with a man several
+miles off among desolate hills.  Foss rapidly and somewhat plaintively
+brought the conversation to an end; and he returned to his night’s grog
+at Fossville, while I strolled forth again on Calistoga high street.  But
+it was an odd thing that here, on what we are accustomed to consider the
+very skirts of civilization, I should have used the telephone for the
+first time in my civilized career.  So it goes in these young countries;
+telephones, and telegraphs, and newspapers, and advertisements running
+far ahead among the Indians and the grizzly bears.
+
+Alone, on the other side of the railway, stands the Springs Hotel, with
+its attendant cottages.  The floor of the valley is extremely level to
+the very roots of the hills; only here and there a hillock, crowned with
+pines, rises like the barrow of some chieftain famed in war; and right
+against one of these hillocks is the Springs Hotel—is or was; for since I
+was there the place has been destroyed by fire, and has risen again from
+its ashes.  A lawn runs about the house, and the lawn is in its turn
+surrounded by a system of little five-roomed cottages, each with a
+verandah and a weedy palm before the door.  Some of the cottages are let
+to residents, and these are wreathed in flowers.  The rest are occupied
+by ordinary visitors to the Hotel; and a very pleasant way this is, by
+which you have a little country cottage of your own, without domestic
+burthens, and by the day or week.
+
+The whole neighbourhood of Mount Saint Helena is full of sulphur and of
+boiling springs.  The Geysers are famous; they were the great health
+resort of the Indians before the coming of the whites.  Lake County is
+dotted with spas; Hot Springs and White Sulphur Springs are the names of
+two stations on the Napa Valley railroad; and Calistoga itself seems to
+repose on a mere film above a boiling, subterranean lake.  At one end of
+the hotel enclosure are the springs from which it takes its name, hot
+enough to scald a child seriously while I was there.  At the other end,
+the tenant of a cottage sank a well, and there also the water came up
+boiling.  It keeps this end of the valley as warm as a toast.  I have
+gone across to the hotel a little after five in the morning, when a sea
+fog from the Pacific was hanging thick and gray, and dark and dirty
+overhead, and found the thermometer had been up before me, and had
+already climbed among the nineties; and in the stress of the day it was
+sometimes too hot to move about.
+
+But in spite of this heat from above and below, doing one on both sides,
+Calistoga was a pleasant place to dwell in; beautifully green, for it was
+then that favoured moment in the Californian year, when the rains are
+over and the dusty summer has not yet set in; often visited by fresh
+airs, now from the mountain, now across Sonoma from the sea; very quiet,
+very idle, very silent but for the breezes and the cattle bells afield.
+And there was something satisfactory in the sight of that great mountain
+that enclosed us to the north: whether it stood, robed in sunshine,
+quaking to its topmost pinnacle with the heat and brightness of the day;
+or whether it set itself to weaving vapours, wisp after wisp growing,
+trembling, fleeting, and fading in the blue.
+
+The tangled, woody, and almost trackless foot-hills that enclose the
+valley, shutting it off from Sonoma on the west, and from Yolo on the
+east—rough as they were in outline, dug out by winter streams, crowned by
+cliffy bluffs and nodding pine trees—wore dwarfed into satellites by the
+bulk and bearing of Mount Saint Helena.  She over-towered them by
+two-thirds of her own stature.  She excelled them by the boldness of her
+profile.  Her great bald summit, clear of trees and pasture, a cairn of
+quartz and cinnabar, rejected kinship with the dark and shaggy wilderness
+of lesser hill-tops.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II—THE PETRIFIED FOREST
+
+
+WE drove off from the Springs Hotel about three in the afternoon.  The
+sun warmed me to the heart.  A broad, cool wind streamed pauselessly down
+the valley, laden with perfume.  Up at the top stood Mount Saint Helena,
+a bulk of mountain, bare atop, with tree-fringed spurs, and radiating
+warmth.  Once we saw it framed in a grove of tall and exquisitely
+graceful white oaks, in line and colour a finished composition.  We
+passed a cow stretched by the roadside, her bell slowly beating time to
+the movement of her ruminating jaws, her big red face crawled over by
+half a dozen flies, a monument of content.
+
+A little farther, and we struck to the left up a mountain road, and for
+two hours threaded one valley after another, green, tangled, full of
+noble timber, giving us every now and again a sight of Mount Saint Helena
+and the blue hilly distance, and crossed by many streams, through which
+we splashed to the carriage-step.  To the right or the left, there was
+scarce any trace of man but the road we followed; I think we passed but
+one ranchero’s house in the whole distance, and that was closed and
+smokeless.  But we had the society of these bright streams—dazzlingly
+clear, as is their wont, splashing from the wheels in diamonds, and
+striking a lively coolness through the sunshine.  And what with the
+innumerable variety of greens, the masses of foliage tossing in the
+breeze, the glimpses of distance, the descents into seemingly
+impenetrable thickets, the continual dodging of the road which made haste
+to plunge again into the covert, we had a fine sense of woods, and
+spring-time, and the open air.
+
+Our driver gave me a lecture by the way on Californian trees—a thing I
+was much in need of, having fallen among painters who know the name of
+nothing, and Mexicans who know the name of nothing in English.  He taught
+me the madrona, the manzanita, the buck-eye, the maple; he showed me the
+crested mountain quail; he showed me where some young redwoods were
+already spiring heavenwards from the ruins of the old; for in this
+district all had already perished: redwoods and redskins, the two noblest
+indigenous living things, alike condemned.
+
+At length, in a lonely dell, we came on a huge wooden gate with a sign
+upon it like an inn.  “The Petrified Forest.  Proprietor: C. Evans,” ran
+the legend.  Within, on a knoll of sward, was the house of the
+proprietor, and another smaller house hard by to serve as a museum, where
+photographs and petrifactions were retailed.  It was a pure little isle
+of touristry among these solitary hills.
+
+The proprietor was a brave old white-faced Swede.  He had wandered this
+way, Heaven knows how, and taken up his acres—I forget how many years
+ago—all alone, bent double with sciatica, and with six bits in his pocket
+and an axe upon his shoulder.  Long, useless years of seafaring had thus
+discharged him at the end, penniless and sick.  Without doubt he had
+tried his luck at the diggings, and got no good from that; without doubt
+he had loved the bottle, and lived the life of Jack ashore.  But at the
+end of these adventures, here he came; and, the place hitting his fancy,
+down he sat to make a new life of it, far from crimps and the salt sea.
+And the very sight of his ranche had done him good.  It was “the
+handsomest spot in the Californy mountains.”  “Isn’t it handsome, now?”
+he said.  Every penny he makes goes into that ranche to make it
+handsomer.  Then the climate, with the sea-breeze every afternoon in the
+hottest summer weather, had gradually cured the sciatica; and his sister
+and niece were now domesticated with him for company—or, rather, the
+niece came only once in the two days, teaching music the meanwhile in the
+valley.  And then, for a last piece of luck, “the handsomest spot in the
+Californy mountains” had produced a petrified forest, which Mr. Evans now
+shows at the modest figure of half a dollar a head, or two-thirds of his
+capital when he first came there with an axe and a sciatica.
+
+This tardy favourite of fortune—hobbling a little, I think, as if in
+memory of the sciatica, but with not a trace that I can remember of the
+sea—thoroughly ruralized from head to foot, proceeded to escort us up the
+hill behind his house.
+
+“Who first found the forest?” asked my wife.
+
+“The first?  I was that man,” said he.  “I was cleaning up the pasture
+for my beasts, when I found _this_”—kicking a great redwood seven feet in
+diameter, that lay there on its side, hollow heart, clinging lumps of
+bark, all changed into gray stone, with veins of quartz between what had
+been the layers of the wood.
+
+“Were you surprised?”
+
+“Surprised?  No!  What would I be surprised about?  What did I know about
+petrifactions—following the sea?  Petrifaction!  There was no such word
+in my language!  I knew about putrifaction, though!  I thought it was a
+stone; so would you, if you was cleaning up pasture.”
+
+And now he had a theory of his own, which I did not quite grasp, except
+that the trees had not “grewed” there.  But he mentioned, with evident
+pride, that he differed from all the scientific people who had visited
+the spot; and he flung about such words as “tufa” and “scilica” with
+careless freedom.
+
+When I mentioned I was from Scotland, “My old country,” he said; “my old
+country”—with a smiling look and a tone of real affection in his voice.
+I was mightily surprised, for he was obviously Scandinavian, and begged
+him to explain.  It seemed he had learned his English and done nearly all
+his sailing in Scotch ships.  “Out of Glasgow,” said he, “or Greenock;
+but that’s all the same—they all hail from Glasgow.” And he was so
+pleased with me for being a Scotsman, and his adopted compatriot, that he
+made me a present of a very beautiful piece of petrifaction—I believe the
+most beautiful and portable he had.
+
+Here was a man, at least, who was a Swede, a Scot, and an American,
+acknowledging some kind allegiance to three lands.  Mr. Wallace’s
+Scoto-Circassian will not fail to come before the reader.  I have myself
+met and spoken with a Fifeshire German, whose combination of abominable
+accents struck me dumb.  But, indeed, I think we all belong to many
+countries.  And perhaps this habit of much travel, and the engendering of
+scattered friendships, may prepare the euthanasia of ancient nations.
+
+And the forest itself?  Well, on a tangled, briery hillside—for the
+pasture would bear a little further cleaning up, to my eyes—there lie
+scattered thickly various lengths of petrified trunk, such as the one
+already mentioned.  It is very curious, of course, and ancient enough, if
+that were all.  Doubtless, the heart of the geologist beats quicker at
+the sight; but, for my part, I was mightily unmoved.  Sight-seeing is the
+art of disappointment.
+
+    “There’s nothing under heaven so blue,
+    That’s fairly worth the travelling to.”
+
+But, fortunately, Heaven rewards us with many agreeable prospects and
+adventures by the way; and sometimes, when we go out to see a petrified
+forest, prepares a far more delightful curiosity, in the form of Mr.
+Evans, whom may all prosperity attend throughout a long and green old
+age.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III—NAPA WINE
+
+
+I WAS interested in Californian wine.  Indeed, I am interested in all
+wines, and have been all my life, from the raisin wine that a
+schoolfellow kept secreted in his play-box up to my last discovery, those
+notable Valtellines, that once shone upon the board of Cæsar.
+
+Some of us, kind old Pagans, watch with dread the shadows falling on the
+age: how the unconquerable worm invades the sunny terraces of France, and
+Bordeaux is no more, and the Rhone a mere Arabia Petræa.  Château Neuf is
+dead, and I have never tasted it; Hermitage—a hermitage indeed from all
+life’s sorrows—lies expiring by the river.  And in the place of these
+imperial elixirs, beautiful to every sense, gem-hued, flower-scented,
+dream-compellers:—behold upon the quays at Cette the chemicals arrayed;
+behold the analyst at Marseilles, raising hands in obsecration, attesting
+god Lyoeus, and the vats staved in, and the dishonest wines poured forth
+among the sea.  It is not Pan only; Bacchus, too, is dead.
+
+If wine is to withdraw its most poetic countenance, the sun of the white
+dinner-cloth, a deity to be invoked by two or three, all fervent, hushing
+their talk, degusting tenderly, and storing reminiscences—for a bottle of
+good wine, like a good act, shines ever in the retrospect—if wine is to
+desert us, go thy ways, old Jack!  Now we begin to have compunctions, and
+look back at the brave bottles squandered upon dinner-parties, where the
+guests drank grossly, discussing politics the while, and even the
+schoolboy “took his whack,” like liquorice water.  And at the same time,
+we look timidly forward, with a spark of hope, to where the new lands,
+already weary of producing gold, begin to green with vineyards.  A nice
+point in human history falls to be decided by Californian and Australian
+wines.
+
+Wine in California is still in the experimental stage; and when you taste
+a vintage, grave economical questions are involved.  The beginning of
+vine-planting is like the beginning of mining for the precious metals:
+the wine-grower also “Prospects.” One corner of land after another is
+tried with one kind of grape after another.  This is a failure; that is
+better; a third best.  So, bit by bit, they grope about for their Clos
+Vougeot and Lafite.  Those lodes and pockets of earth, more precious than
+the precious ores, that yield inimitable fragrance and soft fire; those
+virtuous Bonanzas, where the soil has sublimated under sun and stars to
+something finer, and the wine is bottled poetry: these still lie
+undiscovered; chaparral conceals, thicket embowers them; the miner chips
+the rock and wanders farther, and the grizzly muses undisturbed.  But
+there they bide their hour, awaiting their Columbus; and nature nurses
+and prepares them.  The smack of Californian earth shall linger on the
+palate of your grandson.
+
+Meanwhile the wine is merely a good wine; the best that I have tasted
+better than a Beaujolais, and not unlike.  But the trade is poor; it
+lives from hand to mouth, putting its all into experiments, and forced to
+sell its vintages.  To find one properly matured, and bearing its own
+name, is to be fortune’s favourite.
+
+Bearing its own name, I say, and dwell upon the innuendo.
+
+“You want to know why California wine is not drunk in the States?” a San
+Francisco wine merchant said to me, after he had shown me through his
+premises.  “Well, here’s the reason.”
+
+And opening a large cupboard, fitted with many little drawers, he
+proceeded to shower me all over with a great variety of gorgeously tinted
+labels, blue, red, or yellow, stamped with crown or coronet, and hailing
+from such a profusion of _clos_ and _chateaux_, that a single department
+could scarce have furnished forth the names.  But it was strange that all
+looked unfamiliar.
+
+“Chateau X—?” said I.  “I never heard of that.”
+
+“I dare say not,” said he.  “I had been reading one of X—’s novels.”
+
+They were all castles in Spain!  But that sure enough is the reason why
+California wine is not drunk in the States.
+
+Napa valley has been long a seat of the wine-growing industry.  It did
+not here begin, as it does too often, in the low valley lands along the
+river, but took at once to the rough foot-hills, where alone it can
+expect to prosper.  A basking inclination, and stones, to be a reservoir
+of the day’s heat, seem necessary to the soil for wine; the grossness of
+the earth must be evaporated, its marrow daily melted and refined for
+ages; until at length these clods that break below our footing, and to
+the eye appear but common earth, are truly and to the perceiving mind, a
+masterpiece of nature.  The dust of Richebourg, which the wind carries
+away, what an apotheosis of the dust!  Not man himself can seem a
+stranger child of that brown, friable powder, than the blood and sun in
+that old flask behind the faggots.
+
+A Californian vineyard, one of man’s outposts in the wilderness, has
+features of its own.  There is nothing here to remind you of the Rhine or
+Rhone, of the low _côte d’or_, or the infamous and scabby deserts of
+Champagne; but all is green, solitary, covert.  We visited two of them,
+Mr. Schram’s and Mr. M’Eckron’s, sharing the same glen.
+
+Some way down the valley below Calistoga, we turned sharply to the south
+and plunged into the thick of the wood.  A rude trail rapidly mounting; a
+little stream tinkling by on the one hand, big enough perhaps after the
+rains, but already yielding up its life; overhead and on all sides a
+bower of green and tangled thicket, still fragrant and still
+flower-bespangled by the early season, where thimble-berry played the
+part of our English hawthorn, and the buck-eyes were putting forth their
+twisted horns of blossom: through all this, we struggled toughly upwards,
+canted to and fro by the roughness of the trail, and continually switched
+across the face by sprays of leaf or blossom.  The last is no great
+inconvenience at home; but here in California it is a matter of some
+moment.  For in all woods and by every wayside there prospers an
+abominable shrub or weed, called poison-oak, whose very neighbourhood is
+venomous to some, and whose actual touch is avoided by the most
+impervious.
+
+The two houses, with their vineyards, stood each in a green niche of its
+own in this steep and narrow forest dell.  Though they were so near,
+there was already a good difference in level; and Mr. M’Eckron’s head
+must be a long way under the feet of Mr. Schram.  No more had been
+cleared than was necessary for cultivation; close around each oasis ran
+the tangled wood; the glen enfolds them; there they lie basking in sun
+and silence, concealed from all but the clouds and the mountain birds.
+
+Mr. M’Eckron’s is a bachelor establishment; a little bit of a wooden
+house, a small cellar hard by in the hillside, and a patch of vines
+planted and tended single-handed by himself.  He had but recently began;
+his vines were young, his business young also; but I thought he had the
+look of the man who succeeds.  He hailed from Greenock: he remembered his
+father putting him inside Mons Meg, and that touched me home; and we
+exchanged a word or two of Scotch, which pleased me more than you would
+fancy.
+
+Mr. Schram’s, on the other hand, is the oldest vineyard in the valley,
+eighteen years old, I think; yet he began a penniless barber, and even
+after he had broken ground up here with his black malvoisies, continued
+for long to tramp the valley with his razor.  Now, his place is the
+picture of prosperity: stuffed birds in the verandah, cellars far dug
+into the hillside, and resting on pillars like a bandit’s cave:—all
+trimness, varnish, flowers, and sunshine, among the tangled wildwood.
+Stout, smiling Mrs. Schram, who has been to Europe and apparently all
+about the States for pleasure, entertained Fanny in the verandah, while I
+was tasting wines in the cellar.  To Mr. Schram this was a solemn office;
+his serious gusto warmed my heart; prosperity had not yet wholly banished
+a certain neophite and girlish trepidation, and he followed every sip and
+read my face with proud anxiety.  I tasted all.  I tasted every variety
+and shade of Schramberger, red and white Schramberger, Burgundy
+Schramberger, Schramberger Hock, Schramberger Golden Chasselas, the
+latter with a notable bouquet, and I fear to think how many more.  Much
+of it goes to London—most, I think; and Mr. Schram has a great notion of
+the English taste.
+
+In this wild spot, I did not feel the sacredness of ancient cultivation.
+It was still raw, it was no Marathon, and no Johannisberg; yet the
+stirring sunlight, and the growing vines, and the vats and bottles in the
+cavern, made a pleasant music for the mind.  Here, also, earth’s cream
+was being skimmed and garnered; and the London customers can taste, such
+as it is, the tang of the earth in this green valley.  So local, so
+quintessential is a wine, that it seems the very birds in the verandah
+might communicate a flavour, and that romantic cellar influence the
+bottle next to be uncorked in Pimlico, and the smile of jolly Mr. Schram
+might mantle in the glass.
+
+But these are but experiments.  All things in this new land are moving
+farther on: the wine-vats and the miner’s blasting tools but picket for a
+night, like Bedouin pavillions; and to-morrow, to fresh woods!  This stir
+of change and these perpetual echoes of the moving footfall, haunt the
+land.  Men move eternally, still chasing Fortune; and, fortune found,
+still wander.  As we drove back to Calistoga, the road lay empty of mere
+passengers, but its green side was dotted with the camps of travelling
+families: one cumbered with a great waggonful of household stuff,
+settlers going to occupy a ranche they had taken up in Mendocino, or
+perhaps Tehama County; another, a party in dust coats, men and women,
+whom we found camped in a grove on the roadside, all on pleasure bent,
+with a Chinaman to cook for them, and who waved their hands to us as we
+drove by.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV—THE SCOT ABROAD
+
+
+A FEW pages back, I wrote that a man belonged, in these days, to a
+variety of countries; but the old land is still the true love, the others
+are but pleasant infidelities.  Scotland is indefinable; it has no unity
+except upon the map.  Two languages, many dialects, innumerable forms of
+piety, and countless local patriotisms and prejudices, part us among
+ourselves more widely than the extreme east and west of that great
+continent of America.  When I am at home, I feel a man from Glasgow to be
+something like a rival, a man from Barra to be more than half a
+foreigner.  Yet let us meet in some far country, and, whether we hail
+from the braes of Manor or the braes of Mar, some ready-made affection
+joins us on the instant.  It is not race.  Look at us.  One is Norse, one
+Celtic, and another Saxon.  It is not community of tongue.  We have it
+not among ourselves; and we have it almost to perfection, with English,
+or Irish, or American.  It is no tie of faith, for we detest each other’s
+errors.  And yet somewhere, deep down in the heart of each one of us,
+something yearns for the old land, and the old kindly people.
+
+Of all mysteries of the human heart, this is perhaps the most
+inscrutable.  There is no special loveliness in that gray country, with
+its rainy, sea-beat archipelago; its fields of dark mountains; its
+unsightly places, black with coal; its treeless, sour, unfriendly looking
+corn-lands; its quaint, gray, castled city, where the bells clash of a
+Sunday, and the wind squalls, and the salt showers fly and beat.  I do
+not even know if I desire to live there; but let me hear, in some far
+land, a kindred voice sing out, “Oh, why left I my hame?” and it seems at
+once as if no beauty under the kind heavens, and no society of the wise
+and good, can repay me for my absence from my country.  And though I
+think I would rather die elsewhere, yet in my heart of hearts I long to
+be buried among good Scots clods.  I will say it fairly, it grows on me
+with every year: there are no stars so lovely as Edinburgh street-lamps.
+When I forget thee, auld Reekie, may my right hand forget its cunning!
+
+The happiest lot on earth is to be born a Scotchman.  You must pay for it
+in many ways, as for all other advantages on earth.  You have to learn
+the paraphrases and the shorter catechism; you generally take to drink;
+your youth, as far as I can find out, is a time of louder war against
+society, of more outcry and tears and turmoil, than if you had been born,
+for instance, in England.  But somehow life is warmer and closer; the
+hearth burns more redly; the lights of home shine softer on the rainy
+street; the very names, endeared in verse and music, cling nearer round
+our hearts.  An Englishman may meet an Englishman to-morrow, upon
+Chimborazo, and neither of them care; but when the Scotch wine-grower
+told me of Mons Meg, it was like magic.
+
+    “From the dim shieling on the misty island
+       Mountains divide us, and a world of seas;
+    Yet still our hearts are true, our hearts are Highland,
+       And we, in dreams, behold the Hebrides.”
+
+And, Highland and Lowland, all our hearts are Scotch.
+
+Only a few days after I had seen M’Eckron, a message reached me in my
+cottage.  It was a Scotchman who had come down a long way from the hills
+to market.  He had heard there was a countryman in Calistoga, and came
+round to the hotel to see him.  We said a few words to each other; we had
+not much to say—should never have seen each other had we stayed at home,
+separated alike in space and in society; and then we shook hands, and he
+went his way again to his ranche among the hills, and that was all.
+
+Another Scotchman there was, a resident, who for the more love of the
+common country, douce, serious, religious man, drove me all about the
+valley, and took as much interest in me as if I had been his son: more,
+perhaps; for the son has faults too keenly felt, while the abstract
+countryman is perfect—like a whiff of peats.
+
+And there was yet another.  Upon him I came suddenly, as he was calmly
+entering my cottage, his mind quite evidently bent on plunder: a man of
+about fifty, filthy, ragged, roguish, with a chimney-pot hat and a tail
+coat, and a pursing of his mouth that might have been envied by an elder
+of the kirk.  He had just such a face as I have seen a dozen times behind
+the plate.
+
+“Hullo, sir!” I cried.  “Where are you going?”
+
+He turned round without a quiver.
+
+“You’re a Scotchman, sir?” he said gravely.  “So am I; I come from
+Aberdeen.  This is my card,” presenting me with a piece of pasteboard
+which he had raked out of some gutter in the period of the rains.  “I was
+just examining this palm,” he continued, indicating the misbegotten plant
+before our door, “which is the largest sp_a_cimen I have yet observed in
+Califoarnia.”
+
+There were four or five larger within sight.  But where was the use of
+argument?  He produced a tape-line, made me help him to measure the tree
+at the level of the ground, and entered the figures in a large and filthy
+pocket-book, all with the gravity of Solomon.  He then thanked me
+profusely, remarking that such little services were due between
+countrymen; shook hands with me, “for add lang syne,” as he said; and
+took himself solemnly away, radiating dirt and humbug as he went.
+
+A month or two after this encounter of mine, there came a Scot to
+Sacramento—perhaps from Aberdeen.  Anyway, there never was any one more
+Scotch in this wide world.  He could sing and dance, and drink, I
+presume; and he played the pipes with vigour and success.  All the Scotch
+in Sacramento became infatuated with him, and spent their spare time and
+money, driving him about in an open cab, between drinks, while he blew
+himself scarlet at the pipes.  This is a very sad story.  After he had
+borrowed money from every one, he and his pipes suddenly disappeared from
+Sacramento, and when I last heard, the police were looking for him.
+
+I cannot say how this story amused me, when I felt myself so thoroughly
+ripe on both sides to be duped in the same way.
+
+It is at least a curious thing, to conclude, that the races which wander
+widest, Jews and Scotch, should be the most clannish in the world.  But
+perhaps these two are cause and effect: “For ye were strangers in the
+land of Egypt.”
+
+
+
+
+PART II—WITH THE CHILDREN OF ISRAEL
+
+
+CHAPTER I.—TO INTRODUCE MR. KELMAR
+
+
+ONE thing in this new country very particularly strikes a stranger, and
+that is the number of antiquities.  Already there have been many cycles
+of population succeeding each other, and passing away and leaving behind
+them relics.  These, standing on into changed times, strike the
+imagination as forcibly as any pyramid or feudal tower.  The towns, like
+the vineyards, are experimentally founded: they grow great and prosper by
+passing occasions; and when the lode comes to an end, and the miners move
+elsewhere, the town remains behind them, like Palmyra in the desert.  I
+suppose there are, in no country in the world, so many deserted towns as
+here in California.
+
+The whole neighbourhood of Mount Saint Helena, now so quiet and sylvan,
+was once alive with mining camps and villages.  Here there would be two
+thousand souls under canvas; there one thousand or fifteen hundred
+ensconced, as if for ever, in a town of comfortable houses.  But the luck
+had failed, the mines petered out; and the army of miners had departed,
+and left this quarter of the world to the rattlesnakes and deer and
+grizzlies, and to the slower but steadier advance of husbandry.
+
+It was with an eye on one of these deserted places, Pine Flat, on the
+Geysers road, that we had come first to Calistoga.  There is something
+singularly enticing in the idea of going, rent-free, into a ready-made
+house.  And to the British merchant, sitting at home at ease, it may
+appear that, with such a roof over your head and a spring of clear water
+hard by, the whole problem of the squatter’s existence would be solved.
+Food, however, has yet to be considered, I will go as far as most people
+on tinned meats; some of the brightest moments of my life were passed
+over tinned mulli-gatawney in the cabin of a sixteen-ton schooner,
+storm-stayed in Portree Bay; but after suitable experiments, I pronounce
+authoritatively that man cannot live by tins alone.  Fresh meat must be
+had on an occasion.  It is true that the great Foss, driving by along the
+Geysers road, wooden-faced, but glorified with legend, might have been
+induced to bring us meat, but the great Foss could hardly bring us milk.
+To take a cow would have involved taking a field of grass and a milkmaid;
+after which it would have been hardly worth while to pause, and we might
+have added to our colony a flock of sheep and an experienced butcher.
+
+It is really very disheartening how we depend on other people in this
+life.  “Mihi est propositum,” as you may see by the motto, “id quod
+regibus;” and behold it cannot be carried out, unless I find a neighbour
+rolling in cattle.
+
+Now, my principal adviser in this matter was one whom I will call Kelmar.
+That was not what he called himself, but as soon as I set eyes on him, I
+knew it was or ought to be his name; I am sure it will be his name among
+the angels.  Kelmar was the store-keeper, a Russian Jew, good-natured, in
+a very thriving way of business, and, on equal terms, one of the most
+serviceable of men.  He also had something of the expression of a Scotch
+country elder, who, by some peculiarity, should chance to be a Hebrew.
+He had a projecting under lip, with which he continually smiled, or
+rather smirked.  Mrs. Kelmar was a singularly kind woman; and the oldest
+son had quite a dark and romantic bearing, and might be heard on summer
+evenings playing sentimental airs on the violin.
+
+I had no idea, at the time I made his acquaintance, what an important
+person Kelmar was.  But the Jew store-keepers of California, profiting at
+once by the needs and habits of the people, have made themselves in too
+many cases the tyrants of the rural population.  Credit is offered, is
+pressed on the new customer, and when once he is beyond his depth, the
+tune changes, and he is from thenceforth a white slave.  I believe, even
+from the little I saw, that Kelmar, if he choose to put on the screw,
+could send half the settlers packing in a radius of seven or eight miles
+round Calistoga.  These are continually paying him, but are never
+suffered to get out of debt.  He palms dull goods upon them, for they
+dare not refuse to buy; he goes and dines with them when he is on an
+outing, and no man is loudlier welcomed; he is their family friend, the
+director of their business, and, to a degree elsewhere unknown in modern
+days, their king.
+
+For some reason, Kelmar always shook his head at the mention of Pine
+Flat, and for some days I thought he disapproved of the whole scheme and
+was proportionately sad.  One fine morning, however, he met me, wreathed
+in smiles.  He had found the very place for me—Silverado, another old
+mining town, right up the mountain.  Rufe Hanson, the hunter, could take
+care of us—fine people the Hansons; we should be close to the Toll House,
+where the Lakeport stage called daily; it was the best place for my
+health, besides.  Rufe had been consumptive, and was now quite a strong
+man, ain’t it?  In short, the place and all its accompaniments seemed
+made for us on purpose.
+
+He took me to his back door, whence, as from every point of Calistoga,
+Mount Saint Helena could be seen towering in the air.  There, in the
+nick, just where the eastern foothills joined the mountain, and she
+herself began to rise above the zone of forest—there was Silverado.  The
+name had already pleased me; the high station pleased me still more.  I
+began to inquire with some eagerness.  It was but a little while ago that
+Silverado was a great place.  The mine—a silver mine, of course—had
+promised great things.  There was quite a lively population, with several
+hotels and boarding-houses; and Kelmar himself had opened a branch store,
+and done extremely well—“Ain’t it?” he said, appealing to his wife.  And
+she said, “Yes; extremely well.” Now there was no one living in the town
+but Rufe the hunter; and once more I heard Rufe’s praises by the yard,
+and this time sung in chorus.
+
+I could not help perceiving at the time that there was something
+underneath; that no unmixed desire to have us comfortably settled had
+inspired the Kelmars with this flow of words.  But I was impatient to be
+gone, to be about my kingly project; and when we were offered seats in
+Kelmar’s waggon, I accepted on the spot.  The plan of their next Sunday’s
+outing took them, by good fortune, over the border into Lake County.
+They would carry us so far, drop us at the Toll House, present us to the
+Hansons, and call for us again on Monday morning early.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II—FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF SILVERADO
+
+
+WE were to leave by six precisely; that was solemnly pledged on both
+sides; and a messenger came to us the last thing at night, to remind us
+of the hour.  But it was eight before we got clear of Calistoga: Kelmar,
+Mrs. Kelmar, a friend of theirs whom we named Abramina, her little
+daughter, my wife, myself, and, stowed away behind us, a cluster of
+ship’s coffee-kettles.  These last were highly ornamental in the sheen of
+their bright tin, but I could invent no reason for their presence.  Our
+carriageful reckoned up, as near as we could get at it, some three
+hundred years to the six of us.  Four of the six, besides, were Hebrews.
+But I never, in all my life, was conscious of so strong an atmosphere of
+holiday.  No word was spoken but of pleasure; and even when we drove in
+silence, nods and smiles went round the party like refreshments.
+
+The sun shone out of a cloudless sky.  Close at the zenith rode the
+belated moon, still clearly visible, and, along one margin, even bright.
+The wind blew a gale from the north; the trees roared; the corn and the
+deep grass in the valley fled in whitening surges; the dust towered into
+the air along the road and dispersed like the smoke of battle.  It was
+clear in our teeth from the first, and for all the windings of the road
+it managed to keep clear in our teeth until the end.
+
+For some two miles we rattled through the valley, skirting the eastern
+foothills; then we struck off to the right, through haugh-land, and
+presently, crossing a dry water-course, entered the Toll road, or, to be
+more local, entered on “the grade.”  The road mounts the near shoulder of
+Mount Saint Helena, bound northward into Lake County.  In one place it
+skirts along the edge of a narrow and deep canyon, filled with trees, and
+I was glad, indeed, not to be driven at this point by the dashing Foss.
+Kelmar, with his unvarying smile, jogging to the motion of the trap,
+drove for all the world like a good, plain, country clergyman at home;
+and I profess I blessed him unawares for his timidity.
+
+Vineyards and deep meadows, islanded and framed with thicket, gave place
+more and more as we ascended to woods of oak and madrona, dotted with
+enormous pines.  It was these pines, as they shot above the lower wood,
+that produced that pencilling of single trees I had so often remarked
+from the valley.  Thence, looking up and from however far, each fir
+stands separate against the sky no bigger than an eyelash; and all
+together lend a quaint, fringed aspect to the hills.  The oak is no baby;
+even the madrona, upon these spurs of Mount Saint Helena, comes to a fine
+bulk and ranks with forest trees—but the pines look down upon the rest
+for underwood.  As Mount Saint Helena among her foothills, so these dark
+giants out-top their fellow-vegetables.  Alas! if they had left the
+redwoods, the pines, in turn, would have been dwarfed.  But the redwoods,
+fallen from their high estate, are serving as family bedsteads, or yet
+more humbly as field fences, along all Napa Valley.
+
+A rough smack of resin was in the air, and a crystal mountain purity.  It
+came pouring over these green slopes by the oceanful.  The woods sang
+aloud, and gave largely of their healthful breath.  Gladness seemed to
+inhabit these upper zones, and we had left indifference behind us in the
+valley.  “I to the hills lift mine eyes!”  There are days in a life when
+thus to climb out of the lowlands, seems like scaling heaven.
+
+As we continued to ascend, the wind fell upon us with increasing
+strength.  It was a wonder how the two stout horses managed to pull us up
+that steep incline and still face the athletic opposition of the wind, or
+how their great eyes were able to endure the dust.  Ten minutes after we
+went by, a tree fell, blocking the road; and even before us leaves were
+thickly strewn, and boughs had fallen, large enough to make the passage
+difficult.  But now we were hard by the summit.  The road crosses the
+ridge, just in the nick that Kelmar showed me from below, and then,
+without pause, plunges down a deep, thickly wooded glen on the farther
+side.  At the highest point a trail strikes up the main hill to the
+leftward; and that leads to Silverado.  A hundred yards beyond, and in a
+kind of elbow of the glen, stands the Toll House Hotel.  We came up the
+one side, were caught upon the summit by the whole weight of the wind as
+it poured over into Napa Valley, and a minute after had drawn up in
+shelter, but all buffetted and breathless, at the Toll House door.
+
+A water-tank, and stables, and a gray house of two stories, with gable
+ends and a verandah, are jammed hard against the hillside, just where a
+stream has cut for itself a narrow canyon, filled with pines.  The pines
+go right up overhead; a little more and the stream might have played,
+like a fire-hose, on the Toll House roof.  In front the ground drops as
+sharply as it rises behind.  There is just room for the road and a sort
+of promontory of croquet ground, and then you can lean over the edge and
+look deep below you through the wood.  I said croquet _ground_, not
+_green_; for the surface was of brown, beaten earth.  The toll-bar itself
+was the only other note of originality: a long beam, turning on a post,
+and kept slightly horizontal by a counterweight of stones.  Regularly
+about sundown this rude barrier was swung, like a derrick, across the
+road and made fast, I think, to a tree upon the farther side.
+
+On our arrival there followed a gay scene in the bar.  I was presented to
+Mr. Corwin, the landlord; to Mr. Jennings, the engineer, who lives there
+for his health; to Mr. Hoddy, a most pleasant little gentleman, once a
+member of the Ohio legislature, again the editor of a local paper, and
+now, with undiminished dignity, keeping the Toll House bar.  I had a
+number of drinks and cigars bestowed on me, and enjoyed a famous
+opportunity of seeing Kelmar in his glory, friendly, radiant, smiling,
+steadily edging one of the ship’s kettles on the reluctant Corwin.
+
+Corwin, plainly aghast, resisted gallantly, and for that bout victory
+crowned his arms.
+
+At last we set forth for Silverado on foot.  Kelmar and his jolly Jew
+girls were full of the sentiment of Sunday outings, breathed geniality
+and vagueness, and suffered a little vile boy from the hotel to lead them
+here and there about the woods.  For three people all so old, so bulky in
+body, and belonging to a race so venerable, they could not but surprise
+us by their extreme and almost imbecile youthfulness of spirit.  They
+were only going to stay ten minutes at the Toll House; had they not
+twenty long miles of road before them on the other side?  Stay to dinner?
+Not they!  Put up the horses? Never.  Let us attach them to the verandah
+by a wisp of straw rope, such as would not have held a person’s hat on
+that blustering day.  And with all these protestations of hurry, they
+proved irresponsible like children.  Kelmar himself, shrewd old Russian
+Jew, with a smirk that seemed just to have concluded a bargain to its
+satisfaction, intrusted himself and us devoutly to that boy.  Yet the boy
+was patently fallacious; and for that matter a most unsympathetic urchin,
+raised apparently on gingerbread.  He was bent on his own pleasure,
+nothing else; and Kelmar followed him to his ruin, with the same shrewd
+smirk.  If the boy said there was “a hole there in the hill”—a hole, pure
+and simple, neither more nor less—Kelmar and his Jew girls would follow
+him a hundred yards to look complacently down that hole.  For two hours
+we looked for houses; and for two hours they followed us, smelling trees,
+picking flowers, foisting false botany on the unwary.  Had we taken five,
+with that vile lad to head them off on idle divagations, for five they
+would have smiled and stumbled through the woods.
+
+However, we came forth at length, and as by accident, upon a lawn, sparse
+planted like an orchard, but with forest instead of fruit trees.  That
+was the site of Silverado mining town.  A piece of ground was levelled
+up, where Kelmar’s store had been; and facing that we saw Rufe Hanson’s
+house, still bearing on its front the legend _Silverado Hotel_.  Not
+another sign of habitation.  Silverado town had all been carted from the
+scene; one of the houses was now the school-house far down the road; one
+was gone here, one there, but all were gone away.
+
+It was now a sylvan solitude, and the silence was unbroken but by the
+great, vague voice of the wind.  Some days before our visit, a grizzly
+bear had been sporting round the Hansons’ chicken-house.
+
+Mrs. Hanson was at home alone, we found.  Rufe had been out after a
+“bar,” had risen late, and was now gone, it did not clearly appear
+whither.  Perhaps he had had wind of Kelmar’s coming, and was now
+ensconced among the underwood, or watching us from the shoulder of the
+mountain.  We, hearing there were no houses to be had, were for
+immediately giving up all hopes of Silverado.  But this, somehow, was not
+to Kelmar’s fancy.  He first proposed that we should “camp someveres
+around, ain’t it?” waving his hand cheerily as though to weave a spell;
+and when that was firmly rejected, he decided that we must take up house
+with the Hansons.  Mrs. Hanson had been, from the first, flustered,
+subdued, and a little pale; but from this proposition she recoiled with
+haggard indignation.  So did we, who would have preferred, in a manner of
+speaking, death.  But Kelmar was not to be put by.  He edged Mrs. Hanson
+into a corner, where for a long time he threatened her with his
+forefinger, like a character in Dickens; and the poor woman, driven to
+her entrenchments, at last remembered with a shriek that there were still
+some houses at the tunnel.
+
+Thither we went; the Jews, who should already have been miles into Lake
+County, still cheerily accompanying us.  For about a furlong we followed
+a good road alone, the hillside through the forest, until suddenly that
+road widened out and came abruptly to an end.  A canyon, woody below,
+red, rocky, and naked overhead, was here walled across by a dump of
+rolling stones, dangerously steep, and from twenty to thirty feet in
+height.  A rusty iron chute on wooden legs came flying, like a monstrous
+gargoyle, across the parapet.  It was down this that they poured the
+precious ore; and below here the carts stood to wait their lading, and
+carry it mill-ward down the mountain.
+
+The whole canyon was so entirely blocked, as if by some rude guerilla
+fortification, that we could only mount by lengths of wooden ladder,
+fixed in the hillside.  These led us round the farther corner of the
+dump; and when they were at an end, we still persevered over loose rubble
+and wading deep in poison oak, till we struck a triangular platform,
+filling up the whole glen, and shut in on either hand by bold projections
+of the mountain.  Only in front the place was open like the proscenium of
+a theatre, and we looked forth into a great realm of air, and down upon
+treetops and hilltops, and far and near on wild and varied country.  The
+place still stood as on the day it was deserted: a line of iron rails
+with a bifurcation; a truck in working order; a world of lumber, old
+wood, old iron; a blacksmith’s forge on one side, half buried in the
+leaves of dwarf madronas; and on the other, an old brown wooden house.
+
+Fanny and I dashed at the house.  It consisted of three rooms, and was so
+plastered against the hill, that one room was right atop of another, that
+the upper floor was more than twice as large as the lower, and that all
+three apartments must be entered from a different side and level.  Not a
+window-sash remained.
+
+The door of the lower room was smashed, and one panel hung in splinters.
+We entered that, and found a fair amount of rubbish: sand and gravel that
+had been sifted in there by the mountain winds; straw, sticks, and
+stones; a table, a barrel; a plate-rack on the wall; two home-made
+bootjacks, signs of miners and their boots; and a pair of papers pinned
+on the boarding, headed respectively “Funnel No. 1,” and “Funnel No. 2,”
+but with the tails torn away.  The window, sashless of course, was choked
+with the green and sweetly smelling foliage of a bay; and through a chink
+in the floor, a spray of poison oak had shot up and was handsomely
+prospering in the interior.  It was my first care to cut away that poison
+oak, Fanny standing by at a respectful distance.  That was our first
+improvement by which we took possession.
+
+The room immediately above could only be entered by a plank propped
+against the threshold, along which the intruder must foot it gingerly,
+clutching for support to sprays of poison oak, the proper product of the
+country.  Herein was, on either hand, a triple tier of beds, where miners
+had once lain; and the other gable was pierced by a sashless window and a
+doorless doorway opening on the air of heaven, five feet above the
+ground.  As for the third room, which entered squarely from the ground
+level, but higher up the hill and farther up the canyon, it contained
+only rubbish and the uprights for another triple tier of beds.
+
+The whole building was overhung by a bold, lion-like, red rock. Poison
+oak, sweet bay trees, calcanthus, brush, and chaparral, grew freely but
+sparsely all about it. In front, in the strong sunshine, the platform lay
+overstrewn with busy litter, as though the labours of the mine might
+begin again to-morrow in the morning.
+
+Following back into the canyon, among the mass of rotting plant and
+through the flowering bushes, we came to a great crazy staging, with a
+wry windless on the top; and clambering up, we could look into an open
+shaft, leading edgeways down into the bowels of the mountain, trickling
+with water, and lit by some stray sun-gleams, whence I know not.  In that
+quiet place the still, far-away tinkle of the water-drops was loudly
+audible.  Close by, another shaft led edgeways up into the superincumbent
+shoulder of the hill.  It lay partly open; and sixty or a hundred feet
+above our head, we could see the strata propped apart by solid wooden
+wedges, and a pine, half undermined, precariously nodding on the verge.
+Here also a rugged, horizontal tunnel ran straight into the unsunned
+bowels of the rock.  This secure angle in the mountain’s flank was, even
+on this wild day, as still as my lady’s chamber.  But in the tunnel a
+cold, wet draught tempestuously blew.  Nor have I ever known that place
+otherwise than cold and windy.
+
+Such was our fist prospect of Juan Silverado.  I own I had looked for
+something different: a clique of neighbourly houses on a village green,
+we shall say, all empty to be sure, but swept and varnished; a trout
+stream brawling by; great elms or chestnuts, humming with bees and nested
+in by song-birds; and the mountains standing round about, as at
+Jerusalem.  Here, mountain and house and the old tools of industry were
+all alike rusty and downfalling.  The hill was here wedged up, and there
+poured forth its bowels in a spout of broken mineral; man with his picks
+and powder, and nature with her own great blasting tools of sun and rain,
+labouring together at the ruin of that proud mountain.  The view up the
+canyon was a glimpse of devastation; dry red minerals sliding together,
+here and there a crag, here and there dwarf thicket clinging in the
+general glissade, and over all a broken outline trenching on the blue of
+heaven.  Downwards indeed, from our rock eyrie, we behold the greener
+side of nature; and the bearing of the pines and the sweet smell of bays
+and nutmegs commanded themselves gratefully to our senses.  One way and
+another, now the die was cast.  Silverado be it!
+
+After we had got back to the Toll House, the Jews were not long of
+striking forward.  But I observed that one of the Hanson lads came down,
+before their departure, and returned with a ship’s kettle.  Happy
+Hansons!  Nor was it until after Kelmar was gone, if I remember rightly,
+that Rufe put in an appearance to arrange the details of our
+installation.
+
+The latter part of the day, Fanny and I sat in the verandah of the Toll
+House, utterly stunned by the uproar of the wind among the trees on the
+other side of the valley.  Sometimes, we would have it it was like a sea,
+but it was not various enough for that; and again, we thought it like the
+roar of a cataract, but it was too changeful for the cataract; and then
+we would decide, speaking in sleepy voices, that it could be compared
+with nothing but itself.  My mind was entirely preoccupied by the noise.
+I hearkened to it by the hour, gapingly hearkened, and let my cigarette
+go out.  Sometimes the wind would make a sally nearer hand, and send a
+shrill, whistling crash among the foliage on our side of the glen; and
+sometimes a back-draught would strike into the elbow where we sat, and
+cast the gravel and torn leaves into our faces.  But for the most part,
+this great, streaming gale passed unweariedly by us into Napa Valley, not
+two hundred yards away, visible by the tossing boughs, stunningly
+audible, and yet not moving a hair upon our heads.  So it blew all night
+long while I was writing up my journal, and after we were in bed, under a
+cloudless, starset heaven; and so it was blowing still next morning when
+we rose.
+
+It was a laughable thought to us, what had become of our cheerful,
+wandering Hebrews.  We could not suppose they had reached a destination.
+The meanest boy could lead them miles out of their way to see a
+gopher-hole.  Boys, we felt to be their special danger; none others were
+of that exact pitch of cheerful irrelevancy to exercise a kindred sway
+upon their minds: but before the attractions of a boy their most settled
+resolutions would be war.  We thought we could follow in fancy these
+three aged Hebrew truants wandering in and out on hilltop and in thicket,
+a demon boy trotting far ahead, their will-o’-the-wisp conductor; and at
+last about midnight, the wind still roaring in the darkness, we had a
+vision of all three on their knees upon a mountain-top around a
+glow-worm.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III. THE RETURN
+
+
+NEXT morning we were up by half-past five, according to agreement, and it
+was ten by the clock before our Jew boys returned to pick us up.  Kelmar,
+Mrs. Kelmar, and Abramina, all smiling from ear to ear, and full of tales
+of the hospitality they had found on the other side.  It had not gone
+unrewarded; for I observed with interest that the ship’s kettles, all but
+one, had been “placed.”  Three Lake County families, at least, endowed
+for life with a ship’s kettle.  Come, this was no misspent Sunday.  The
+absence of the kettles told its own story: our Jews said nothing about
+them; but, on the other hand, they said many kind and comely things about
+the people they had met.  The two women, in particular, had been charmed
+out of themselves by the sight of a young girl surrounded by her
+admirers; all evening, it appeared, they had been triumphing together in
+the girl’s innocent successes, and to this natural and unselfish joy they
+gave expression in language that was beautiful by its simplicity and
+truth.
+
+Take them for all in all, few people have done my heart more good; they
+seemed so thoroughly entitled to happiness, and to enjoy it in so large a
+measure and so free from after-thought; almost they persuaded me to be a
+Jew.  There was, indeed, a chink of money in their talk.  They
+particularly commanded people who were well to do.  “_He_ don’t
+care—ain’t it?” was their highest word of commendation to an individual
+fate; and here I seem to grasp the root of their philosophy—it was to be
+free from care, to be free to make these Sunday wanderings, that they so
+eagerly pursued after wealth; and all this carefulness was to be
+careless.  The fine, good humour of all three seemed to declare they had
+attained their end.  Yet there was the other side to it; and the
+recipients of kettles perhaps cared greatly.
+
+No sooner had they returned, than the scene of yesterday began again.
+The horses were not even tied with a straw rope this time—it was not
+worth while; and Kelmar disappeared into the bar, leaving them under a
+tree on the other side of the road.  I had to devote myself.  I stood
+under the shadow of that tree for, I suppose, hard upon an hour, and had
+not the heart to be angry.  Once some one remembered me, and brought me
+out half a tumblerful of the playful, innocuous American cocktail.  I
+drank it, and lo! veins of living fire ran down my leg; and then a focus
+of conflagration remained seated in my stomach, not unpleasantly, for
+quarter of an hour.  I love these sweet, fiery pangs, but I will not
+court them.  The bulk of the time I spent in repeating as much French
+poetry as I could remember to the horses, who seemed to enjoy it hugely.
+And now it went—
+
+    “O ma vieille Font-georges
+    Où volent les rouges-gorges:”
+
+and again, to a more trampling measure—
+
+    “Et tout tremble, Irun, Coïmbre,
+       Sautander, Almodovar,
+    Sitôt qu’on entend le timbre
+       Des cymbales do Bivar.”
+
+The redbreasts and the brooks of Europe, in that dry and songless land;
+brave old names and wars, strong cities, cymbals, and bright armour, in
+that nook of the mountain, sacred only to the Indian and the bear!  This
+is still the strangest thing in all man’s travelling, that he should
+carry about with him incongruous memories.  There is no foreign land; it
+is the traveller only that is foreign, and now and again, by a flash of
+recollection, lights up the contrasts of the earth.
+
+But while I was thus wandering in my fancy, great feats had been
+transacted in the bar.  Corwin the bold had fallen, Kelmar was again
+crowned with laurels, and the last of the ship’s kettles had changed
+hands.  If I had ever doubted the purity of Kelmar’s motives, if I had
+ever suspected him of a single eye to business in his eternal dallyings,
+now at least, when the last kettle was disposed of, my suspicions must
+have been allayed.  I dare not guess how much more time was wasted; nor
+how often we drove off, merely to drive back again and renew interrupted
+conversations about nothing, before the Toll House was fairly left
+behind.  Alas! and not a mile down the grade there stands a ranche in a
+sunny vineyard, and here we must all dismount again and enter.
+
+Only the old lady was at home, Mrs. Guele, a brown old Swiss dame, the
+picture of honesty; and with her we drank a bottle of wine and had an
+age-long conversation, which would have been highly delightful if Fanny
+and I had not been faint with hunger.  The ladies each narrated the story
+of her marriage, our two Hebrews with the prettiest combination of
+sentiment and financial bathos.  Abramina, specially, endeared herself
+with every word.  She was as simple, natural, and engaging as a kid that
+should have been brought up to the business of a money-changer.  One
+touch was so resplendently Hebraic that I cannot pass it over.  When her
+“old man” wrote home for her from America, her old man’s family would not
+intrust her with the money for the passage, till she had bound herself by
+an oath—on her knees, I think she said—not to employ it otherwise.
+
+This had tickled Abramina hugely, but I think it tickled me fully more.
+
+Mrs. Guele told of her home-sickness up here in the long winters; of her
+honest, country-woman troubles and alarms upon the journey; how in the
+bank at Frankfort she had feared lest the banker, after having taken her
+cheque, should deny all knowledge of it—a fear I have myself every time I
+go to a bank; and how crossing the Luneburger Heath, an old lady,
+witnessing her trouble and finding whither she was bound, had given her
+“the blessing of a person eighty years old, which would be sure to bring
+her safely to the States.  And the first thing I did,” added Mrs. Guele,
+“was to fall downstairs.”
+
+At length we got out of the house, and some of us into the trap,
+when—judgment of Heaven!—here came Mr. Guele from his vineyard.  So
+another quarter of an hour went by; till at length, at our earnest
+pleading, we set forth again in earnest, Fanny and I white-faced and
+silent, but the Jews still smiling.  The heart fails me.  There was yet
+another stoppage!  And we drove at last into Calistoga past two in the
+afternoon, Fanny and I having breakfasted at six in the morning, eight
+mortal hours before.  We were a pallid couple; but still the Jews were
+smiling.
+
+So ended our excursion with the village usurers; and, now that it was
+done, we had no more idea of the nature of the business, nor of the part
+we had been playing in it, than the child unborn.  That all the people we
+had met were the slaves of Kelmar, though in various degrees of
+servitude; that we ourselves had been sent up the mountain in the
+interests of none but Kelmar; that the money we laid out, dollar by
+dollar, cent by cent, and through the hands of various intermediaries,
+should all hop ultimately into Kelmar’s till;—these were facts that we
+only grew to recognize in the course of time and by the accumulation of
+evidence.  At length all doubt was quieted, when one of the
+kettle-holders confessed.  Stopping his trap in the moonlight, a little
+way out of Calistoga, he told me, in so many words, that he dare not show
+face therewith an empty pocket.  “You see, I don’t mind if it was only
+five dollars, Mr. Stevens,” he said, “but I must give Mr. Kelmar
+_something_.”
+
+Even now, when the whole tyranny is plain to me, I cannot find it in my
+heart to be as angry as perhaps I should be with the Hebrew tyrant.  The
+whole game of business is beggar my neighbour; and though perhaps that
+game looks uglier when played at such close quarters and on so small a
+scale, it is none the more intrinsically inhumane for that.  The village
+usurer is not so sad a feature of humanity and human progress as the
+millionaire manufacturer, fattening on the toil and loss of thousands,
+and yet declaiming from the platform against the greed and dishonesty of
+landlords.  If it were fair for Cobden to buy up land from owners whom he
+thought unconscious of its proper value, it was fair enough for my
+Russian Jew to give credit to his farmers.  Kelmar, if he was unconscious
+of the beam in his own eye, was at least silent in the matter of his
+brother’s mote.
+
+
+
+
+THE ACT OF SQUATTING
+
+
+THERE were four of us squatters—myself and my wife, the King and Queen of
+Silverado; Sam, the Crown Prince; and Chuchu, the Grand Duke.  Chuchu, a
+setter crossed with spaniel, was the most unsuited for a rough life.  He
+had been nurtured tenderly in the society of ladies; his heart was large
+and soft; he regarded the sofa-cushion as a bed-rook necessary of
+existence.  Though about the size of a sheep, he loved to sit in ladies’
+laps; he never said a bad word in all his blameless days; and if he had
+seen a flute, I am sure he could have played upon it by nature.  It may
+seem hard to say it of a dog, but Chuchu was a tame cat.
+
+The king and queen, the grand duke, and a basket of cold provender for
+immediate use, set forth from Calistoga in a double buggy; the crown
+prince, on horseback, led the way like an outrider.  Bags and boxes and a
+second-hand stove were to follow close upon our heels by Hanson’s team.
+
+It was a beautiful still day; the sky was one field of azure.  Not a leaf
+moved, not a speck appeared in heaven.  Only from the summit of the
+mountain one little snowy wisp of cloud after another kept detaching
+itself, like smoke from a volcano, and blowing southward in some high
+stream of air: Mount Saint Helena still at her interminable task, making
+the weather, like a Lapland witch.
+
+By noon we had come in sight of the mill: a great brown building,
+half-way up the hill, big as a factory, two stories high, and with tanks
+and ladders along the roof; which, as a pendicle of Silverado mine, we
+held to be an outlying province of our own.  Thither, then, we went,
+crossing the valley by a grassy trail; and there lunched out of the
+basket, sitting in a kind of portico, and wondering, while we ate, at
+this great bulk of useless building.  Through a chink we could look far
+down into the interior, and see sunbeams floating in the dust and
+striking on tier after tier of silent, rusty machinery.  It cost six
+thousand dollars, twelve hundred English sovereigns; and now, here it
+stands deserted, like the temple of a forgotten religion, the busy
+millers toiling somewhere else.  All the time we were there, mill and
+mill town showed no sign of life; that part of the mountain-side, which
+is very open and green, was tenanted by no living creature but ourselves
+and the insects; and nothing stirred but the cloud manufactory upon the
+mountain summit.  It was odd to compare this with the former days, when
+the engine was in fall blast, the mill palpitating to its strokes, and
+the carts came rattling down from Silverado, charged with ore.
+
+By two we had been landed at the mine, the buggy was gone again, and we
+were left to our own reflections and the basket of cold provender, until
+Hanson should arrive.  Hot as it was by the sun, there was something
+chill in such a home-coming, in that world of wreck and rust, splinter
+and rolling gravel, where for so many years no fire had smoked.
+
+Silverado platform filled the whole width of the canyon.  Above, as I
+have said, this was a wild, red, stony gully in the mountains; but below
+it was a wooded dingle.  And through this, I was told, there had gone a
+path between the mine and the Toll House—our natural north-west passage
+to civilization.  I found and followed it, clearing my way as I went
+through fallen branches and dead trees.  It went straight down that steep
+canyon, till it brought you out abruptly over the roofs of the hotel.
+There was nowhere any break in the descent.  It almost seemed as if, were
+you to drop a stone down the old iron chute at our platform, it would
+never rest until it hopped upon the Toll House shingles.  Signs were not
+wanting of the ancient greatness of Silverado.  The footpath was well
+marked, and had been well trodden in the old clays by thirsty miners.
+And far down, buried in foliage, deep out of sight of Silverado, I came
+on a last outpost of the mine—a mound of gravel, some wreck of wooden
+aqueduct, and the mouth of a tunnel, like a treasure grotto in a fairy
+story.  A stream of water, fed by the invisible leakage from our shaft,
+and dyed red with cinnabar or iron, ran trippingly forth out of the
+bowels of the cave; and, looking far under the arch, I could see
+something like an iron lantern fastened on the rocky wall.  It was a
+promising spot for the imagination.  No boy could have left it
+unexplored.
+
+The stream thenceforward stole along the bottom of the dingle, and made,
+for that dry land, a pleasant warbling in the leaves.  Once, I suppose,
+it ran splashing down the whole length of the canyon, but now its head
+waters had been tapped by the shaft at Silverado, and for a great part of
+its course it wandered sunless among the joints of the mountain.  No
+wonder that it should better its pace when it sees, far before it,
+daylight whitening in the arch, or that it should come trotting forth
+into the sunlight with a song.
+
+The two stages had gone by when I got down, and the Toll House stood,
+dozing in sun and dust and silence, like a place enchanted.  My mission
+was after hay for bedding, and that I was readily promised.  But when I
+mentioned that we were waiting for Rufe, the people shook their heads.
+Rufe was not a regular man any way, it seemed; and if he got playing
+poker—Well, poker was too many for Rufe.  I had not yet heard them
+bracketted together; but it seemed a natural conjunction, and commended
+itself swiftly to my fears; and as soon as I returned to Silverado and
+had told my story, we practically gave Hanson up, and set ourselves to do
+what we could find do-able in our desert-island state.
+
+The lower room had been the assayer’s office.  The floor was thick with
+_débris_—part human, from the former occupants; part natural, sifted in
+by mountain winds.  In a sea of red dust there swam or floated sticks,
+boards, hay, straw, stones, and paper; ancient newspapers, above all—for
+the newspaper, especially when torn, soon becomes an antiquity—and bills
+of the Silverado boarding-house, some dated Silverado, some Calistoga
+Mine.  Here is one, verbatim; and if any one can calculate the scale of
+charges, he has my envious admiration.
+
+Calistoga Mine, May 3rd, 1875.
+John Stanley
+      To S. Chapman, Cr.
+To board from April 1st, to April 30               $25       75
+   ,,    ,,     ,,  May 1st, to 3rd . . .            2       00
+                                                    27       75
+
+Where is John Stanley mining now?  Where is S. Chapman, within whose
+hospitable walls we were to lodge?  The date was but five years old, but
+in that time the world had changed for Silverado; like Palmyra in the
+desert, it had outlived its people and its purpose; we camped, like
+Layard, amid ruins, and these names spoke to us of prehistoric time.  A
+boot-jack, a pair of boots, a dog-hutch, and these bills of Mr. Chapman’s
+were the only speaking relics that we disinterred from all that vast
+Silverado rubbish-heap; but what would I not have given to unearth a
+letter, a pocket-book, a diary, only a ledger, or a roll of names, to
+take me back, in a more personal manner, to the past?  It pleases me,
+besides, to fancy that Stanley or Chapman, or one of their companions,
+may light upon this chronicle, and be struck by the name, and read some
+news of their anterior home, coming, as it were, out of a subsequent
+epoch of history in that quarter of the world.
+
+As we were tumbling the mingled rubbish on the floor, kicking it with our
+feet, and groping for these written evidences of the past, Sam, with a
+somewhat whitened face, produced a paper bag.  “What’s this?” said he.
+It contained a granulated powder, something the colour of Gregory’s
+Mixture, but rosier; and as there were several of the bags, and each more
+or less broken, the powder was spread widely on the floor.  Had any of us
+ever seen giant powder?  No, nobody had; and instantly there grew up in
+my mind a shadowy belief, verging with every moment nearer to certitude,
+that I had somewhere heard somebody describe it as just such a powder as
+the one around us.  I have learnt since that it is a substance not unlike
+tallow, and is made up in rolls for all the world like tallow candles.
+
+Fanny, to add to our happiness, told us a story of a gentleman who had
+camped one night, like ourselves, by a deserted mine.  He was a handy,
+thrifty fellow, and looked right and left for plunder, but all he could
+lay his hands on was a can of oil.  After dark he had to see to the
+horses with a lantern; and not to miss an opportunity, filled up his lamp
+from the oil can.  Thus equipped, he set forth into the forest.  A little
+while after, his friends heard a loud explosion; the mountain echoes
+bellowed, and then all was still.  On examination, the can proved to
+contain oil, with the trifling addition of nitro-glycerine; but no
+research disclosed a trace of either man or lantern.
+
+It was a pretty sight, after this anecdote, to see us sweeping out the
+giant powder.  It seemed never to be far enough away.  And, after all, it
+was only some rock pounded for assay.
+
+So much for the lower room.  We scraped some of the rougher dirt off the
+floor, and left it.  That was our sitting-room and kitchen, though there
+was nothing to sit upon but the table, and no provision for a fire except
+a hole in the roof of the room above, which had once contained the
+chimney of a stove.
+
+To that upper room we now proceeded.  There were the eighteen bunks in a
+double tier, nine on either hand, where from eighteen to thirty-six
+miners had once snored together all night long, John Stanley, perhaps,
+snoring loudest.  There was the roof, with a hole in it through which the
+sun now shot an arrow.  There was the floor, in much the same state as
+the one below, though, perhaps, there was more hay, and certainly there
+was the added ingredient of broken glass, the man who stole the
+window-frames having apparently made a miscarriage with this one.
+Without a broom, without hay or bedding, we could but look about us with
+a beginning of despair.  The one bright arrow of day, in that gaunt and
+shattered barrack, made the rest look dirtier and darker, and the sight
+drove us at last into the open.
+
+Here, also, the handiwork of man lay ruined: but the plants were all
+alive and thriving; the view below was fresh with the colours of nature;
+and we had exchanged a dim, human garret for a corner, even although it
+were untidy, of the blue hall of heaven.  Not a bird, not a beast, not a
+reptile.  There was no noise in that part of the world, save when we
+passed beside the staging, and heard the water musically falling in the
+shaft.
+
+We wandered to and fro.  We searched among that drift of lumber-wood and
+iron, nails and rails, and sleepers and the wheels of tracks.  We gazed
+up the cleft into the bosom of the mountain.  We sat by the margin of the
+dump and saw, far below us, the green treetops standing still in the
+clear air.  Beautiful perfumes, breaths of bay, resin, and nutmeg, came
+to us more often and grew sweeter and sharper as the afternoon declined.
+But still there was no word of Hanson.
+
+I set to with pick and shovel, and deepened the pool behind the shaft,
+till we were sure of sufficient water for the morning; and by the time I
+had finished, the sun had begun to go down behind the mountain shoulder,
+the platform was plunged in quiet shadow, and a chill descended from the
+sky.  Night began early in our cleft.  Before us, over the margin of the
+dump, we could see the sun still striking aslant into the wooded nick
+below, and on the battlemented, pine-bescattered ridges on the farther
+side.
+
+There was no stove, of course, and no hearth in our lodging, so we betook
+ourselves to the blacksmith’s forge across the platform.  If the platform
+be taken as a stage, and the out-curving margin of the dump to represent
+the line of the foot-lights, then our house would be the first wing on
+the actor’s left, and this blacksmith’s forge, although no match for it
+in size, the foremost on the right.  It was a low, brown cottage, planted
+close against the hill, and overhung by the foliage and peeling boughs of
+a madrona thicket.  Within it was full of dead leaves and mountain dust,
+and rubbish from the mine.  But we soon had a good fire brightly blazing,
+and sat close about it on impromptu seats.  Chuchu, the slave of
+sofa-cushions, whimpered for a softer bed; but the rest of us were
+greatly revived and comforted by that good creature-fire, which gives us
+warmth and light and companionable sounds, and colours up the emptiest
+building with better than frescoes.  For a while it was even pleasant in
+the forge, with the blaze in the midst, and a look over our shoulders on
+the woods and mountains where the day was dying like a dolphin.
+
+It was between seven and eight before Hanson arrived, with a waggonful of
+our effects and two of his wife’s relatives to lend him a hand.  The
+elder showed surprising strength.  He would pick up a huge packing-case,
+full of books of all things, swing it on his shoulder, and away up the
+two crazy ladders and the breakneck spout of rolling mineral, familiarly
+termed a path, that led from the cart-track to our house.  Even for a man
+unburthened, the ascent was toilsome and precarious; but Irvine sealed it
+with a light foot, carrying box after box, as the hero whisks the stage
+child up the practicable footway beside the waterfall of the fifth act.
+With so strong a helper, the business was speedily transacted.  Soon the
+assayer’s office was thronged with our belongings, piled
+higgledy-piggledy, and upside down, about the floor.  There were our
+boxes, indeed, but my wife had left her keys in Calistoga.  There was the
+stove, but, alas! our carriers had forgot the chimney, and lost one of
+the plates along the road.  The Silverado problem was scarce solved.
+
+Rufe himself was grave and good-natured over his share of blame; he even,
+if I remember right, expressed regret.  But his crew, to my astonishment
+and anger, grinned from ear to ear, and laughed aloud at our distress.
+They thought it “real funny” about the stove-pipe they had forgotten;
+“real funny” that they should have lost a plate.  As for hay, the whole
+party refused to bring us any till they should have supped.  See how late
+they were!  Never had there been such a job as coming up that grade!  Nor
+often, I suspect, such a game of poker as that before they started.  But
+about nine, as a particular favour, we should have some hay.
+
+So they took their departure, leaving me still staring, and we resigned
+ourselves to wait for their return.  The fire in the forge had been
+suffered to go out, and we were one and all too weary to kindle another.
+We dined, or, not to take that word in vain, we ate after a fashion, in
+the nightmare disorder of the assayer’s office, perched among boxes.  A
+single candle lighted us.  It could scarce be called a housewarming; for
+there was, of course, no fire, and with the two open doors and the open
+window gaping on the night, like breaches in a fortress, it began to grow
+rapidly chill.  Talk ceased; nobody moved but the unhappy Chuchu, still
+in quest of sofa-cushions, who tumbled complainingly among the trunks.
+It required a certain happiness of disposition to look forward hopefully,
+from so dismal a beginning, across the brief hours of night, to the warm
+shining of to-morrow’s sun.
+
+But the hay arrived at last, and we turned, with our last spark of
+courage, to the bedroom.  We had improved the entrance, but it was still
+a kind of rope-walking; and it would have been droll to see us mounting,
+one after another, by candle-light, under the open stars.
+
+The western door—that which looked up the canyon, and through which we
+entered by our bridge of flying plank—was still entire, a handsome,
+panelled door, the most finished piece of carpentry in Silverado.  And
+the two lowest bunks next to this we roughly filled with hay for that
+night’s use.  Through the opposite, or eastern-looking gable, with its
+open door and window, a faint, disused starshine came into the room like
+mist; and when we were once in bed, we lay, awaiting sleep, in a haunted,
+incomplete obscurity.  At first the silence of the night was utter.  Then
+a high wind began in the distance among the treetops, and for hours
+continued to grow higher.  It seemed to me much such a wind as we had
+found on our visit; yet here in our open chamber we were fanned only by
+gentle and refreshing draughts, so deep was the canyon, so close our
+house was planted under the overhanging rock.
+
+
+
+
+THE HUNTER’S FAMILY
+
+
+THERE is quite a large race or class of people in America, for whom we
+scarcely seem to have a parallel in England.  Of pure white blood, they
+are unknown or unrecognizable in towns; inhabit the fringe of settlements
+and the deep, quiet places of the country; rebellious to all labour, and
+pettily thievish, like the English gipsies; rustically ignorant, but with
+a touch of wood-lore and the dexterity of the savage.  Whence they came
+is a moot point.  At the time of the war, they poured north in crowds to
+escape the conscription; lived during summer on fruits, wild animals, and
+petty theft; and at the approach of winter, when these supplies failed,
+built great fires in the forest, and there died stoically by starvation.
+They are widely scattered, however, and easily recognized.  Loutish, but
+not ill-looking, they will sit all day, swinging their legs on a field
+fence, the mind seemingly as devoid of all reflection as a Suffolk
+peasant’s, careless of politics, for the most part incapable of reading,
+but with a rebellious vanity and a strong sense of independence.  Hunting
+is their most congenial business, or, if the occasion offers, a little
+amateur detection.  In tracking a criminal, following a particular horse
+along a beaten highway, and drawing inductions from a hair or a
+footprint, one of those somnolent, grinning Hodges will suddenly display
+activity of body and finesse of mind.  By their names ye may know them,
+the women figuring as Loveina, Larsenia, Serena, Leanna, Orreana; the men
+answering to Alvin, Alva, or Orion, pronounced Orrion, with the accent on
+the first.  Whether they are indeed a race, or whether this is the form
+of degeneracy common to all back-woodsmen, they are at least known by a
+generic byword, as Poor Whites or Low-downers.
+
+I will not say that the Hanson family was Poor White, because the name
+savours of offence; but I may go as far as this—they were, in many
+points, not unsimilar to the people usually so-cared.  Rufe himself
+combined two of the qualifications, for he was both a hunter and an
+amateur detective.  It was he who pursued Russel and Dollar, the robbers
+of the Lake Port stage, and captured them the very morning after the
+exploit, while they were still sleeping in a hayfield.  Russel, a drunken
+Scotch carpenter, was even an acquaintance of his own, and he expressed
+much grave commiseration for his fate.  In all that he said and did, Rufe
+was grave.  I never saw him hurried.  When he spoke, he took out his pipe
+with ceremonial deliberation, looked east and west, and then, in quiet
+tones and few words, stated his business or told his story.  His gait was
+to match; it would never have surprised you if, at any step, he had
+turned round and walked away again, so warily and slowly, and with so
+much seeming hesitation did he go about.  He lay long in bed in the
+morning—rarely indeed, rose before noon; he loved all games, from poker
+to clerical croquet; and in the Toll House croquet ground I have seen him
+toiling at the latter with the devotion of a curate.  He took an interest
+in education, was an active member of the local school-board, and when I
+was there, he had recently lost the schoolhouse key.  His waggon was
+broken, but it never seemed to occur to him to mend it.  Like all truly
+idle people, he had an artistic eye.  He chose the print stuff for his
+wife’s dresses, and counselled her in the making of a patchwork quilt,
+always, as she thought, wrongly, but to the more educated eye, always
+with bizarre and admirable taste—the taste of an Indian.  With all this,
+he was a perfect, unoffending gentleman in word and act.  Take his clay
+pipe from him, and he was fit for any society but that of fools.  Quiet
+as he was, there burned a deep, permanent excitement in his dark blue
+eyes; and when this grave man smiled, it was like sunshine in a shady
+place.
+
+Mrs. Hanson (_née_, if you please, Lovelands) was more commonplace than
+her lord.  She was a comely woman, too, plump, fair-coloured, with
+wonderful white teeth; and in her print dresses (chosen by Rufe) and with
+a large sun-bonnet shading her valued complexion, made, I assure you, a
+very agreeable figure.  But she was on the surface, what there was of
+her, out-spoken and loud-spoken.  Her noisy laughter had none of the
+charm of one of Hanson’s rare, slow-spreading smiles; there was no
+reticence, no mystery, no manner about the woman: she was a first-class
+dairymaid, but her husband was an unknown quantity between the savage and
+the nobleman.  She was often in and out with us, merry, and healthy, and
+fair; he came far seldomer—only, indeed, when there was business, or now
+and again, to pay a visit of ceremony, brushed up for the occasion, with
+his wife on his arm, and a clean clay pipe in his teeth.  These visits,
+in our forest state, had quite the air of an event, and turned our red
+canyon into a salon.
+
+Such was the pair who ruled in the old Silverado Hotel, among the windy
+trees, on the mountain shoulder overlooking the whole length of Napa
+Valley, as the man aloft looks down on the ship’s deck.  There they kept
+house, with sundry horses and fowls, and a family of sons, Daniel
+Webster, and I think George Washington, among the number.  Nor did they
+want visitors.  An old gentleman, of singular stolidity, and called
+Breedlove—I think he had crossed the plains in the same caravan with
+Rufe—housed with them for awhile during our stay; and they had besides a
+permanent lodger, in the form of Mrs. Hanson’s brother, Irvine Lovelands.
+I spell Irvine by guess; for I could get no information on the subject,
+just as I could never find out, in spite of many inquiries, whether or
+not Rufe was a contraction for Rufus.  They were all cheerfully at sea
+about their names in that generation.  And this is surely the more
+notable where the names are all so strange, and even the family names
+appear to have been coined.  At one time, at least, the ancestors of all
+these Alvins and Alvas, Loveinas, Lovelands, and Breedloves, must have
+taken serious council and found a certain poetry in these denominations;
+that must have been, then, their form of literature.  But still times
+change; and their next descendants, the George Washingtons and Daniel
+Websters, will at least be clear upon the point.  And anyway, and however
+his name should be spelt, this Irvine Lovelands was the most unmitigated
+Caliban I ever knew.
+
+Our very first morning at Silverado, when we were full of business,
+patching up doors and windows, making beds and seats, and getting our
+rough lodging into shape, Irvine and his sister made their appearance
+together, she for neighbourliness and general curiosity; he, because he
+was working for me, to my sorrow, cutting firewood at I forget how much a
+day.  The way that he set about cutting wood was characteristic.  We were
+at that moment patching up and unpacking in the kitchen.  Down he sat on
+one side, and down sat his sister on the other.  Both were chewing
+pine-tree gum, and he, to my annoyance, accompanied that simple pleasure
+with profuse expectoration.  She rattled away, talking up hill and down
+dale, laughing, tossing her head, showing her brilliant teeth.  He looked
+on in silence, now spitting heavily on the floor, now putting his head
+back and uttering a loud, discordant, joyless laugh.  He had a tangle of
+shock hair, the colour of wool; his mouth was a grin; although as strong
+as a horse, he looked neither heavy nor yet adroit, only leggy, coltish,
+and in the road.  But it was plain he was in high spirits, thoroughly
+enjoying his visit; and he laughed frankly whenever we failed to
+accomplish what we were about.  This was scarcely helpful: it was even,
+to amateur carpenters, embarrassing; but it lasted until we knocked off
+work and began to get dinner.  Then Mrs. Hanson remembered she should
+have been gone an hour ago; and the pair retired, and the lady’s laughter
+died away among the nutmegs down the path.  That was Irvine’s first day’s
+work in my employment—the devil take him!
+
+The next morning he returned and, as he was this time alone, he bestowed
+his conversation upon us with great liberality.  He prided himself on his
+intelligence; asked us if we knew the school ma’am.  _He_ didn’t think
+much of her, anyway.  He had tried her, he had.  He had put a question to
+her.  If a tree a hundred feet high were to fall a foot a day, how long
+would it take to fall right down?  She had not been able to solve the
+problem.  “She don’t know nothing,” he opined.  He told us how a friend
+of his kept a school with a revolver, and chuckled mightily over that;
+his friend could teach school, he could.  All the time he kept chewing
+gum and spitting.  He would stand a while looking down; and then he would
+toss back his shock of hair, and laugh hoarsely, and spit, and bring
+forward a new subject.  A man, he told us, who bore a grudge against him,
+had poisoned his dog.  “That was a low thing for a man to do now, wasn’t
+it?  It wasn’t like a man, that, nohow.  But I got even with him: I
+pisoned _his_ dog.”  His clumsy utterance, his rude embarrassed manner,
+set a fresh value on the stupidity of his remarks.  I do not think I ever
+appreciated the meaning of two words until I knew Irvine—the verb, loaf,
+and the noun, oaf; between them, they complete his portrait.  He could
+lounge, and wriggle, and rub himself against the wall, and grin, and be
+more in everybody’s way than any other two people that I ever set my eyes
+on.  Nothing that he did became him; and yet you were conscious that he
+was one of your own race, that his mind was cumbrously at work, revolving
+the problem of existence like a quid of gum, and in his own cloudy manner
+enjoying life, and passing judgment on his fellows.  Above all things, he
+was delighted with himself.  You would not have thought it, from his
+uneasy manners and troubled, struggling utterance; but he loved himself
+to the marrow, and was happy and proud like a peacock on a rail.
+
+His self-esteem was, indeed, the one joint in his harness.  He could be
+got to work, and even kept at work, by flattery.  As long as my wife
+stood over him, crying out how strong he was, so long exactly he would
+stick to the matter in hand; and the moment she turned her back, or
+ceased to praise him, he would stop.  His physical strength was
+wonderful; and to have a woman stand by and admire his achievements,
+warmed his heart like sunshine.  Yet he was as cowardly as he was
+powerful, and felt no shame in owning to the weakness.  Something was
+once wanted from the crazy platform over the shaft, and he at once
+refused to venture there—“did not like,” as he said, “foolen’ round them
+kind o’ places,” and let my wife go instead of him, looking on with a
+grin.  Vanity, where it rules, is usually more heroic: but Irvine
+steadily approved himself, and expected others to approve him; rather
+looked down upon my wife, and decidedly expected her to look up to him,
+on the strength of his superior prudence.
+
+Yet the strangest part of the whole matter was perhaps this, that Irvine
+was as beautiful as a statue.  His features were, in themselves, perfect;
+it was only his cloudy, uncouth, and coarse expression that disfigured
+them.  So much strength residing in so spare a frame was proof sufficient
+of the accuracy of his shape.  He must have been built somewhat after the
+pattern of Jack Sheppard; but the famous housebreaker, we may be certain,
+was no lout.  It was by the extraordinary powers of his mind no less than
+by the vigour of his body, that he broke his strong prison with such
+imperfect implements, turning the very obstacles to service.  Irvine, in
+the same case, would have sat down and spat, and grumbled curses.  He had
+the soul of a fat sheep, but, regarded as an artist’s model, the exterior
+of a Greek God.  It was a cruel thought to persons less favoured in their
+birth, that this creature, endowed—to use the language of theatres—with
+extraordinary “means,” should so manage to misemploy them that he looked
+ugly and almost deformed.  It was only by an effort of abstraction, and
+after many days, that you discovered what he was.
+
+By playing on the oaf’s conceit, and standing closely over him, we got a
+path made round the corner of the dump to our door, so that we could come
+and go with decent ease; and he even enjoyed the work, for in that there
+were boulders to be plucked up bodily, bushes to be uprooted, and other
+occasions for athletic display: but cutting wood was a different matter.
+Anybody could cut wood; and, besides, my wife was tired of supervising
+him, and had other things to attend to.  And, in short, days went by, and
+Irvine came daily, and talked and lounged and spat; but the firewood
+remained intact as sleepers on the platform or growing trees upon the
+mountainside.  Irvine, as a woodcutter, we could tolerate; but Irvine as
+a friend of the family, at so much a day, was too bald an imposition, and
+at length, on the afternoon of the fourth or fifth day of our connection,
+I explained to him, as clearly as I could, the light in which I had grown
+to regard his presence.  I pointed out to him that I could not continue
+to give him a salary for spitting on the floor; and this expression,
+which came after a good many others, at last penetrated his obdurate
+wits.  He rose at once, and said if that was the way he was going to be
+spoke to, he reckoned he would quit.  And, no one interposing, he
+departed.
+
+So far, so good.  But we had no firewood.  The next afternoon, I strolled
+down to Rufe’s and consulted him on the subject.  It was a very droll
+interview, in the large, bare north room of the Silverado Hotel, Mrs.
+Hanson’s patchwork on a frame, and Rufe, and his wife, and I, and the oaf
+himself, all more or less embarrassed.  Rufe announced there was nobody
+in the neighbourhood but Irvine who could do a day’s work for anybody.
+Irvine, thereupon, refused to have any more to do with my service; he
+“wouldn’t work no more for a man as had spoke to him’s I had done.”  I
+found myself on the point of the last humiliation—driven to beseech the
+creature whom I had just dismissed with insult: but I took the high hand
+in despair, said there must be no talk of Irvine coming back unless
+matters were to be differently managed; that I would rather chop firewood
+for myself than be fooled; and, in short, the Hansons being eager for the
+lad’s hire, I so imposed upon them with merely affected resolution, that
+they ended by begging me to re-employ him again, on a solemn promise that
+he should be more industrious.  The promise, I am bound to say, was kept.
+We soon had a fine pile of firewood at our door; and if Caliban gave me
+the cold shoulder and spared me his conversation, I thought none the
+worse of him for that, nor did I find my days much longer for the
+deprivation.
+
+The leading spirit of the family was, I am inclined to fancy, Mrs.
+Hanson.  Her social brilliancy somewhat dazzled the others, and she had
+more of the small change of sense.  It was she who faced Kelmar, for
+instance; and perhaps, if she had been alone, Kelmar would have had no
+rule within her doors.  Rufe, to be sure, had a fine, sober, open-air
+attitude of mind, seeing the world without exaggeration—perhaps, we may
+even say, without enough; for he lacked, along with the others, that
+commercial idealism which puts so high a value on time and money.  Sanity
+itself is a kind of convention.  Perhaps Rufe was wrong; but, looking on
+life plainly, he was unable to perceive that croquet or poker were in any
+way less important than, for instance, mending his waggon.  Even his own
+profession, hunting, was dear to him mainly as a sort of play; even that
+he would have neglected, had it not appealed to his imagination.  His
+hunting-suit, for instance, had cost I should be afraid to say how many
+bucks—the currency in which he paid his way: it was all befringed, after
+the Indian fashion, and it was dear to his heart.  The pictorial side of
+his daily business was never forgotten.  He was even anxious to stand for
+his picture in those buckskin hunting clothes; and I remember how he once
+warmed almost into enthusiasm, his dark blue eyes growing perceptibly
+larger, as he planned the composition in which he should appear, “with
+the horns of some real big bucks, and dogs, and a camp on a crick”
+(creek, stream).
+
+There was no trace in Irvine of this woodland poetry.  He did not care
+for hunting, nor yet for buckskin suits.  He had never observed scenery.
+The world, as it appeared to him, was almost obliterated by his own great
+grinning figure in the foreground: Caliban Malvolio.  And it seems to me
+as if, in the persons of these brothers-in-law, we had the two sides of
+rusticity fairly well represented: the hunter living really in nature;
+the clodhopper living merely out of society: the one bent up in every
+corporal agent to capacity in one pursuit, doing at least one thing
+keenly and thoughtfully, and thoroughly alive to all that touches it; the
+other in the inert and bestial state, walking in a faint dream, and
+taking so dim an impression of the myriad sides of life that he is truly
+conscious of nothing but himself.  It is only in the fastnesses of
+nature, forests, mountains, and the back of man’s beyond, that a creature
+endowed with five senses can grow up into the perfection of this crass
+and earthy vanity.  In towns or the busier country sides, he is roughly
+reminded of other men’s existence; and if he learns no more, he learns at
+least to fear contempt.  But Irvine had come scatheless through life,
+conscious only of himself, of his great strength and intelligence; and in
+the silence of the universe, to which he did not listen, dwelling with
+delight on the sound of his own thoughts.
+
+
+
+
+THE SEA FOGS
+
+
+A CHANGE in the colour of the light usually called me in the morning.  By
+a certain hour, the long, vertical chinks in our western gable, where the
+boards had shrunk and separated, flashed suddenly into my eyes as stripes
+of dazzling blue, at once so dark and splendid that I used to marvel how
+the qualities could be combined.  At an earlier hour, the heavens in that
+quarter were still quietly coloured, but the shoulder of the mountain
+which shuts in the canyon already glowed with sunlight in a wonderful
+compound of gold and rose and green; and this too would kindle, although
+more mildly and with rainbow tints, the fissures of our crazy gable.  If
+I were sleeping heavily, it was the bold blue that struck me awake; if
+more lightly, then I would come to myself in that earlier and fairier
+fight.
+
+One Sunday morning, about five, the first brightness called me.  I rose
+and turned to the east, not for my devotions, but for air.  The night had
+been very still.  The little private gale that blew every evening in our
+canyon, for ten minutes or perhaps a quarter of an hour, had swiftly
+blown itself out; in the hours that followed not a sigh of wind had
+shaken the treetops; and our barrack, for all its breaches, was less
+fresh that morning than of wont.  But I had no sooner reached the window
+than I forgot all else in the sight that met my eyes, and I made but two
+bounds into my clothes, and down the crazy plank to the platform.
+
+The sun was still concealed below the opposite hilltops, though it was
+shining already, not twenty feet above my head, on our own mountain
+slope.  But the scene, beyond a few near features, was entirely changed.
+Napa valley was gone; gone were all the lower slopes and woody foothills
+of the range; and in their place, not a thousand feet below me, rolled a
+great level ocean.  It was as though I had gone to bed the night before,
+safe in a nook of inland mountains, and had awakened in a bay upon the
+coast.  I had seen these inundations from below; at Calistoga I had risen
+and gone abroad in the early morning, coughing and sneezing, under
+fathoms on fathoms of gray sea vapour, like a cloudy sky—a dull sight for
+the artist, and a painful experience for the invalid.  But to sit aloft
+one’s self in the pure air and under the unclouded dome of heaven, and
+thus look down on the submergence of the valley, was strangely different
+and even delightful to the eyes.  Far away were hilltops like little
+islands.  Nearer, a smoky surf beat about the foot of precipices and
+poured into all the coves of these rough mountains.  The colour of that
+fog ocean was a thing never to be forgotten.  For an instant, among the
+Hebrides and just about sundown, I have seen something like it on the sea
+itself.  But the white was not so opaline; nor was there, what
+surprisingly increased the effect, that breathless, crystal stillness
+over all.  Even in its gentlest moods the salt sea travails, moaning
+among the weeds or lisping on the sand; but that vast fog ocean lay in a
+trance of silence, nor did the sweet air of the morning tremble with a
+sound.
+
+As I continued to sit upon the dump, I began to observe that this sea was
+not so level as at first sight it appeared to be.  Away in the extreme
+south, a little hill of fog arose against the sky above the general
+surface, and as it had already caught the sun, it shone on the horizon
+like the topsails of some giant ship.  There were huge waves, stationary,
+as it seemed, like waves in a frozen sea; and yet, as I looked again, I
+was not sure but they were moving after all, with a slow and august
+advance.  And while I was yet doubting, a promontory of the some four or
+five miles away, conspicuous by a bouquet of tall pines, was in a single
+instant overtaken and swallowed up.  It reappeared in a little, with its
+pines, but this time as an islet, and only to be swallowed up once more
+and then for good.  This set me looking nearer, and I saw that in every
+cove along the line of mountains the fog was being piled in higher and
+higher, as though by some wind that was inaudible to me.  I could trace
+its progress, one pine tree first growing hazy and then disappearing
+after another; although sometimes there was none of this fore-running
+haze, but the whole opaque white ocean gave a start and swallowed a piece
+of mountain at a gulp.  It was to flee these poisonous fogs that I had
+left the seaboard, and climbed so high among the mountains.  And now,
+behold, here came the fog to besiege me in my chosen altitudes, and yet
+came so beautifully that my first thought was of welcome.
+
+The sun had now gotten much higher, and through all the gaps of the hills
+it cast long bars of gold across that white ocean.  An eagle, or some
+other very great bird of the mountain, came wheeling over the nearer
+pine-tops, and hung, poised and something sideways, as if to look abroad
+on that unwonted desolation, spying, perhaps with terror, for the eyries
+of her comrades.  Then, with a long cry, she disappeared again towards
+Lake County and the clearer air.  At length it seemed to me as if the
+flood were beginning to subside.  The old landmarks, by whose
+disappearance I had measured its advance, here a crag, there a brave pine
+tree, now began, in the inverse order, to make their reappearance into
+daylight.  I judged all danger of the fog was over.  This was not Noah’s
+flood; it was but a morning spring, and would now drift out seaward
+whence it came.  So, mightily relieved, and a good deal exhilarated by
+the sight, I went into the house to light the fire.
+
+I suppose it was nearly seven when I once more mounted the platform to
+look abroad.  The fog ocean had swelled up enormously since last I saw
+it; and a few hundred feet below me, in the deep gap where the Toll House
+stands and the road runs through into Lake County, it had already topped
+the slope, and was pouring over and down the other side like driving
+smoke.  The wind had climbed along with it; and though I was still in
+calm air, I could see the trees tossing below me, and their long,
+strident sighing mounted to me where I stood.
+
+Half an hour later, the fog had surmounted all the ridge on the opposite
+side of the gap, though a shoulder of the mountain still warded it out of
+our canyon.  Napa valley and its bounding hills were now utterly blotted
+out.  The fog, sunny white in the sunshine, was pouring over into Lake
+County in a huge, ragged cataract, tossing treetops appearing and
+disappearing in the spray.  The air struck with a little chill, and set
+me coughing.  It smelt strong of the fog, like the smell of a
+washing-house, but with a shrewd tang of the sea salt.
+
+Had it not been for two things—the sheltering spur which answered as a
+dyke, and the great valley on the other side which rapidly engulfed
+whatever mounted—our own little platform in the canyon must have been
+already buried a hundred feet in salt and poisonous air.  As it was, the
+interest of the scene entirely occupied our minds.  We were set just out
+of the wind, and but just above the fog; we could listen to the voice of
+the one as to music on the stage; we could plunge our eyes down into the
+other, as into some flowing stream from over the parapet of a bridge;
+thus we looked on upon a strange, impetuous, silent, shifting exhibition
+of the powers of nature, and saw the familiar landscape changing from
+moment to moment like figures in a dream.
+
+The imagination loves to trifle with what is not.  Had this been indeed
+the deluge, I should have felt more strongly, but the emotion would have
+been similar in kind.  I played with the idea, as the child flees in
+delighted terror from the creations of his fancy.  The look of the thing
+helped me.  And when at last I began to flee up the mountain, it was
+indeed partly to escape from the raw air that kept me coughing, but it
+was also part in play.
+
+As I ascended the mountain-side, I came once more to overlook the upper
+surface of the fog; but it wore a different appearance from what I had
+beheld at daybreak.  For, first, the sun now fell on it from high
+overhead, and its surface shone and undulated like a great nor’land moor
+country, sheeted with untrodden morning snow.  And next the new level
+must have been a thousand or fifteen hundred feet higher than the old, so
+that only five or six points of all the broken country below me, still
+stood out.  Napa valley was now one with Sonoma on the west.  On the
+hither side, only a thin scattered fringe of bluffs was unsubmerged; and
+through all the gaps the fog was pouring over, like an ocean, into the
+blue clear sunny country on the east.  There it was soon lost; for it
+fell instantly into the bottom of the valleys, following the water-shed;
+and the hilltops in that quarter were still clear cut upon the eastern
+sky.
+
+Through the Toll House gap and over the near ridges on the other side,
+the deluge was immense.  A spray of thin vapour was thrown high above it,
+rising and falling, and blown into fantastic shapes.  The speed of its
+course was like a mountain torrent.  Here and there a few treetops were
+discovered and then whelmed again; and for one second, the bough of a
+dead pine beckoned out of the spray like the arm of a drowning man.  But
+still the imagination was dissatisfied, still the ear waited for
+something more.  Had this indeed been water (as it seemed so, to the
+eye), with what a plunge of reverberating thunder would it have rolled
+upon its course, disembowelling mountains and deracinating pines!  And
+yet water it was, and sea-water at that—true Pacific billows, only
+somewhat rarefied, rolling in mid air among the hilltops.
+
+I climbed still higher, among the red rattling gravel and dwarf underwood
+of Mount Saint Helena, until I could look right down upon Silverado, and
+admire the favoured nook in which it lay.  The sunny plain of fog was
+several hundred feet higher; behind the protecting spur a gigantic
+accumulation of cottony vapour threatened, with every second, to blow
+over and submerge our homestead; but the vortex setting past the Toll
+House was too strong; and there lay our little platform, in the arms of
+the deluge, but still enjoying its unbroken sunshine.  About eleven,
+however, thin spray came flying over the friendly buttress, and I began
+to think the fog had hunted out its Jonah after all.  But it was the last
+effort.  The wind veered while we were at dinner, and began to blow
+squally from the mountain summit; and by half-past one, all that world of
+sea-fogs was utterly routed and flying here and there into the south in
+little rags of cloud.  And instead of a lone sea-beach, we found
+ourselves once more inhabiting a high mountainside, with the clear green
+country far below us, and the light smoke of Calistoga blowing in the
+air.
+
+This was the great Russian campaign for that season.  Now and then, in
+the early morning, a little white lakelet of fog would be seen far down
+in Napa Valley; but the heights were not again assailed, nor was the
+surrounding world again shut off from Silverado.
+
+
+
+
+THE TOLL HOUSE
+
+
+THE Toll House, standing alone by the wayside under nodding pines, with
+its streamlet and water-tank; its backwoods, toll-bar, and well trodden
+croquet ground; the ostler standing by the stable door, chewing a straw;
+a glimpse of the Chinese cook in the back parts; and Mr. Hoddy in the
+bar, gravely alert and serviceable, and equally anxious to lend or borrow
+books;—dozed all day in the dusty sunshine, more than half asleep.  There
+were no neighbours, except the Hansons up the hill.  The traffic on the
+road was infinitesimal; only, at rare intervals, a couple in a waggon, or
+a dusty farmer on a springboard, toiling over “the grade” to that
+metropolitan hamlet, Calistoga; and, at the fixed hours, the passage of
+the stages.
+
+The nearest building was the school-house, down the road; and the
+school-ma’am boarded at the Toll House, walking thence in the morning to
+the little brown shanty, where she taught the young ones of the district,
+and returning thither pretty weary in the afternoon.  She had chosen this
+outlying situation, I understood, for her health.  Mr. Corwin was
+consumptive; so was Rufe; so was Mr. Jennings, the engineer.  In short,
+the place was a kind of small Davos: consumptive folk consorting on a
+hilltop in the most unbroken idleness.  Jennings never did anything that
+I could see, except now and then to fish, and generally to sit about in
+the bar and the verandah, waiting for something to happen.  Corwin and
+Rufe did as little as possible; and if the school-ma’am, poor lady, had
+to work pretty hard all morning, she subsided when it was over into much
+the same dazed beatitude as all the rest.
+
+Her special corner was the parlour—a very genteel room, with Bible
+prints, a crayon portrait of Mrs. Corwin in the height of fashion, a few
+years ago, another of her son (Mr. Corwin was not represented), a mirror,
+and a selection of dried grasses.  A large book was laid religiously on
+the table—“From Palace to Hovel,” I believe, its name—full of the raciest
+experiences in England.  The author had mingled freely with all classes,
+the nobility particularly meeting him with open arms; and I must say that
+traveller had ill requited his reception.  His book, in short, was a
+capital instance of the Penny Messalina school of literature; and there
+arose from it, in that cool parlour, in that silent, wayside, mountain
+inn, a rank atmosphere of gold and blood and “Jenkins,” and the
+“Mysteries of London,” and sickening, inverted snobbery, fit to knock you
+down.  The mention of this book reminds me of another and far racier
+picture of our island life.  The latter parts of _Rocambole_ are surely
+too sparingly consulted in the country which they celebrate.  No man’s
+education can be said to be complete, nor can he pronounce the world yet
+emptied of enjoyment, till he has made the acquaintance of “the Reverend
+Patterson, director of the Evangelical Society.”  To follow the
+evolutions of that reverend gentleman, who goes through scenes in which
+even Mr. Duffield would hesitate to place a bishop, is to rise to new
+ideas.  But, alas! there was no Patterson about the Toll House.  Only,
+alongside of “From Palace to Hovel,” a sixpenny “Ouida” figured.  So
+literature, you see, was not unrepresented.
+
+The school-ma’am had friends to stay with her, other school-ma’ams
+enjoying their holidays, quite a bevy of damsels.  They seemed never to
+go out, or not beyond the verandah, but sat close in the little parlour,
+quietly talking or listening to the wind among the trees.  Sleep dwelt in
+the Toll House, like a fixture: summer sleep, shallow, soft, and
+dreamless.  A cuckoo-clock, a great rarity in such a place, hooted at
+intervals about the echoing house; and Mr. Jenning would open his eyes
+for a moment in the bar, and turn the leaf of a newspaper, and the
+resting school-ma’ams in the parlour would be recalled to the
+consciousness of their inaction.  Busy Mrs. Corwin and her busy Chinaman
+might be heard indeed, in the penetralia, pounding dough or rattling
+dishes; or perhaps Rufe had called up some of the sleepers for a game of
+croquet, and the hollow strokes of the mallet sounded far away among the
+woods: but with these exceptions, it was sleep and sunshine and dust, and
+the wind in the pine trees, all day long.
+
+A little before stage time, that castle of indolence awoke.  The ostler
+threw his straw away and set to his preparations.  Mr. Jennings rubbed
+his eyes; happy Mr. Jennings, the something he had been waiting for all
+day about to happen at last!  The boarders gathered in the verandah,
+silently giving ear, and gazing down the road with shaded eyes.  And as
+yet there was no sign for the senses, not a sound, not a tremor of the
+mountain road.  The birds, to whom the secret of the hooting cuckoo is
+unknown, must have set down to instinct this premonitory bustle.
+
+And then the first of the two stages swooped upon the Toll House with a
+roar and in a cloud of dust; and the shock had not yet time to subside,
+before the second was abreast of it.  Huge concerns they were,
+well-horsed and loaded, the men in their shirt-sleeves, the women swathed
+in veils, the long whip cracking like a pistol; and as they charged upon
+that slumbering hostelry, each shepherding a dust storm, the dead place
+blossomed into life and talk and clatter.  This the Toll House?—with its
+city throng, its jostling shoulders, its infinity of instant business in
+the bar?  The mind would not receive it!  The heartfelt bustle of that
+hour is hardly credible; the thrill of the great shower of letters from
+the post-bag, the childish hope and interest with which one gazed in all
+these strangers’ eyes.  They paused there but to pass: the blue-clad
+China-boy, the San Francisco magnate, the mystery in the dust coat, the
+secret memoirs in tweed, the ogling, well-shod lady with her troop of
+girls; they did but flash and go; they were hull-down for us behind
+life’s ocean, and we but hailed their topsails on the line.  Yet, out of
+our great solitude of four and twenty mountain hours, we thrilled to
+their momentary presence gauged and divined them, loved and hated; and
+stood light-headed in that storm of human electricity.  Yes, like
+Piccadilly circus, this is also one of life’s crossing-places.  Here I
+beheld one man, already famous or infamous, a centre of pistol-shots: and
+another who, if not yet known to rumour, will fill a column of the Sunday
+paper when he comes to hang—a burly, thick-set, powerful Chinese
+desperado, six long bristles upon either lip; redolent of whiskey,
+playing cards, and pistols; swaggering in the bar with the lowest
+assumption of the lowest European manners; rapping out blackguard English
+oaths in his canorous oriental voice; and combining in one person the
+depravities of two races and two civilizations.  For all his lust and
+vigour, he seemed to look cold upon me from the valley of the shadow of
+the gallows.  He imagined a vain thing; and while he drained his
+cock-tail, Holbein’s death was at his elbow.  Once, too, I fell in talk
+with another of these flitting strangers—like the rest, in his
+shirt-sleeves and all begrimed with dust—and the next minute we were
+discussing Paris and London, theatres and wines.  To him, journeying from
+one human place to another, this was a trifle; but to me!  No, Mr.
+Lillie, I have not forgotten it.
+
+And presently the city-tide was at its flood and began to ebb.  Life runs
+in Piccadilly Circus, say, from nine to one, and then, there also, ebbs
+into the small hours of the echoing policeman and the lamps and stars.
+But the Toll House is far up stream, and near its rural springs; the
+bubble of the tide but touches it.  Before you had yet grasped your
+pleasure, the horses were put to, the loud whips volleyed, and the tide
+was gone.  North and south had the two stages vanished, the towering dust
+subsided in the woods; but there was still an interval before the flush
+had fallen on your cheeks, before the ear became once more contented with
+the silence, or the seven sleepers of the Toll House dozed back to their
+accustomed corners.  Yet a little, and the ostler would swing round the
+great barrier across the road; and in the golden evening, that dreamy inn
+begin to trim its lamps and spread the board for supper.
+
+As I recall the place—the green dell below; the spires of pine; the
+sun-warm, scented air; that gray, gabled inn, with its faint stirrings of
+life amid the slumber of the mountains—I slowly awake to a sense of
+admiration, gratitude, and almost love.  A fine place, after all, for a
+wasted life to doze away in—the cuckoo clock hooting of its far home
+country; the croquet mallets, eloquent of English lawns; the stages daily
+bringing news of—the turbulent world away below there; and perhaps once
+in the summer, a salt fog pouring overhead with its tale of the Pacific.
+
+
+
+
+A STARRY DRIVE
+
+
+IN our rule at Silverado, there was a melancholy interregnum.  The queen
+and the crown prince with one accord fell sick; and, as I was sick to
+begin with, our lone position on Mount Saint Helena was no longer
+tenable, and we had to hurry back to Calistoga and a cottage on the
+green.  By that time we had begun to realize the difficulties of our
+position.  We had found what an amount of labour it cost to support life
+in our red canyon; and it was the dearest desire of our hearts to get a
+China-boy to go along with us when we returned.  We could have given him
+a whole house to himself, self-contained, as they say in the
+advertisements; and on the money question we were prepared to go far.
+Kong Sam Kee, the Calistoga washerman, was entrusted with the affair; and
+from day to day it languished on, with protestations on our part and
+mellifluous excuses on the part of Kong Sam Kee.
+
+At length, about half-past eight of our last evening, with the waggon
+ready harnessed to convey us up the grade, the washerman, with a somewhat
+sneering air, produced the boy.  He was a handsome, gentlemanly lad,
+attired in rich dark blue, and shod with snowy white; but, alas! he had
+heard rumours of Silverado.  He know it for a lone place on the
+mountain-side, with no friendly wash-house near by, where he might smoke
+a pipe of opium o’ nights with other China-boys, and lose his little
+earnings at the game of tan; and he first backed out for more money; and
+then, when that demand was satisfied, refused to come point-blank.  He
+was wedded to his wash-houses; he had no taste for the rural life; and we
+must go to our mountain servantless.  It must have been near half an hour
+before we reached that conclusion, standing in the midst of Calistoga
+high street under the stars, and the China-boy and Kong Sam Kee singing
+their pigeon English in the sweetest voices and with the most musical
+inflections.
+
+We were not, however, to return alone; for we brought with us Joe Strong,
+the painter, a most good-natured comrade and a capital hand at an
+omelette.  I do not know in which capacity he was most valued—as a cook
+or a companion; and he did excellently well in both.
+
+The Kong Sam Kee negotiation had delayed us unduly; it must have been
+half-past nine before we left Calistoga, and night came fully ere we
+struck the bottom of the grade.  I have never seen such a night.  It
+seemed to throw calumny in the teeth of all the painters that ever
+dabbled in starlight.  The sky itself was of a ruddy, powerful, nameless,
+changing colour, dark and glossy like a serpent’s back.  The stars, by
+innumerable millions, stuck boldly forth like lamps.  The milky way was
+bright, like a moonlit cloud; half heaven seemed milky way.  The greater
+luminaries shone each more clearly than a winter’s moon.  Their light was
+dyed in every sort of colour—red, like fire; blue, like steel; green,
+like the tracks of sunset; and so sharply did each stand forth in its own
+lustre that there was no appearance of that flat, star-spangled arch we
+know so well in pictures, but all the hollow of heaven was one chaos of
+contesting luminaries—a hurry-burly of stars.  Against this the hills and
+rugged treetops stood out redly dark.
+
+As we continued to advance, the lesser lights and milky ways first grew
+pale, and then vanished; the countless hosts of heaven dwindled in number
+by successive millions; those that still shone had tempered their
+exceeding brightness and fallen back into their customary wistful
+distance; and the sky declined from its first bewildering splendour into
+the appearance of a common night.  Slowly this change proceeded, and
+still there was no sign of any cause.  Then a whiteness like mist was
+thrown over the spurs of the mountain.  Yet a while, and, as we turned a
+corner, a great leap of silver light and net of forest shadows fell
+across the road and upon our wondering waggonful; and, swimming low among
+the trees, we beheld a strange, misshapen, waning moon, half-tilted on
+her back.
+
+“Where are ye when the moon appears?” so the old poet sang,
+half-taunting, to the stars, bent upon a courtly purpose.
+
+    “As the sunlight round the dim earth’s midnight tower of shadow
+    pours,
+       Streaming past the dim, wide portals,
+       Viewless to the eyes of mortals,
+    Till it floods the moon’s pale islet or the morning’s golden shores.”
+
+So sings Mr. Trowbridge, with a noble inspiration.  And so had the
+sunlight flooded that pale islet of the moon, and her lit face put out,
+one after another, that galaxy of stars.  The wonder of the drive was
+over; but, by some nice conjunction of clearness in the air and fit
+shadow in the valley where we travelled, we had seen for a little while
+that brave display of the midnight heavens.  It was gone, but it had
+been; nor shall I ever again behold the stars with the same mind.  He who
+has seen the sea commoved with a great hurricane, thinks of it very
+differently from him who has seen it only in a calm.  And the difference
+between a calm and a hurricane is not greatly more striking than that
+between the ordinary face of night and the splendour that shone upon us
+in that drive.  Two in our waggon knew night as she shines upon the
+tropics, but even that bore no comparison.  The nameless colour of the
+sky, the hues of the star-fire, and the incredible projection of the
+stars themselves, starting from their orbits, so that the eye seemed to
+distinguish their positions in the hollow of space—these were things that
+we had never seen before and shall never see again.
+
+Meanwhile, in this altered night, we proceeded on our way among the
+scents and silence of the forest, reached the top of the grade, wound up
+by Hanson’s, and came at last to a stand under the flying gargoyle of the
+chute.  Sam, who had been lying back, fast asleep, with the moon on his
+face, got down, with the remark that it was pleasant “to be home.”  The
+waggon turned and drove away, the noise gently dying in the woods, and we
+clambered up the rough path, Caliban’s great feat of engineering, and
+came home to Silverado.
+
+The moon shone in at the eastern doors and windows, and over the lumber
+on the platform.  The one tall pine beside the ledge was steeped in
+silver.  Away up the canyon, a wild cat welcomed us with three discordant
+squalls.  But once we had lit a candle, and began to review our
+improvements, homely in either sense, and count our stores, it was
+wonderful what a feeling of possession and permanence grow up in the
+hearts of the lords of Silverado.  A bed had still to be made up for
+Strong, and the morning’s water to be fetched, with clinking pail; and as
+we set about these household duties, and showed off our wealth and
+conveniences before the stranger, and had a glass of wine, I think, in
+honour of our return, and trooped at length one after another up the
+flying bridge of plank, and lay down to sleep in our shattered,
+moon-pierced barrack, we were among the happiest sovereigns in the world,
+and certainly ruled over the most contented people.  Yet, in our absence,
+the palace had been sacked.  Wild cats, so the Hansons said, had broken
+in and carried off a side of bacon, a hatchet, and two knives.
+
+
+
+
+EPISODES IN THE STORY OF A MINE
+
+
+NO one could live at Silverado and not be curious about the story of the
+mine.  We were surrounded by so many evidences of expense and toil, we
+lived so entirely in the wreck of that great enterprise, like mites in
+the ruins of a cheese, that the idea of the old din and bustle haunted
+our repose.  Our own house, the forge, the dump, the chutes, the rails,
+the windlass, the mass of broken plant; the two tunnels, one far below in
+the green dell, the other on the platform where we kept our wine; the
+deep shaft, with the sun-glints and the water-drops; above all, the
+ledge, that great gaping slice out of the mountain shoulder, propped
+apart by wooden wedges, on whose immediate margin, high above our heads,
+the one tall pine precariously nodded—these stood for its greatness;
+while, the dog-hutch, boot-jacks, old boots, old tavern bills, and the
+very beds that we inherited from bygone miners, put in human touches and
+realized for us the story of the past.
+
+I have sat on an old sleeper, under the thick madronas near the forge,
+with just a look over the dump on the green world below, and seen the sun
+lying broad among the wreck, and heard the silence broken only by the
+tinkling water in the shaft, or a stir of the royal family about the
+battered palace, and my mind has gone back to the epoch of the Stanleys
+and the Chapmans, with a grand _tutti_ of pick and drill, hammer and
+anvil, echoing about the canyon; the assayer hard at it in our
+dining-room; the carts below on the road, and their cargo of red mineral
+bounding and thundering down the iron chute.  And now all gone—all fallen
+away into this sunny silence and desertion: a family of squatters dining
+in the assayer’s office, making their beds in the big sleeping room
+erstwhile so crowded, keeping their wine in the tunnel that once rang
+with picks.
+
+But Silverado itself, although now fallen in its turn into decay, was
+once but a mushroom, and had succeeded to other mines and other flitting
+cities.  Twenty years ago, away down the glen on the Lake County side
+there was a place, Jonestown by name, with two thousand inhabitants
+dwelling under canvas, and one roofed house for the sale of whiskey.
+Round on the western side of Mount Saint Helena, there was at the same
+date, a second large encampment, its name, if it ever had one, lost for
+me.  Both of these have perished, leaving not a stick and scarce a memory
+behind them.  Tide after tide of hopeful miners have thus flowed and
+ebbed about the mountain, coming and going, now by lone prospectors, now
+with a rush.  Last, in order of time came Silverado, reared the big mill,
+in the valley, founded the town which is now represented, monumentally,
+by Hanson’s, pierced all these slaps and shafts and tunnels, and in turn
+declined and died away.
+
+    “Our noisy years seem moments in the wake
+    Of the eternal silence.”
+
+As to the success of Silverado in its time of being, two reports were
+current.  According to the first, six hundred thousand dollars were taken
+out of that great upright seam, that still hung open above us on crazy
+wedges.  Then the ledge pinched out, and there followed, in quest of the
+remainder, a great drifting and tunnelling in all directions, and a great
+consequent effusion of dollars, until, all parties being sick of the
+expense, the mine was deserted, and the town decamped.  According to the
+second version, told me with much secrecy of manner, the whole affair,
+mine, mill, and town, were parts of one majestic swindle.  There had
+never come any silver out of any portion of the mine; there was no silver
+to come.  At midnight trains of packhorses might have been observed
+winding by devious tracks about the shoulder of the mountain.  They came
+from far away, from Amador or Placer, laden with silver in “old cigar
+boxes.”  They discharged their load at Silverado, in the hour of sleep;
+and before the morning they were gone again with their mysterious drivers
+to their unknown source.  In this way, twenty thousand pounds’ worth of
+silver was smuggled in under cover of night, in these old cigar boxes;
+mixed with Silverado mineral; carted down to the mill; crushed,
+amalgated, and refined, and despatched to the city as the proper product
+of the mine.  Stock-jobbing, if it can cover such expenses, must be a
+profitable business in San Francisco.
+
+I give these two versions as I got them.  But I place little reliance on
+either, my belief in history having been greatly shaken.  For it chanced
+that I had come to dwell in Silverado at a critical hour; great events in
+its history were about to happen—did happen, as I am led to believe; nay,
+and it will be seen that I played a part in that revolution myself.  And
+yet from first to last I never had a glimmer of an idea what was going
+on; and even now, after full reflection, profess myself at sea.  That
+there was some obscure intrigue of the cigar-box order, and that I, in
+the character of a wooden puppet, set pen to paper in the interest of
+somebody, so much, and no more, is certain.
+
+Silverado, then under my immediate sway, belonged to one whom I will call
+a Mr. Ronalds.  I only knew him through the extraordinarily distorting
+medium of local gossip, now as a momentous jobber; now as a dupe to point
+an adage; and again, and much more probably, as an ordinary Christian
+gentleman like you or me, who had opened a mine and worked it for a while
+with better and worse fortune.  So, through a defective window-pane, you
+may see the passer-by shoot up into a hunchbacked giant or dwindle into a
+potbellied dwarf.
+
+To Ronalds, at least, the mine belonged; but the notice by which he held
+it would ran out upon the 30th of June—or rather, as I suppose, it had
+run out already, and the month of grace would expire upon that day, after
+which any American citizen might post a notice of his own, and make
+Silverado his.  This, with a sort of quiet slyness, Rufe told me at an
+early period of our acquaintance.  There was no silver, of course; the
+mine “wasn’t worth nothing, Mr. Stevens,” but there was a deal of old
+iron and wood around, and to gain possession of this old wood and iron,
+and get a right to the water, Rufe proposed, if I had no objections, to
+“jump the claim.”
+
+Of course, I had no objection.  But I was filled with wonder.  If all he
+wanted was the wood and iron, what, in the name of fortune, was to
+prevent him taking them?  “His right there was none to dispute.”  He
+might lay hands on all to-morrow, as the wild cats had laid hands upon
+our knives and hatchet.  Besides, was this mass of heavy mining plant
+worth transportation?  If it was, why had not the rightful owners carted
+it away?  If it was, would they not preserve their title to these
+movables, even after they had lost their title to the mine?  And if it
+were not, what the better was Rufe?  Nothing would grow at Silverado;
+there was even no wood to cut; beyond a sense of property, there was
+nothing to be gained.  Lastly, was it at all credible that Ronalds would
+forget what Rufe remembered?  The days of grace were not yet over: any
+fine morning he might appear, paper in hand, and enter for another year
+on his inheritance.  However, it was none of my business; all seemed
+legal; Rufe or Ronalds, all was one to me.
+
+On the morning of the 27th, Mrs. Hanson appeared with the milk as usual,
+in her sun-bonnet.  The time would be out on Tuesday, she reminded us,
+and bade me be in readiness to play my part, though I had no idea what it
+was to be.  And suppose Ronalds came? we asked.  She received the idea
+with derision, laughing aloud with all her fine teeth.  He could not find
+the mine to save his life, it appeared, without Rufe to guide him.  Last
+year, when he came, they heard him “up and down the road a hollerin’ and
+a raisin’ Cain.”  And at last he had to come to the Hansons in despair,
+and bid Rufe, “Jump into your pants and shoes, and show me where this old
+mine is, anyway!”  Seeing that Ronalds had laid out so much money in the
+spot, and that a beaten road led right up to the bottom of the clump, I
+thought this a remarkable example.  The sense of locality must be
+singularly in abeyance in the case of Ronalds.
+
+That same evening, supper comfortably over, Joe Strong busy at work on a
+drawing of the dump and the opposite hills, we were all out on the
+platform together, sitting there, under the tented heavens, with the same
+sense of privacy as if we had been cabined in a parlour, when the sound
+of brisk footsteps came mounting up the path.  We pricked our ears at
+this, for the tread seemed lighter and firmer than was usual with our
+country neighbours.  And presently, sure enough, two town gentlemen, with
+cigars and kid gloves, came debauching past the house.  They looked in
+that place like a blasphemy.
+
+“Good evening,” they said.  For none of us had stirred; we all sat stiff
+with wonder.
+
+“Good evening,” I returned; and then, to put them at their ease, “A stiff
+climb,” I added.
+
+“Yes,” replied the leader; “but we have to thank you for this path.”
+
+I did not like the man’s tone.  None of us liked it.  He did not seem
+embarrassed by the meeting, but threw us his remarks like favours, and
+strode magisterially by us towards the shaft and tunnel.
+
+Presently we heard his voice raised to his companion.  “We drifted every
+sort of way, but couldn’t strike the ledge.”  Then again: “It pinched out
+here.”  And once more: “Every minor that ever worked upon it says there’s
+bound to be a ledge somewhere.”
+
+These were the snatches of his talk that reached us, and they had a
+damning significance.  We, the lords of Silverado, had come face to face
+with our superior.  It is the worst of all quaint and of all cheap ways
+of life that they bring us at last to the pinch of some humiliation.  I
+liked well enough to be a squatter when there was none but Hanson by;
+before Ronalds, I will own, I somewhat quailed.  I hastened to do him
+fealty, said I gathered he was the Squattee, and apologized.  He
+threatened me with ejection, in a manner grimly pleasant—more pleasant to
+him, I fancy, than to me; and then he passed off into praises of the
+former state of Silverado.  “It was the busiest little mining town you
+ever saw:” a population of between a thousand and fifteen hundred souls,
+the engine in full blast, the mill newly erected; nothing going but
+champagne, and hope the order of the day.  Ninety thousand dollars came
+out; a hundred and forty thousand were put in, making a net loss of fifty
+thousand.  The last days, I gathered, the days of John Stanley, were not
+so bright; the champagne had ceased to flow, the population was already
+moving elsewhere, and Silverado had begun to wither in the branch before
+it was cut at the root.  The last shot that was fired knocked over the
+stove chimney, and made that hole in the roof of our barrack, through
+which the sun was wont to visit slug-a-beds towards afternoon.  A noisy,
+last shot, to inaugurate the days of silence.
+
+Throughout this interview, my conscience was a good deal exercised; and I
+was moved to throw myself on my knees and own the intended treachery.
+But then I had Hanson to consider.  I was in much the same position as
+Old Rowley, that royal humourist, whom “the rogue had taken into his
+confidence.”  And again, here was Ronalds on the spot.  He must know the
+day of the month as well as Hanson and I.  If a broad hint were
+necessary, he had the broadest in the world.  For a large board had been
+nailed by the crown prince on the very front of our house, between the
+door and window, painted in cinnabar—the pigment of the country—with
+doggrel rhymes and contumelious pictures, and announcing, in terms
+unnecessarily figurative, that the trick was already played, the claim
+already jumped, and Master Sam the legitimate successor of Mr. Ronalds.
+But no, nothing could save that man; _quem deus vult perdere_, _prius
+dementat_.  As he came so he went, and left his rights depending.
+
+Late at night, by Silverado reckoning, and after we were all abed, Mrs.
+Hanson returned to give us the newest of her news.  It was like a scene
+in a ship’s steerage: all of us abed in our different tiers, the single
+candle struggling with the darkness, and this plump, handsome woman,
+seated on an upturned valise beside the bunks, talking and showing her
+fine teeth, and laughing till the rafters rang.  Any ship, to be sure,
+with a hundredth part as many holes in it as our barrack, must long ago
+have gone to her last port.  Up to that time I had always imagined Mrs.
+Hanson’s loquacity to be mere incontinence, that she said what was
+uppermost for the pleasure of speaking, and laughed and laughed again as
+a kind of musical accompaniment.  But I now found there was an art in it,
+I found it less communicative than silence itself.  I wished to know why
+Ronalds had come; how he had found his way without Rufe; and why, being
+on the spot, he had not refreshed his title.  She talked interminably on,
+but her replies were never answers.  She fled under a cloud of words; and
+when I had made sure that she was purposely eluding me, I dropped the
+subject in my turn, and let her rattle where she would.
+
+She had come to tell us that, instead of waiting for Tuesday, the claim
+was to be jumped on the morrow.  How?  If the time were not out, it was
+impossible.  Why?  If Ronalds had come and gone, and done nothing, there
+was the less cause for hurry.  But again I could reach no satisfaction.
+The claim was to be jumped next morning, that was all that she would
+condescend upon.
+
+And yet it was not jumped the next morning, nor yet the next, and a whole
+week had come and gone before we heard more of this exploit.  That day
+week, however, a day of great heat, Hanson, with a little roll of paper
+in his hand, and the eternal pipe alight; Breedlove, his large, dull
+friend, to act, I suppose, as witness; Mrs. Hanson, in her Sunday best;
+and all the children, from the oldest to the youngest;—arrived in a
+procession, tailing one behind another up the path.  Caliban was absent,
+but he had been chary of his friendly visits since the row; and with that
+exception, the whole family was gathered together as for a marriage or a
+christening.  Strong was sitting at work, in the shade of the dwarf
+madronas near the forge; and they planted themselves about him in a
+circle, one on a stone, another on the waggon rails, a third on a piece
+of plank.  Gradually the children stole away up the canyon to where there
+was another chute, somewhat smaller than the one across the dump; and
+down this chute, for the rest of the afternoon, they poured one avalanche
+of stones after another, waking the echoes of the glen.  Meantime we
+elders sat together on the platform, Hanson and his friend smoking in
+silence like Indian sachems, Mrs. Hanson rattling on as usual with an
+adroit volubility, saying nothing, but keeping the party at their ease
+like a courtly hostess.
+
+Not a word occurred about the business of the day.  Once, twice, and
+thrice I tried to slide the subject in, but was discouraged by the stoic
+apathy of Rufe, and beaten down before the pouring verbiage of his wife.
+There is nothing of the Indian brave about me, and I began to grill with
+impatience.  At last, like a highway robber, I cornered Hanson, and bade
+him stand and deliver his business.  Thereupon he gravely rose, as though
+to hint that this was not a proper place, nor the subject one suitable
+for squaws, and I, following his example, led him up the plank into our
+barrack.  There he bestowed himself on a box, and unrolled his papers
+with fastidious deliberation.  There were two sheets of note-paper, and
+an old mining notice, dated May 30th, 1879, part print, part manuscript,
+and the latter much obliterated by the rains.  It was by this identical
+piece of paper that the mine had been held last year.  For thirteen
+months it had endured the weather and the change of seasons on a cairn
+behind the shoulder of the canyon; and it was now my business, spreading
+it before me on the table, and sitting on a valise, to copy its terms,
+with some necessary changes, twice over on the two sheets of note-paper.
+One was then to be placed on the same cairn—a “mound of rocks” the notice
+put it; and the other to be lodged for registration.
+
+Rufe watched me, silently smoking, till I came to the place for the
+locator’s name at the end of the first copy; and when I proposed that he
+should sign, I thought I saw a scare in his eye.  “I don’t think that’ll
+be necessary,” he said slowly; “just you write it down.”  Perhaps this
+mighty hunter, who was the most active member of the local school board,
+could not write.  There would be nothing strange in that.  The constable
+of Calistoga is, and has been for years, a bed-ridden man, and, if I
+remember rightly, blind.  He had more need of the emoluments than
+another, it was explained; and it was easy for him to “depytize,” with a
+strong accent on the last.  So friendly and so free are popular
+institutions.
+
+When I had done my scrivening, Hanson strolled out, and addressed
+Breedlove, “Will you step up here a bit?” and after they had disappeared
+a little while into the chaparral and madrona thicket, they came back
+again, minus a notice, and the deed was done.  The claim was jumped; a
+tract of mountain-side, fifteen hundred feet long by six hundred wide,
+with all the earth’s precious bowels, had passed from Ronalds to Hanson,
+and, in the passage, changed its name from the “Mammoth” to the
+“Calistoga.”  I had tried to get Rufe to call it after his wife, after
+himself, and after Garfield, the Republican Presidential candidate of the
+hour—since then elected, and, alas! dead—but all was in vain.  The claim
+had once been called the Calistoga before, and he seemed to feel safety
+in returning to that.
+
+And so the history of that mine became once more plunged in darkness, lit
+only by some monster pyrotechnical displays of gossip.  And perhaps the
+most curious feature of the whole matter is this: that we should have
+dwelt in this quiet corner of the mountains, with not a dozen neighbours,
+and yet struggled all the while, like desperate swimmers, in this sea of
+falsities and contradictions.  Wherever a man is, there will be a lie.
+
+
+
+
+TOILS AND PLEASURES
+
+
+I MUST try to convey some notion of our life, of how the days passed and
+what pleasure we took in them, of what there was to do and how we set
+about doing it, in our mountain hermitage.  The house, after we had
+repaired the worst of the damages, and filled in some of the doors and
+windows with white cotton cloth, became a healthy and a pleasant
+dwelling-place, always airy and dry, and haunted by the outdoor perfumes
+of the glen.  Within, it had the look of habitation, the human look.  You
+had only to go into the third room, which we did not use, and see its
+stones, its sifting earth, its tumbled litter; and then return to our
+lodging, with the beds made, the plates on the rack, the pail of bright
+water behind the door, the stove crackling in a corner, and perhaps the
+table roughly laid against a meal,—and man’s order, the little clean
+spots that he creates to dwell in, were at once contrasted with the rich
+passivity of nature.  And yet our house was everywhere so wrecked and
+shattered, the air came and went so freely, the sun found so many
+portholes, the golden outdoor glow shone in so many open chinks, that we
+enjoyed, at the same time, some of the comforts of a roof and much of the
+gaiety and brightness of al fresco life.  A single shower of rain, to be
+sure, and we should have been drowned out like mice.  But ours was a
+Californian summer, and an earthquake was a far likelier accident than a
+shower of rain.
+
+Trustful in this fine weather, we kept the house for kitchen and bedroom,
+and used the platform as our summer parlour.  The sense of privacy, as I
+have said already, was complete.  We could look over the clump on miles
+of forest and rough hilltop; our eyes commanded some of Napa Valley,
+where the train ran, and the little country townships sat so close
+together along the line of the rail.  But here there was no man to
+intrude.  None but the Hansons were our visitors.  Even they came but at
+long intervals, or twice daily, at a stated hour, with milk.  So our
+days, as they were never interrupted, drew out to the greater length;
+hour melted insensibly into hour; the household duties, though they were
+many, and some of them laborious, dwindled into mere islets of business
+in a sea of sunny day-time; and it appears to me, looking back, as though
+the far greater part of our life at Silverado had been passed, propped
+upon an elbow, or seated on a plank, listening to the silence that there
+is among the hills.
+
+My work, it is true, was over early in the morning.  I rose before any
+one else, lit the stove, put on the water to boil, and strolled forth
+upon the platform to wait till it was ready.  Silverado would then be
+still in shadow, the sun shining on the mountain higher up.  A clean
+smell of trees, a smell of the earth at morning, hung in the air.
+Regularly, every day, there was a single bird, not singing, but awkwardly
+chirruping among the green madronas, and the sound was cheerful, natural,
+and stirring.  It did not hold the attention, nor interrupt the thread of
+meditation, like a blackbird or a nightingale; it was mere woodland
+prattle, of which the mind was conscious like a perfume.  The freshness
+of these morning seasons remained with me far on into the day.
+
+As soon as the kettle boiled, I made porridge and coffee; and that,
+beyond the literal drawing of water, and the preparation of kindling,
+which it would be hyperbolical to call the hewing of wood, ended my
+domestic duties for the day.  Thenceforth my wife laboured single-handed
+in the palace, and I lay or wandered on the platform at my own sweet
+will.  The little corner near the forge, where we found a refuge under
+the madronas from the unsparing early sun, is indeed connected in my mind
+with some nightmare encounters over Euclid, and the Latin Grammar.  These
+were known as Sam’s lessons.  He was supposed to be the victim and the
+sufferer; but here there must have been some misconception, for whereas I
+generally retired to bed after one of these engagements, he was no sooner
+set free than he dashed up to the Chinaman’s house, where he had
+installed a printing press, that great element of civilization, and the
+sound of his labours would be faintly audible about the canyon half the
+day.
+
+To walk at all was a laborious business; the foot sank and slid, the
+boots were cut to pieces, among sharp, uneven, rolling stones.  When we
+crossed the platform in any direction, it was usual to lay a course,
+following as much as possible the line of waggon rails.  Thus, if water
+were to be drawn, the water-carrier left the house along some tilting
+planks that we had laid down, and not laid down very well.  These carried
+him to that great highroad, the railway; and the railway served him as
+far as to the head of the shaft.  But from thence to the spring and back
+again he made the best of his unaided way, staggering among the stones,
+and wading in low growth of the calcanthus, where the rattlesnakes lay
+hissing at his passage.  Yet I liked to draw water.  It was pleasant to
+dip the gray metal pail into the clean, colourless, cool water; pleasant
+to carry it back, with the water ripping at the edge, and a broken
+sunbeam quivering in the midst.
+
+But the extreme roughness of the walking confined us in common practice
+to the platform, and indeed to those parts of it that were most easily
+accessible along the line of rails.  The rails came straight forward from
+the shaft, here and there overgrown with little green bushes, but still
+entire, and still carrying a truck, which it was Sam’s delight to trundle
+to and fro by the hour with various ladings.  About midway down the
+platform, the railroad trended to the right, leaving our house and
+coasting along the far side within a few yards of the madronas and the
+forge, and not far of the latter, ended in a sort of platform on the edge
+of the dump.  There, in old days, the trucks were tipped, and their load
+sent thundering down the chute.  There, besides, was the only spot where
+we could approach the margin of the dump.  Anywhere else, you took your
+life in your right hand when you came within a yard and a half to peer
+over.  For at any moment the dump might begin to slide and carry you down
+and bury you below its ruins.  Indeed, the neighbourhood of an old mine
+is a place beset with dangers.  For as still as Silverado was, at any
+moment the report of rotten wood might tell us that the platform had
+fallen into the shaft; the dump might begin to pour into the road below;
+or a wedge slip in the great upright seam, and hundreds of tons of
+mountain bury the scene of our encampment.
+
+I have already compared the dump to a rampart, built certainly by some
+rude people, and for prehistoric wars.  It was likewise a frontier.  All
+below was green and woodland, the tall pines soaring one above another,
+each with a firm outline and full spread of bough.  All above was arid,
+rocky, and bald.  The great spout of broken mineral, that had dammed the
+canyon up, was a creature of man’s handiwork, its material dug out with a
+pick and powder, and spread by the service of the tracks.  But nature
+herself, in that upper district, seemed to have had an eye to nothing
+besides mining; and even the natural hill-side was all sliding gravel and
+precarious boulder.  Close at the margin of the well leaves would decay
+to skeletons and mummies, which at length some stronger gust would carry
+clear of the canyon and scatter in the subjacent woods.  Even moisture
+and decaying vegetable matter could not, with all nature’s alchemy,
+concoct enough soil to nourish a few poor grasses.  It is the same, they
+say, in the neighbourhood of all silver mines; the nature of that
+precious rock being stubborn with quartz and poisonous with cinnabar.
+Both were plenty in our Silverado.  The stones sparkled white in the
+sunshine with quartz; they were all stained red with cinnabar.  Here,
+doubtless, came the Indians of yore to paint their faces for the
+war-path; and cinnabar, if I remember rightly, was one of the few
+articles of Indian commerce.  Now, Sam had it in his undisturbed
+possession, to pound down and slake, and paint his rude designs with.
+But to me it had always a fine flavour of poetry, compounded out of
+Indian story and Hawthornden’s allusion:
+
+    “Desire, alas! I desire a Zeuxis new,
+    From Indies borrowing gold, from Eastern skies
+    Most bright cinoper . . .”
+
+Yet this is but half the picture; our Silverado platform has another side
+to it.  Though there was no soil, and scarce a blade of grass, yet out of
+these tumbled gravel-heaps and broken boulders, a flower garden bloomed
+as at home in a conservatory.  Calcanthus crept, like a hardy weed, all
+over our rough parlour, choking the railway, and pushing forth its rusty,
+aromatic cones from between two blocks of shattered mineral.  Azaleas
+made a big snow-bed just above the well.  The shoulder of the hill waved
+white with Mediterranean heath.  In the crannies of the ledge and about
+the spurs of the tall pine, a red flowering stone-plant hung in clusters.
+Even the low, thorny chaparral was thick with pea-like blossom.  Close at
+the foot of our path nutmegs prospered, delightful to the sight and
+smell.  At sunrise, and again late at night, the scent of the sweet bay
+trees filled the canyon, and the down-blowing night wind must have borne
+it hundreds of feet into the outer air.
+
+All this vegetation, to be sure, was stunted.  The madrona was here no
+bigger than the manzanita; the bay was but a stripling shrub; the very
+pines, with four or five exceptions in all our upper canyon, were not so
+tall as myself, or but a little taller, and the most of them came lower
+than my waist.  For a prosperous forest tree, we must look below, where
+the glen was crowded with green spires.  But for flowers and ravishing
+perfume, we had none to envy: our heap of road-metal was thick with
+bloom, like a hawthorn in the front of June; our red, baking angle in the
+mountain, a laboratory of poignant scents.  It was an endless wonder to
+my mind, as I dreamed about the platform, following the progress of the
+shadows, where the madrona with its leaves, the azalea and calcanthus
+with their blossoms, could find moisture to support such thick, wet, waxy
+growths, or the bay tree collect the ingredients of its perfume.  But
+there they all grew together, healthy, happy, and happy-making, as though
+rooted in a fathom of black soil.
+
+Nor was it only vegetable life that prospered.  We had, indeed, few
+birds, and none that had much of a voice or anything worthy to be called
+a song.  My morning comrade had a thin chirp, unmusical and monotonous,
+but friendly and pleasant to hear.  He had but one rival: a fellow with
+an ostentatious cry of near an octave descending, not one note of which
+properly followed another.  This is the only bird I ever knew with a
+wrong ear; but there was something enthralling about his performance.
+You listened and listened, thinking each time he must surely get it
+right; but no, it was always wrong, and always wrong the same way.  Yet
+he seemed proud of his song, delivered it with execution and a manner of
+his own, and was charming to his mate.  A very incorrect, incessant human
+whistler had thus a chance of knowing how his own music pleased the
+world.  Two great birds—eagles, we thought—dwelt at the top of the
+canyon, among the crags that were printed on the sky.  Now and again, but
+very rarely, they wheeled high over our heads in silence, or with a
+distant, dying scream; and then, with a fresh impulse, winged fleetly
+forward, dipped over a hilltop, and were gone.  They seemed solemn and
+ancient things, sailing the blue air: perhaps co-oeval with the mountain
+where they haunted, perhaps emigrants from Rome, where the glad legions
+may have shouted to behold them on the morn of battle.
+
+But if birds were rare, the place abounded with rattlesnakes—the
+rattlesnake’s nest, it might have been named.  Wherever we brushed among
+the bushes, our passage woke their angry buzz.  One dwelt habitually in
+the wood-pile, and sometimes, when we came for firewood, thrust up his
+small head between two logs, and hissed at the intrusion.  The rattle has
+a legendary credit; it is said to be awe-inspiring, and, once heard, to
+stamp itself for ever in the memory.  But the sound is not at all
+alarming; the hum of many insects, and the buzz of the wasp convince the
+ear of danger quite as readily.  As a matter of fact, we lived for weeks
+in Silverado, coming and going, with rattles sprung on every side, and it
+never occurred to us to be afraid.  I used to take sun-baths and do
+calisthenics in a certain pleasant nook among azalea and calcanthus, the
+rattles whizzing on every side like spinning-wheels, and the combined
+hiss or buzz rising louder and angrier at any sudden movement; but I was
+never in the least impressed, nor ever attacked.  It was only towards the
+end of our stay, that a man down at Calistoga, who was expatiating on the
+terrifying nature of the sound, gave me at last a very good imitation;
+and it burst on me at once that we dwelt in the very metropolis of deadly
+snakes, and that the rattle was simply the commonest noise in Silverado.
+Immediately on our return, we attacked the Hansons on the subject.  They
+had formerly assured us that our canyon was favoured, like Ireland, with
+an entire immunity from poisonous reptiles; but, with the perfect
+inconsequence of the natural man, they were no sooner found out than they
+went off at score in the contrary direction, and we were told that in no
+part of the world did rattlesnakes attain to such a monstrous bigness as
+among the warm, flower-dotted rocks of Silverado.  This is a contribution
+rather to the natural history of the Hansons, than to that of snakes.
+
+One person, however, better served by his instinct, had known the rattle
+from the first; and that was Chuchu, the dog.  No rational creature has
+ever led an existence more poisoned by terror than that dog’s at
+Silverado.  Every whiz of the rattle made him bound.  His eyes rolled; he
+trembled; he would be often wet with sweat.  One of our great mysteries
+was his terror of the mountain.  A little away above our nook, the
+azaleas and almost all the vegetation ceased.  Dwarf pines not big enough
+to be Christmas trees, grew thinly among loose stone and gravel scaurs.
+Here and there a big boulder sat quiescent on a knoll, having paused
+there till the next rain in his long slide down the mountain.  There was
+here no ambuscade for the snakes, you could see clearly where you trod;
+and yet the higher I went, the more abject and appealing became Chuchu’s
+terror.  He was an excellent master of that composite language in which
+dogs communicate with men, and he would assure me, on his honour, that
+there was some peril on the mountain; appeal to me, by all that I held
+holy, to turn back; and at length, finding all was in vain, and that I
+still persisted, ignorantly foolhardy, he would suddenly whip round and
+make a bee-line down the slope for Silverado, the gravel showering after
+him.  What was he afraid of?  There were admittedly brown bears and
+California lions on the mountain; and a grizzly visited Rufe’s poultry
+yard not long before, to the unspeakable alarm of Caliban, who dashed out
+to chastise the intruder, and found himself, by moonlight, face to face
+with such a tartar.  Something at least there must have been: some hairy,
+dangerous brute lodged permanently among the rocks a little to the
+north-west of Silverado, spending his summer thereabout, with wife and
+family.
+
+And there was, or there had been, another animal.  Once, under the broad
+daylight, on that open stony hillside, where the baby pines were growing,
+scarcely tall enough to be a badge for a MacGregor’s bonnet, I came
+suddenly upon his innocent body, lying mummified by the dry air and sun:
+a pigmy kangaroo.  I am ingloriously ignorant of these subjects; had
+never heard of such a beast; thought myself face to face with some
+incomparable sport of nature; and began to cherish hopes of immortality
+in science.  Rarely have I been conscious of a stranger thrill than when
+I raised that singular creature from the stones, dry as a board, his
+innocent heart long quiet, and all warm with sunshine.  His long hind
+legs were stiff, his tiny forepaws clutched upon his breast, as if to
+leap; his poor life cut short upon that mountain by some unknown
+accident.  But the kangaroo rat, it proved, was no such unknown animal;
+and my discovery was nothing.
+
+Crickets were not wanting.  I thought I could make out exactly four of
+them, each with a corner of his own, who used to make night musical at
+Silverado.  In the matter of voice, they far excelled the birds, and
+their ringing whistle sounded from rock to rock, calling and replying the
+same thing, as in a meaningless opera.  Thus, children in full health and
+spirits shout together, to the dismay of neighbours; and their idle,
+happy, deafening vociferations rise and fall, like the song of the
+crickets.  I used to sit at night on the platform, and wonder why these
+creatures were so happy; and what was wrong with man that he also did not
+wind up his days with an hour or two of shouting; but I suspect that all
+long-lived animals are solemn.  The dogs alone are hardly used by nature;
+and it seems a manifest injustice for poor Chuchu to die in his teens,
+after a life so shadowed and troubled, continually shaken with alarm, and
+the tear of elegant sentiment permanently in his eye.
+
+There was another neighbour of ours at Silverado, small but very active,
+a destructive fellow.  This was a black, ugly fly—a bore, the Hansons
+called him—who lived by hundreds in the boarding of our house.  He
+entered by a round hole, more neatly pierced than a man could do it with
+a gimlet, and he seems to have spent his life in cutting out the interior
+of the plank, but whether as a dwelling or a store-house, I could never
+find.  When I used to lie in bed in the morning for a rest—we had no
+easy-chairs in Silverado—I would hear, hour after hour, the sharp cutting
+sound of his labours, and from time to time a dainty shower of sawdust
+would fall upon the blankets.  There lives no more industrious creature
+than a bore.
+
+And now that I have named to the reader all our animals and insects
+without exception—only I find I have forgotten the flies—he will be able
+to appreciate the singular privacy and silence of our days.  It was not
+only man who was excluded: animals, the song of birds, the lowing of
+cattle, the bleating of sheep, clouds even, and the variations of the
+weather, were here also wanting; and as, day after day, the sky was one
+dome of blue, and the pines below us stood motionless in the still air,
+so the hours themselves were marked out from each other only by the
+series of our own affairs, and the sun’s great period as he ranged
+westward through the heavens.  The two birds cackled a while in the early
+morning; all day the water tinkled in the shaft, the bores ground sawdust
+in the planking of our crazy palace—infinitesimal sounds; and it was only
+with the return of night that any change would fall on our surroundings,
+or the four crickets begin to flute together in the dark.
+
+Indeed, it would be hard to exaggerate the pleasure that we took in the
+approach of evening.  Our day was not very long, but it was very tiring.
+To trip along unsteady planks or wade among shifting stones, to go to and
+fro for water, to clamber down the glen to the Toll House after meat and
+letters, to cook, to make fires and beds, were all exhausting to the
+body.  Life out of doors, besides, under the fierce eye of day, draws
+largely on the animal spirits.  There are certain hours in the afternoon
+when a man, unless he is in strong health or enjoys a vacant mind, would
+rather creep into a cool corner of a house and sit upon the chairs of
+civilization.  About that time, the sharp stones, the planks, the
+upturned boxes of Silverado, began to grow irksome to my body; I set out
+on that hopeless, never-ending quest for a more comfortable posture; I
+would be fevered and weary of the staring sun; and just then he would
+begin courteously to withdraw his countenance, the shadows lengthened,
+the aromatic airs awoke, and an indescribable but happy change announced
+the coming of the night.
+
+The hours of evening, when we were once curtained in the friendly dark,
+sped lightly.  Even as with the crickets, night brought to us a certain
+spirit of rejoicing.  It was good to taste the air; good to mark the
+dawning of the stars, as they increased their glittering company; good,
+too, to gather stones, and send them crashing down the chute, a wave of
+light.  It seemed, in some way, the reward and the fulfilment of the day.
+So it is when men dwell in the open air; it is one of the simple
+pleasures that we lose by living cribbed and covered in a house, that,
+though the coming of the day is still the most inspiriting, yet day’s
+departure, also, and the return of night refresh, renew, and quiet us;
+and in the pastures of the dusk we stand, like cattle, exulting in the
+absence of the load.
+
+Our nights wore never cold, and they were always still, but for one
+remarkable exception.  Regularly, about nine o’clock, a warm wind sprang
+up, and blew for ten minutes, or maybe a quarter of an hour, right down
+the canyon, fanning it well out, airing it as a mother airs the night
+nursery before the children sleep.  As far as I could judge, in the clear
+darkness of the night, this wind was purely local: perhaps dependant on
+the configuration of the glen.  At least, it was very welcome to the hot
+and weary squatters; and if we were not abed already, the springing up of
+this lilliputian valley-wind would often be our signal to retire.
+
+I was the last to go to bed, as I was still the first to rise.  Many a
+night I have strolled about the platform, taking a bath of darkness
+before I slept.  The rest would be in bed, and even from the forge I
+could hear them talking together from bunk to bunk.  A single candle in
+the neck of a pint bottle was their only illumination; and yet the old
+cracked house seemed literally bursting with the light.  It shone keen as
+a knife through all the vertical chinks; it struck upward through the
+broken shingles; and through the eastern door and window, it fell in a
+great splash upon the thicket and the overhanging rock.  You would have
+said a conflagration, or at the least a roaring forge; and behold, it was
+but a candle.  Or perhaps it was yet more strange to see the procession
+moving bedwards round the corner of the house, and up the plank that
+brought us to the bedroom door; under the immense spread of the starry
+heavens, down in a crevice of the giant mountain these few human shapes,
+with their unshielded taper, made so disproportionate a figure in the eye
+and mind.  But the more he is alone with nature, the greater man and his
+doings bulk in the consideration of his fellow-men.  Miles and miles away
+upon the opposite hill-tops, if there were any hunter belated or any
+traveller who had lost his way, he must have stood, and watched and
+wondered, from the time the candle issued from the door of the assayer’s
+office till it had mounted the plank and disappeared again into the
+miners’ dormitory.
+
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS***
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+<title>The Silverado Squatters, by Robert Louis Stevenson</title>
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+
+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Silverado Squatters, by Robert Louis
+Stevenson, Illustrated by Joseph D. Strong
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: The Silverado Squatters
+
+
+Author: Robert Louis Stevenson
+
+
+
+Release Date: January 29, 2013  [eBook #516]
+[This file was first posted on March 12, 1996]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS***
+</pre>
+<p>Transcribed from the 1906 Chatto &amp; Windus edition by David
+Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a href="images/fpb.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Picture of the squatters by Joseph D. Strong.  The title page
+incorrectly claims it was by Joseph A. Strong"
+title=
+"Picture of the squatters by Joseph D. Strong.  The title page
+incorrectly claims it was by Joseph A. Strong"
+src="images/fps.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<h1>THE<br />
+SILVERADO SQUATTERS</h1>
+<p style="text-align: center"><span
+class="GutSmall">BY</span></p>
+<p style="text-align: center">ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a href="images/p0b.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Decorative graphic"
+title=
+"Decorative graphic"
+src="images/p0s.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p style="text-align: center"><span class="GutSmall">A NEW
+IMPRESSION</span><br />
+<span class="GutSmall">WITH A FRONTISPIECE BY JOSEPH D.
+STRONG</span></p>
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p style="text-align: center">LONDON<br />
+CHATTO &amp; WINDUS<br />
+1906</p>
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;Vixerunt nonnulli in agris, delectati re
+sua familiari.&nbsp; His idem propositum fuit quod regibus, ut ne
+qua re agerent, ne cui parerent, libertate uterentur: cujus
+proprium est sic vivere ut velis.&rdquo;</p>
+<p style="text-align: right">&mdash;<span
+class="smcap">Cic.</span>, <i>De Off.</i>, I. xx.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+<table>
+<tr>
+<td colspan="3"><p><span class="smcap">In the Valley</span>:</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">I.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Calistoga</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page13">13</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">II.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>The Petrified Forest</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page24">24</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">III.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Napa Wine</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page34">34</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">IV.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>The Scot Abroad</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page48">48</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td colspan="3"><p><span class="smcap">With the Children of
+Israel</span>:</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">I.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>To Introduce Mr. Kelmar</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page59">59</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">II.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>First Impressions of Silverado</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page68">68</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">III.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>The Return</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page92">92</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td colspan="2"><p><span class="smcap">The Act of
+Squatting</span></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page103">103</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td colspan="2"><p><span class="smcap">The Hunter&rsquo;s
+Family</span></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page127">127</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td colspan="2"><p><span class="smcap">The Sea Fogs</span></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page153">153</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td colspan="2"><p><span class="smcap">The Toll House</span></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page171">171</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td colspan="2"><p><span class="smcap">A Starry Drive</span></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page185">185</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td colspan="2"><p><span class="smcap">Episodes in the Story of a
+Mine</span></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page197">197</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td colspan="2"><p><span class="smcap">Toils And
+Pleasures</span></p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page223">223</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+<h2><a name="page1"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 1</span>THE
+SILVERADO SQUATTERS</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> scene of this little book is on
+a high mountain.&nbsp; There are, indeed, many higher; there are
+many of a nobler outline.&nbsp; It is no place of pilgrimage for
+the summary globe-trotter; but to one who lives upon its sides,
+Mount Saint Helena soon becomes a centre of interest.&nbsp; It is
+the Mont Blanc of one section of the Californian Coast Range,
+none of its near neighbours rising to one-half its
+altitude.&nbsp; It looks down on much green, intricate
+country.&nbsp; It feeds in the spring-time many splashing
+brooks.&nbsp; From its summit you must have an excellent lesson
+of geography: seeing, to the south, San Francisco Bay, with
+Tamalpais on the one hand and Monte Diablo on the other; to the
+west and thirty miles away, the open ocean; eastward, across the
+corn-lands and thick tule swamps of Sacramento Valley, to where
+the Central Pacific railroad begins to climb the sides of the
+Sierras; and northward, for what I know, the white head of Shasta
+looking down on Oregon.&nbsp; Three counties, Napa County, Lake
+County, and Sonoma County, march across its cliffy
+shoulders.&nbsp; Its naked peak stands nearly four thousand five
+hundred feet above the sea; its sides are fringed with forest;
+and the soil, where it is bare, glows warm with cinnabar.</p>
+<p>Life in its shadow goes rustically forward.&nbsp; Bucks, and
+bears, and rattlesnakes, and former mining operations, are the
+staple of men&rsquo;s talk.&nbsp; Agriculture has only begun to
+mount above the valley.&nbsp; And though in a few years from now
+the whole district may be smiling with farms, passing trains
+shaking the mountain to the heart, many-windowed hotels lighting
+up the night like factories, and a prosperous city occupying the
+site of sleepy Calistoga; yet in the mean time, around the foot
+of that mountain the silence of nature reigns in a great measure
+unbroken, and the people of hill and valley go sauntering about
+their business as in the days before the flood.</p>
+<p>To reach Mount Saint Helena from San Francisco, the traveller
+has twice to cross the bay: once by the busy Oakland Ferry, and
+again, after an hour or so of the railway, from Vallejo junction
+to Vallejo.&nbsp; Thence he takes rail once more to mount the
+long green strath of Napa Valley.</p>
+<p>In all the contractions and expansions of that inland sea, the
+Bay of San Francisco, there can be few drearier scenes than the
+Vallejo Ferry.&nbsp; Bald shores and a low, bald islet inclose
+the sea; through the narrows the tide bubbles, muddy like a
+river.&nbsp; When we made the passage (bound, although yet we
+knew it not, for Silverado) the steamer jumped, and the black
+buoys were dancing in the jabble; the ocean breeze blew killing
+chill; and, although the upper sky was still unflecked with
+vapour, the sea fogs were pouring in from seaward, over the
+hilltops of Marin county, in one great, shapeless, silver
+cloud.</p>
+<p>South Vallejo is typical of many Californian towns.&nbsp; It
+was a blunder; the site has proved untenable; and, although it is
+still such a young place by the scale of Europe, it has already
+begun to be deserted for its neighbour and namesake, North
+Vallejo.&nbsp; A long pier, a number of drinking saloons, a hotel
+of a great size, marshy pools where the frogs keep up their
+croaking, and even at high noon the entire absence of any human
+face or voice&mdash;these are the marks of South Vallejo.&nbsp;
+Yet there was a tall building beside the pier, labelled the
+<i>Star Flour Mills</i>; and sea-going, full-rigged ships lay
+close along shore, waiting for their cargo.&nbsp; Soon these
+would be plunging round the Horn, soon the flour from the <i>Star
+Flour Mills</i> would be landed on the wharves of
+Liverpool.&nbsp; For that, too, is one of England&rsquo;s
+outposts; thither, to this gaunt mill, across the Atlantic and
+Pacific deeps and round about the icy Horn, this crowd of great,
+three-masted, deep-sea ships come, bringing nothing, and return
+with bread.</p>
+<p>The Frisby House, for that was the name of the hotel, was a
+place of fallen fortunes, like the town.&nbsp; It was now given
+up to labourers, and partly ruinous.&nbsp; At dinner there was
+the ordinary display of what is called in the west a <i>two-bit
+house</i>: the tablecloth checked red and white, the plague of
+flies, the wire hencoops over the dishes, the great variety and
+invariable vileness of the food and the rough coatless men
+devoting it in silence.&nbsp; In our bedroom, the stove would not
+burn, though it would smoke; and while one window would not open,
+the other would not shut.&nbsp; There was a view on a bit of
+empty road, a few dark houses, a donkey wandering with its shadow
+on a slope, and a blink of sea, with a tall ship lying anchored
+in the moonlight.&nbsp; All about that dreary inn frogs sang
+their ungainly chorus.</p>
+<p>Early the next morning we mounted the hill along a wooden
+footway, bridging one marish spot after another.&nbsp; Here and
+there, as we ascended, we passed a house embowered in white
+roses.&nbsp; More of the bay became apparent, and soon the blue
+peak of Tamalpais rose above the green level of the island
+opposite.&nbsp; It told us we were still but a little way from
+the city of the Golden Gates, already, at that hour, beginning to
+awake among the sand-hills.&nbsp; It called to us over the waters
+as with the voice of a bird.&nbsp; Its stately head, blue as a
+sapphire on the paler azure of the sky, spoke to us of wider
+outlooks and the bright Pacific.&nbsp; For Tamalpais stands
+sentry, like a lighthouse, over the Golden Gates, between the bay
+and the open ocean, and looks down indifferently on both.&nbsp;
+Even as we saw and hailed it from Vallejo, seamen, far out at
+sea, were scanning it with shaded eyes; and, as if to answer to
+the thought, one of the great ships below began silently to
+clothe herself with white sails, homeward bound for England.</p>
+<p>For some way beyond Vallejo the railway led us through bald
+green pastures.&nbsp; On the west the rough highlands of Marin
+shut off the ocean; in the midst, in long, straggling, gleaming
+arms, the bay died out among the grass; there were few trees and
+few enclosures; the sun shone wide over open uplands, the
+displumed hills stood clear against the sky.&nbsp; But by-and-by
+these hills began to draw nearer on either hand, and first
+thicket and then wood began to clothe their sides; and soon we
+were away from all signs of the sea&rsquo;s neighbourhood,
+mounting an inland, irrigated valley.&nbsp; A great variety of
+oaks stood, now severally, now in a becoming grove, among the
+fields and vineyards.&nbsp; The towns were compact, in about
+equal proportions, of bright, new wooden houses and great and
+growing forest trees; and the chapel bell on the engine sounded
+most festally that sunny Sunday, as we drew up at one green town
+after another, with the townsfolk trooping in their
+Sunday&rsquo;s best to see the strangers, with the sun sparkling
+on the clean houses, and great domes of foliage humming overhead
+in the breeze.</p>
+<p>This pleasant Napa Valley is, at its north end, blockaded by
+our mountain.&nbsp; There, at Calistoga, the railroad ceases, and
+the traveller who intends faring farther, to the Geysers or to
+the springs in Lake County, must cross the spurs of the mountain
+by stage.&nbsp; Thus, Mount Saint Helena is not only a summit,
+but a frontier; and, up to the time of writing, it has stayed the
+progress of the iron horse.</p>
+<h2>PART I&mdash;IN THE VALLEY</h2>
+<h3><a name="page13"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+13</span>CHAPTER I&mdash;CALISTOGA</h3>
+<p><span class="smcap">It</span> is difficult for a European to
+imagine Calistoga, the whole place is so new, and of such an
+accidental pattern; the very name, I hear, was invented at a
+supper-party by the man who found the springs.</p>
+<p>The railroad and the highway come up the valley about parallel
+to one another.&nbsp; The street of Calistoga joins the
+perpendicular to both&mdash;a wide street, with bright, clean,
+low houses, here and there a verandah over the sidewalk, here and
+there a horse-post, here and there lounging townsfolk.&nbsp;
+Other streets are marked out, and most likely named; for these
+towns in the New World begin with a firm resolve to grow larger,
+Washington and Broadway, and then First and Second, and so forth,
+being boldly plotted out as soon as the community indulges in a
+plan.&nbsp; But, in the meanwhile, all the life and most of the
+houses of Calistoga are concentrated upon that street between the
+railway station and the road.&nbsp; I never heard it called by
+any name, but I will hazard a guess that it is either Washington
+or Broadway.&nbsp; Here are the blacksmith&rsquo;s, the
+chemist&rsquo;s, the general merchant&rsquo;s, and Kong Sam Kee,
+the Chinese laundryman&rsquo;s; here, probably, is the office of
+the local paper (for the place has a paper&mdash;they all have
+papers); and here certainly is one of the hotels,
+Cheeseborough&rsquo;s, whence the daring Foss, a man dear to
+legend, starts his horses for the Geysers.</p>
+<p>It must be remembered that we are here in a land of
+stage-drivers and highwaymen: a land, in that sense, like England
+a hundred years ago.&nbsp; The highway robber&mdash;road-agent,
+he is quaintly called&mdash;is still busy in these parts.&nbsp;
+The fame of Vasquez is still young.&nbsp; Only a few years go,
+the Lakeport stage was robbed a mile or two from Calistoga.&nbsp;
+In 1879, the dentist of Mendocino City, fifty miles away upon the
+coast, suddenly threw off the garments of his trade, like
+Grindoff, in <i>The Miller and his Men</i>, and flamed forth in
+his second dress as a captain of banditti.&nbsp; A great robbery
+was followed by a long chase, a chase of days if not of weeks,
+among the intricate hill-country; and the chase was followed by
+much desultory fighting, in which several&mdash;and the dentist,
+I believe, amongst the number&mdash;bit the dust.&nbsp; The grass
+was springing for the first time, nourished upon their blood,
+when I arrived in Calistoga.&nbsp; I am reminded of another
+highwayman of that same year.&nbsp; &ldquo;He had been
+unwell,&rdquo; so ran his humorous defence, &ldquo;and the doctor
+told him to take something, so he took the
+express-box.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>The cultus of the stage-coachman always flourishes highest
+where there are thieves on the road, and where the guard travels
+armed, and the stage is not only a link between country and city,
+and the vehicle of news, but has a faint warfaring aroma, like a
+man who should be brother to a soldier.&nbsp; California boasts
+her famous stage-drivers, and among the famous Foss is not
+forgotten.&nbsp; Along the unfenced, abominable mountain roads,
+he launches his team with small regard to human life or the
+doctrine of probabilities.&nbsp; Flinching travellers, who behold
+themselves coasting eternity at every corner, look with natural
+admiration at their driver&rsquo;s huge, impassive, fleshy
+countenance.&nbsp; He has the very face for the driver in Sam
+Weller&rsquo;s anecdote, who upset the election party at the
+required point.&nbsp; Wonderful tales are current of his
+readiness and skill.&nbsp; One in particular, of how one of his
+horses fell at a ticklish passage of the road, and how Foss let
+slip the reins, and, driving over the fallen animal, arrived at
+the next stage with only three.&nbsp; This I relate as I heard
+it, without guarantee.</p>
+<p>I only saw Foss once, though, strange as it may sound, I have
+twice talked with him.&nbsp; He lives out of Calistoga, at a
+ranche called Fossville.&nbsp; One evening, after he was long
+gone home, I dropped into Cheeseborough&rsquo;s, and was asked if
+I should like to speak with Mr. Foss.&nbsp; Supposing that the
+interview was impossible, and that I was merely called upon to
+subscribe the general sentiment, I boldly answered
+&ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;&nbsp; Next moment, I had one instrument at my
+ear, another at my mouth and found myself, with nothing in the
+world to say, conversing with a man several miles off among
+desolate hills.&nbsp; Foss rapidly and somewhat plaintively
+brought the conversation to an end; and he returned to his
+night&rsquo;s grog at Fossville, while I strolled forth again on
+Calistoga high street.&nbsp; But it was an odd thing that here,
+on what we are accustomed to consider the very skirts of
+civilization, I should have used the telephone for the first time
+in my civilized career.&nbsp; So it goes in these young
+countries; telephones, and telegraphs, and newspapers, and
+advertisements running far ahead among the Indians and the
+grizzly bears.</p>
+<p>Alone, on the other side of the railway, stands the Springs
+Hotel, with its attendant cottages.&nbsp; The floor of the valley
+is extremely level to the very roots of the hills; only here and
+there a hillock, crowned with pines, rises like the barrow of
+some chieftain famed in war; and right against one of these
+hillocks is the Springs Hotel&mdash;is or was; for since I was
+there the place has been destroyed by fire, and has risen again
+from its ashes.&nbsp; A lawn runs about the house, and the lawn
+is in its turn surrounded by a system of little five-roomed
+cottages, each with a verandah and a weedy palm before the
+door.&nbsp; Some of the cottages are let to residents, and these
+are wreathed in flowers.&nbsp; The rest are occupied by ordinary
+visitors to the Hotel; and a very pleasant way this is, by which
+you have a little country cottage of your own, without domestic
+burthens, and by the day or week.</p>
+<p>The whole neighbourhood of Mount Saint Helena is full of
+sulphur and of boiling springs.&nbsp; The Geysers are famous;
+they were the great health resort of the Indians before the
+coming of the whites.&nbsp; Lake County is dotted with spas; Hot
+Springs and White Sulphur Springs are the names of two stations
+on the Napa Valley railroad; and Calistoga itself seems to repose
+on a mere film above a boiling, subterranean lake.&nbsp; At one
+end of the hotel enclosure are the springs from which it takes
+its name, hot enough to scald a child seriously while I was
+there.&nbsp; At the other end, the tenant of a cottage sank a
+well, and there also the water came up boiling.&nbsp; It keeps
+this end of the valley as warm as a toast.&nbsp; I have gone
+across to the hotel a little after five in the morning, when a
+sea fog from the Pacific was hanging thick and gray, and dark and
+dirty overhead, and found the thermometer had been up before me,
+and had already climbed among the nineties; and in the stress of
+the day it was sometimes too hot to move about.</p>
+<p>But in spite of this heat from above and below, doing one on
+both sides, Calistoga was a pleasant place to dwell in;
+beautifully green, for it was then that favoured moment in the
+Californian year, when the rains are over and the dusty summer
+has not yet set in; often visited by fresh airs, now from the
+mountain, now across Sonoma from the sea; very quiet, very idle,
+very silent but for the breezes and the cattle bells
+afield.&nbsp; And there was something satisfactory in the sight
+of that great mountain that enclosed us to the north: whether it
+stood, robed in sunshine, quaking to its topmost pinnacle with
+the heat and brightness of the day; or whether it set itself to
+weaving vapours, wisp after wisp growing, trembling, fleeting,
+and fading in the blue.</p>
+<p>The tangled, woody, and almost trackless foot-hills that
+enclose the valley, shutting it off from Sonoma on the west, and
+from Yolo on the east&mdash;rough as they were in outline, dug
+out by winter streams, crowned by cliffy bluffs and nodding pine
+trees&mdash;wore dwarfed into satellites by the bulk and bearing
+of Mount Saint Helena.&nbsp; She over-towered them by two-thirds
+of her own stature.&nbsp; She excelled them by the boldness of
+her profile.&nbsp; Her great bald summit, clear of trees and
+pasture, a cairn of quartz and cinnabar, rejected kinship with
+the dark and shaggy wilderness of lesser hill-tops.</p>
+<h3><a name="page24"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+24</span>CHAPTER II&mdash;THE PETRIFIED FOREST</h3>
+<p><span class="smcap">We</span> drove off from the Springs Hotel
+about three in the afternoon.&nbsp; The sun warmed me to the
+heart.&nbsp; A broad, cool wind streamed pauselessly down the
+valley, laden with perfume.&nbsp; Up at the top stood Mount Saint
+Helena, a bulk of mountain, bare atop, with tree-fringed spurs,
+and radiating warmth.&nbsp; Once we saw it framed in a grove of
+tall and exquisitely graceful white oaks, in line and colour a
+finished composition.&nbsp; We passed a cow stretched by the
+roadside, her bell slowly beating time to the movement of her
+ruminating jaws, her big red face crawled over by half a dozen
+flies, a monument of content.</p>
+<p>A little farther, and we struck to the left up a mountain
+road, and for two hours threaded one valley after another, green,
+tangled, full of noble timber, giving us every now and again a
+sight of Mount Saint Helena and the blue hilly distance, and
+crossed by many streams, through which we splashed to the
+carriage-step.&nbsp; To the right or the left, there was scarce
+any trace of man but the road we followed; I think we passed but
+one ranchero&rsquo;s house in the whole distance, and that was
+closed and smokeless.&nbsp; But we had the society of these
+bright streams&mdash;dazzlingly clear, as is their wont,
+splashing from the wheels in diamonds, and striking a lively
+coolness through the sunshine.&nbsp; And what with the
+innumerable variety of greens, the masses of foliage tossing in
+the breeze, the glimpses of distance, the descents into seemingly
+impenetrable thickets, the continual dodging of the road which
+made haste to plunge again into the covert, we had a fine sense
+of woods, and spring-time, and the open air.</p>
+<p>Our driver gave me a lecture by the way on Californian
+trees&mdash;a thing I was much in need of, having fallen among
+painters who know the name of nothing, and Mexicans who know the
+name of nothing in English.&nbsp; He taught me the madrona, the
+manzanita, the buck-eye, the maple; he showed me the crested
+mountain quail; he showed me where some young redwoods were
+already spiring heavenwards from the ruins of the old; for in
+this district all had already perished: redwoods and redskins,
+the two noblest indigenous living things, alike condemned.</p>
+<p>At length, in a lonely dell, we came on a huge wooden gate
+with a sign upon it like an inn.&nbsp; &ldquo;The Petrified
+Forest.&nbsp; Proprietor: C. Evans,&rdquo; ran the legend.&nbsp;
+Within, on a knoll of sward, was the house of the proprietor, and
+another smaller house hard by to serve as a museum, where
+photographs and petrifactions were retailed.&nbsp; It was a pure
+little isle of touristry among these solitary hills.</p>
+<p>The proprietor was a brave old white-faced Swede.&nbsp; He had
+wandered this way, Heaven knows how, and taken up his
+acres&mdash;I forget how many years ago&mdash;all alone, bent
+double with sciatica, and with six bits in his pocket and an axe
+upon his shoulder.&nbsp; Long, useless years of seafaring had
+thus discharged him at the end, penniless and sick.&nbsp; Without
+doubt he had tried his luck at the diggings, and got no good from
+that; without doubt he had loved the bottle, and lived the life
+of Jack ashore.&nbsp; But at the end of these adventures, here he
+came; and, the place hitting his fancy, down he sat to make a new
+life of it, far from crimps and the salt sea.&nbsp; And the very
+sight of his ranche had done him good.&nbsp; It was &ldquo;the
+handsomest spot in the Californy mountains.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+&ldquo;Isn&rsquo;t it handsome, now?&rdquo; he said.&nbsp; Every
+penny he makes goes into that ranche to make it handsomer.&nbsp;
+Then the climate, with the sea-breeze every afternoon in the
+hottest summer weather, had gradually cured the sciatica; and his
+sister and niece were now domesticated with him for
+company&mdash;or, rather, the niece came only once in the two
+days, teaching music the meanwhile in the valley.&nbsp; And then,
+for a last piece of luck, &ldquo;the handsomest spot in the
+Californy mountains&rdquo; had produced a petrified forest, which
+Mr. Evans now shows at the modest figure of half a dollar a head,
+or two-thirds of his capital when he first came there with an axe
+and a sciatica.</p>
+<p>This tardy favourite of fortune&mdash;hobbling a little, I
+think, as if in memory of the sciatica, but with not a trace that
+I can remember of the sea&mdash;thoroughly ruralized from head to
+foot, proceeded to escort us up the hill behind his house.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Who first found the forest?&rdquo; asked my wife.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;The first?&nbsp; I was that man,&rdquo; said he.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;I was cleaning up the pasture for my beasts, when I found
+<i>this</i>&rdquo;&mdash;kicking a great redwood seven feet in
+diameter, that lay there on its side, hollow heart, clinging
+lumps of bark, all changed into gray stone, with veins of quartz
+between what had been the layers of the wood.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Were you surprised?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Surprised?&nbsp; No!&nbsp; What would I be surprised
+about?&nbsp; What did I know about petrifactions&mdash;following
+the sea?&nbsp; Petrifaction!&nbsp; There was no such word in my
+language!&nbsp; I knew about putrifaction, though!&nbsp; I
+thought it was a stone; so would you, if you was cleaning up
+pasture.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And now he had a theory of his own, which I did not quite
+grasp, except that the trees had not &ldquo;grewed&rdquo;
+there.&nbsp; But he mentioned, with evident pride, that he
+differed from all the scientific people who had visited the spot;
+and he flung about such words as &ldquo;tufa&rdquo; and
+&ldquo;scilica&rdquo; with careless freedom.</p>
+<p>When I mentioned I was from Scotland, &ldquo;My old
+country,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;my old country&rdquo;&mdash;with
+a smiling look and a tone of real affection in his voice.&nbsp; I
+was mightily surprised, for he was obviously Scandinavian, and
+begged him to explain.&nbsp; It seemed he had learned his English
+and done nearly all his sailing in Scotch ships.&nbsp; &ldquo;Out
+of Glasgow,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;or Greenock; but that&rsquo;s
+all the same&mdash;they all hail from Glasgow.&rdquo; And he was
+so pleased with me for being a Scotsman, and his adopted
+compatriot, that he made me a present of a very beautiful piece
+of petrifaction&mdash;I believe the most beautiful and portable
+he had.</p>
+<p>Here was a man, at least, who was a Swede, a Scot, and an
+American, acknowledging some kind allegiance to three
+lands.&nbsp; Mr. Wallace&rsquo;s Scoto-Circassian will not fail
+to come before the reader.&nbsp; I have myself met and spoken
+with a Fifeshire German, whose combination of abominable accents
+struck me dumb.&nbsp; But, indeed, I think we all belong to many
+countries.&nbsp; And perhaps this habit of much travel, and the
+engendering of scattered friendships, may prepare the euthanasia
+of ancient nations.</p>
+<p>And the forest itself?&nbsp; Well, on a tangled, briery
+hillside&mdash;for the pasture would bear a little further
+cleaning up, to my eyes&mdash;there lie scattered thickly various
+lengths of petrified trunk, such as the one already
+mentioned.&nbsp; It is very curious, of course, and ancient
+enough, if that were all.&nbsp; Doubtless, the heart of the
+geologist beats quicker at the sight; but, for my part, I was
+mightily unmoved.&nbsp; Sight-seeing is the art of
+disappointment.</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;There&rsquo;s nothing under heaven so
+blue,<br />
+That&rsquo;s fairly worth the travelling to.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>But, fortunately, Heaven rewards us with many agreeable
+prospects and adventures by the way; and sometimes, when we go
+out to see a petrified forest, prepares a far more delightful
+curiosity, in the form of Mr. Evans, whom may all prosperity
+attend throughout a long and green old age.</p>
+<h3><a name="page34"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+34</span>CHAPTER III&mdash;NAPA WINE</h3>
+<p>I <span class="smcap">was</span> interested in Californian
+wine.&nbsp; Indeed, I am interested in all wines, and have been
+all my life, from the raisin wine that a schoolfellow kept
+secreted in his play-box up to my last discovery, those notable
+Valtellines, that once shone upon the board of C&aelig;sar.</p>
+<p>Some of us, kind old Pagans, watch with dread the shadows
+falling on the age: how the unconquerable worm invades the sunny
+terraces of France, and Bordeaux is no more, and the Rhone a mere
+Arabia Petr&aelig;a.&nbsp; Ch&acirc;teau Neuf is dead, and I have
+never tasted it; Hermitage&mdash;a hermitage indeed from all
+life&rsquo;s sorrows&mdash;lies expiring by the river.&nbsp; And
+in the place of these imperial elixirs, beautiful to every sense,
+gem-hued, flower-scented, dream-compellers:&mdash;behold upon the
+quays at Cette the chemicals arrayed; behold the analyst at
+Marseilles, raising hands in obsecration, attesting god Lyoeus,
+and the vats staved in, and the dishonest wines poured forth
+among the sea.&nbsp; It is not Pan only; Bacchus, too, is
+dead.</p>
+<p>If wine is to withdraw its most poetic countenance, the sun of
+the white dinner-cloth, a deity to be invoked by two or three,
+all fervent, hushing their talk, degusting tenderly, and storing
+reminiscences&mdash;for a bottle of good wine, like a good act,
+shines ever in the retrospect&mdash;if wine is to desert us, go
+thy ways, old Jack!&nbsp; Now we begin to have compunctions, and
+look back at the brave bottles squandered upon dinner-parties,
+where the guests drank grossly, discussing politics the while,
+and even the schoolboy &ldquo;took his whack,&rdquo; like
+liquorice water.&nbsp; And at the same time, we look timidly
+forward, with a spark of hope, to where the new lands, already
+weary of producing gold, begin to green with vineyards.&nbsp; A
+nice point in human history falls to be decided by Californian
+and Australian wines.</p>
+<p>Wine in California is still in the experimental stage; and
+when you taste a vintage, grave economical questions are
+involved.&nbsp; The beginning of vine-planting is like the
+beginning of mining for the precious metals: the wine-grower also
+&ldquo;Prospects.&rdquo; One corner of land after another is
+tried with one kind of grape after another.&nbsp; This is a
+failure; that is better; a third best.&nbsp; So, bit by bit, they
+grope about for their Clos Vougeot and Lafite.&nbsp; Those lodes
+and pockets of earth, more precious than the precious ores, that
+yield inimitable fragrance and soft fire; those virtuous
+Bonanzas, where the soil has sublimated under sun and stars to
+something finer, and the wine is bottled poetry: these still lie
+undiscovered; chaparral conceals, thicket embowers them; the
+miner chips the rock and wanders farther, and the grizzly muses
+undisturbed.&nbsp; But there they bide their hour, awaiting their
+Columbus; and nature nurses and prepares them.&nbsp; The smack of
+Californian earth shall linger on the palate of your
+grandson.</p>
+<p>Meanwhile the wine is merely a good wine; the best that I have
+tasted better than a Beaujolais, and not unlike.&nbsp; But the
+trade is poor; it lives from hand to mouth, putting its all into
+experiments, and forced to sell its vintages.&nbsp; To find one
+properly matured, and bearing its own name, is to be
+fortune&rsquo;s favourite.</p>
+<p>Bearing its own name, I say, and dwell upon the innuendo.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You want to know why California wine is not drunk in
+the States?&rdquo; a San Francisco wine merchant said to me,
+after he had shown me through his premises.&nbsp; &ldquo;Well,
+here&rsquo;s the reason.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>And opening a large cupboard, fitted with many little drawers,
+he proceeded to shower me all over with a great variety of
+gorgeously tinted labels, blue, red, or yellow, stamped with
+crown or coronet, and hailing from such a profusion of
+<i>clos</i> and <i>chateaux</i>, that a single department could
+scarce have furnished forth the names.&nbsp; But it was strange
+that all looked unfamiliar.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Chateau X&mdash;?&rdquo; said I.&nbsp; &ldquo;I never
+heard of that.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>&ldquo;I dare say not,&rdquo; said he.&nbsp; &ldquo;I had been
+reading one of X&mdash;&rsquo;s novels.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>They were all castles in Spain!&nbsp; But that sure enough is
+the reason why California wine is not drunk in the States.</p>
+<p>Napa valley has been long a seat of the wine-growing
+industry.&nbsp; It did not here begin, as it does too often, in
+the low valley lands along the river, but took at once to the
+rough foot-hills, where alone it can expect to prosper.&nbsp; A
+basking inclination, and stones, to be a reservoir of the
+day&rsquo;s heat, seem necessary to the soil for wine; the
+grossness of the earth must be evaporated, its marrow daily
+melted and refined for ages; until at length these clods that
+break below our footing, and to the eye appear but common earth,
+are truly and to the perceiving mind, a masterpiece of
+nature.&nbsp; The dust of Richebourg, which the wind carries
+away, what an apotheosis of the dust!&nbsp; Not man himself can
+seem a stranger child of that brown, friable powder, than the
+blood and sun in that old flask behind the faggots.</p>
+<p>A Californian vineyard, one of man&rsquo;s outposts in the
+wilderness, has features of its own.&nbsp; There is nothing here
+to remind you of the Rhine or Rhone, of the low <i>c&ocirc;te
+d&rsquo;or</i>, or the infamous and scabby deserts of Champagne;
+but all is green, solitary, covert.&nbsp; We visited two of them,
+Mr. Schram&rsquo;s and Mr. M&rsquo;Eckron&rsquo;s, sharing the
+same glen.</p>
+<p>Some way down the valley below Calistoga, we turned sharply to
+the south and plunged into the thick of the wood.&nbsp; A rude
+trail rapidly mounting; a little stream tinkling by on the one
+hand, big enough perhaps after the rains, but already yielding up
+its life; overhead and on all sides a bower of green and tangled
+thicket, still fragrant and still flower-bespangled by the early
+season, where thimble-berry played the part of our English
+hawthorn, and the buck-eyes were putting forth their twisted
+horns of blossom: through all this, we struggled toughly upwards,
+canted to and fro by the roughness of the trail, and continually
+switched across the face by sprays of leaf or blossom.&nbsp; The
+last is no great inconvenience at home; but here in California it
+is a matter of some moment.&nbsp; For in all woods and by every
+wayside there prospers an abominable shrub or weed, called
+poison-oak, whose very neighbourhood is venomous to some, and
+whose actual touch is avoided by the most impervious.</p>
+<p>The two houses, with their vineyards, stood each in a green
+niche of its own in this steep and narrow forest dell.&nbsp;
+Though they were so near, there was already a good difference in
+level; and Mr. M&rsquo;Eckron&rsquo;s head must be a long way
+under the feet of Mr. Schram.&nbsp; No more had been cleared than
+was necessary for cultivation; close around each oasis ran the
+tangled wood; the glen enfolds them; there they lie basking in
+sun and silence, concealed from all but the clouds and the
+mountain birds.</p>
+<p>Mr. M&rsquo;Eckron&rsquo;s is a bachelor establishment; a
+little bit of a wooden house, a small cellar hard by in the
+hillside, and a patch of vines planted and tended single-handed
+by himself.&nbsp; He had but recently began; his vines were
+young, his business young also; but I thought he had the look of
+the man who succeeds.&nbsp; He hailed from Greenock: he
+remembered his father putting him inside Mons Meg, and that
+touched me home; and we exchanged a word or two of Scotch, which
+pleased me more than you would fancy.</p>
+<p>Mr. Schram&rsquo;s, on the other hand, is the oldest vineyard
+in the valley, eighteen years old, I think; yet he began a
+penniless barber, and even after he had broken ground up here
+with his black malvoisies, continued for long to tramp the valley
+with his razor.&nbsp; Now, his place is the picture of
+prosperity: stuffed birds in the verandah, cellars far dug into
+the hillside, and resting on pillars like a bandit&rsquo;s
+cave:&mdash;all trimness, varnish, flowers, and sunshine, among
+the tangled wildwood.&nbsp; Stout, smiling Mrs. Schram, who has
+been to Europe and apparently all about the States for pleasure,
+entertained Fanny in the verandah, while I was tasting wines in
+the cellar.&nbsp; To Mr. Schram this was a solemn office; his
+serious gusto warmed my heart; prosperity had not yet wholly
+banished a certain neophite and girlish trepidation, and he
+followed every sip and read my face with proud anxiety.&nbsp; I
+tasted all.&nbsp; I tasted every variety and shade of
+Schramberger, red and white Schramberger, Burgundy Schramberger,
+Schramberger Hock, Schramberger Golden Chasselas, the latter with
+a notable bouquet, and I fear to think how many more.&nbsp; Much
+of it goes to London&mdash;most, I think; and Mr. Schram has a
+great notion of the English taste.</p>
+<p>In this wild spot, I did not feel the sacredness of ancient
+cultivation.&nbsp; It was still raw, it was no Marathon, and no
+Johannisberg; yet the stirring sunlight, and the growing vines,
+and the vats and bottles in the cavern, made a pleasant music for
+the mind.&nbsp; Here, also, earth&rsquo;s cream was being skimmed
+and garnered; and the London customers can taste, such as it is,
+the tang of the earth in this green valley.&nbsp; So local, so
+quintessential is a wine, that it seems the very birds in the
+verandah might communicate a flavour, and that romantic cellar
+influence the bottle next to be uncorked in Pimlico, and the
+smile of jolly Mr. Schram might mantle in the glass.</p>
+<p>But these are but experiments.&nbsp; All things in this new
+land are moving farther on: the wine-vats and the miner&rsquo;s
+blasting tools but picket for a night, like Bedouin pavillions;
+and to-morrow, to fresh woods!&nbsp; This stir of change and
+these perpetual echoes of the moving footfall, haunt the
+land.&nbsp; Men move eternally, still chasing Fortune; and,
+fortune found, still wander.&nbsp; As we drove back to Calistoga,
+the road lay empty of mere passengers, but its green side was
+dotted with the camps of travelling families: one cumbered with a
+great waggonful of household stuff, settlers going to occupy a
+ranche they had taken up in Mendocino, or perhaps Tehama County;
+another, a party in dust coats, men and women, whom we found
+camped in a grove on the roadside, all on pleasure bent, with a
+Chinaman to cook for them, and who waved their hands to us as we
+drove by.</p>
+<h3><a name="page48"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+48</span>CHAPTER IV&mdash;THE SCOT ABROAD</h3>
+<p>A <span class="smcap">few</span> pages back, I wrote that a
+man belonged, in these days, to a variety of countries; but the
+old land is still the true love, the others are but pleasant
+infidelities.&nbsp; Scotland is indefinable; it has no unity
+except upon the map.&nbsp; Two languages, many dialects,
+innumerable forms of piety, and countless local patriotisms and
+prejudices, part us among ourselves more widely than the extreme
+east and west of that great continent of America.&nbsp; When I am
+at home, I feel a man from Glasgow to be something like a rival,
+a man from Barra to be more than half a foreigner.&nbsp; Yet let
+us meet in some far country, and, whether we hail from the braes
+of Manor or the braes of Mar, some ready-made affection joins us
+on the instant.&nbsp; It is not race.&nbsp; Look at us.&nbsp; One
+is Norse, one Celtic, and another Saxon.&nbsp; It is not
+community of tongue.&nbsp; We have it not among ourselves; and we
+have it almost to perfection, with English, or Irish, or
+American.&nbsp; It is no tie of faith, for we detest each
+other&rsquo;s errors.&nbsp; And yet somewhere, deep down in the
+heart of each one of us, something yearns for the old land, and
+the old kindly people.</p>
+<p>Of all mysteries of the human heart, this is perhaps the most
+inscrutable.&nbsp; There is no special loveliness in that gray
+country, with its rainy, sea-beat archipelago; its fields of dark
+mountains; its unsightly places, black with coal; its treeless,
+sour, unfriendly looking corn-lands; its quaint, gray, castled
+city, where the bells clash of a Sunday, and the wind squalls,
+and the salt showers fly and beat.&nbsp; I do not even know if I
+desire to live there; but let me hear, in some far land, a
+kindred voice sing out, &ldquo;Oh, why left I my hame?&rdquo; and
+it seems at once as if no beauty under the kind heavens, and no
+society of the wise and good, can repay me for my absence from my
+country.&nbsp; And though I think I would rather die elsewhere,
+yet in my heart of hearts I long to be buried among good Scots
+clods.&nbsp; I will say it fairly, it grows on me with every
+year: there are no stars so lovely as Edinburgh
+street-lamps.&nbsp; When I forget thee, auld Reekie, may my right
+hand forget its cunning!</p>
+<p>The happiest lot on earth is to be born a Scotchman.&nbsp; You
+must pay for it in many ways, as for all other advantages on
+earth.&nbsp; You have to learn the paraphrases and the shorter
+catechism; you generally take to drink; your youth, as far as I
+can find out, is a time of louder war against society, of more
+outcry and tears and turmoil, than if you had been born, for
+instance, in England.&nbsp; But somehow life is warmer and
+closer; the hearth burns more redly; the lights of home shine
+softer on the rainy street; the very names, endeared in verse and
+music, cling nearer round our hearts.&nbsp; An Englishman may
+meet an Englishman to-morrow, upon Chimborazo, and neither of
+them care; but when the Scotch wine-grower told me of Mons Meg,
+it was like magic.</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;From the dim shieling on the misty
+island<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Mountains divide us, and a world of seas;<br />
+Yet still our hearts are true, our hearts are Highland,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And we, in dreams, behold the Hebrides.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>And, Highland and Lowland, all our hearts are Scotch.</p>
+<p>Only a few days after I had seen M&rsquo;Eckron, a message
+reached me in my cottage.&nbsp; It was a Scotchman who had come
+down a long way from the hills to market.&nbsp; He had heard
+there was a countryman in Calistoga, and came round to the hotel
+to see him.&nbsp; We said a few words to each other; we had not
+much to say&mdash;should never have seen each other had we stayed
+at home, separated alike in space and in society; and then we
+shook hands, and he went his way again to his ranche among the
+hills, and that was all.</p>
+<p>Another Scotchman there was, a resident, who for the more love
+of the common country, douce, serious, religious man, drove me
+all about the valley, and took as much interest in me as if I had
+been his son: more, perhaps; for the son has faults too keenly
+felt, while the abstract countryman is perfect&mdash;like a whiff
+of peats.</p>
+<p>And there was yet another.&nbsp; Upon him I came suddenly, as
+he was calmly entering my cottage, his mind quite evidently bent
+on plunder: a man of about fifty, filthy, ragged, roguish, with a
+chimney-pot hat and a tail coat, and a pursing of his mouth that
+might have been envied by an elder of the kirk.&nbsp; He had just
+such a face as I have seen a dozen times behind the plate.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Hullo, sir!&rdquo; I cried.&nbsp; &ldquo;Where are you
+going?&rdquo;</p>
+<p>He turned round without a quiver.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;You&rsquo;re a Scotchman, sir?&rdquo; he said
+gravely.&nbsp; &ldquo;So am I; I come from Aberdeen.&nbsp; This
+is my card,&rdquo; presenting me with a piece of pasteboard which
+he had raked out of some gutter in the period of the rains.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;I was just examining this palm,&rdquo; he continued,
+indicating the misbegotten plant before our door, &ldquo;which is
+the largest sp<i>a</i>cimen I have yet observed in
+Califoarnia.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>There were four or five larger within sight.&nbsp; But where
+was the use of argument?&nbsp; He produced a tape-line, made me
+help him to measure the tree at the level of the ground, and
+entered the figures in a large and filthy pocket-book, all with
+the gravity of Solomon.&nbsp; He then thanked me profusely,
+remarking that such little services were due between countrymen;
+shook hands with me, &ldquo;for add lang syne,&rdquo; as he said;
+and took himself solemnly away, radiating dirt and humbug as he
+went.</p>
+<p>A month or two after this encounter of mine, there came a Scot
+to Sacramento&mdash;perhaps from Aberdeen.&nbsp; Anyway, there
+never was any one more Scotch in this wide world.&nbsp; He could
+sing and dance, and drink, I presume; and he played the pipes
+with vigour and success.&nbsp; All the Scotch in Sacramento
+became infatuated with him, and spent their spare time and money,
+driving him about in an open cab, between drinks, while he blew
+himself scarlet at the pipes.&nbsp; This is a very sad
+story.&nbsp; After he had borrowed money from every one, he and
+his pipes suddenly disappeared from Sacramento, and when I last
+heard, the police were looking for him.</p>
+<p>I cannot say how this story amused me, when I felt myself so
+thoroughly ripe on both sides to be duped in the same way.</p>
+<p>It is at least a curious thing, to conclude, that the races
+which wander widest, Jews and Scotch, should be the most clannish
+in the world.&nbsp; But perhaps these two are cause and effect:
+&ldquo;For ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.&rdquo;</p>
+<h2>PART II&mdash;WITH THE CHILDREN OF ISRAEL</h2>
+<h3><a name="page59"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+59</span>CHAPTER I.&mdash;TO INTRODUCE MR. KELMAR</h3>
+<p><span class="smcap">One</span> thing in this new country very
+particularly strikes a stranger, and that is the number of
+antiquities.&nbsp; Already there have been many cycles of
+population succeeding each other, and passing away and leaving
+behind them relics.&nbsp; These, standing on into changed times,
+strike the imagination as forcibly as any pyramid or feudal
+tower.&nbsp; The towns, like the vineyards, are experimentally
+founded: they grow great and prosper by passing occasions; and
+when the lode comes to an end, and the miners move elsewhere, the
+town remains behind them, like Palmyra in the desert.&nbsp; I
+suppose there are, in no country in the world, so many deserted
+towns as here in California.</p>
+<p>The whole neighbourhood of Mount Saint Helena, now so quiet
+and sylvan, was once alive with mining camps and villages.&nbsp;
+Here there would be two thousand souls under canvas; there one
+thousand or fifteen hundred ensconced, as if for ever, in a town
+of comfortable houses.&nbsp; But the luck had failed, the mines
+petered out; and the army of miners had departed, and left this
+quarter of the world to the rattlesnakes and deer and grizzlies,
+and to the slower but steadier advance of husbandry.</p>
+<p>It was with an eye on one of these deserted places, Pine Flat,
+on the Geysers road, that we had come first to Calistoga.&nbsp;
+There is something singularly enticing in the idea of going,
+rent-free, into a ready-made house.&nbsp; And to the British
+merchant, sitting at home at ease, it may appear that, with such
+a roof over your head and a spring of clear water hard by, the
+whole problem of the squatter&rsquo;s existence would be
+solved.&nbsp; Food, however, has yet to be considered, I will go
+as far as most people on tinned meats; some of the brightest
+moments of my life were passed over tinned mulli-gatawney in the
+cabin of a sixteen-ton schooner, storm-stayed in Portree Bay; but
+after suitable experiments, I pronounce authoritatively that man
+cannot live by tins alone.&nbsp; Fresh meat must be had on an
+occasion.&nbsp; It is true that the great Foss, driving by along
+the Geysers road, wooden-faced, but glorified with legend, might
+have been induced to bring us meat, but the great Foss could
+hardly bring us milk.&nbsp; To take a cow would have involved
+taking a field of grass and a milkmaid; after which it would have
+been hardly worth while to pause, and we might have added to our
+colony a flock of sheep and an experienced butcher.</p>
+<p>It is really very disheartening how we depend on other people
+in this life.&nbsp; &ldquo;Mihi est propositum,&rdquo; as you may
+see by the motto, &ldquo;id quod regibus;&rdquo; and behold it
+cannot be carried out, unless I find a neighbour rolling in
+cattle.</p>
+<p>Now, my principal adviser in this matter was one whom I will
+call Kelmar.&nbsp; That was not what he called himself, but as
+soon as I set eyes on him, I knew it was or ought to be his name;
+I am sure it will be his name among the angels.&nbsp; Kelmar was
+the store-keeper, a Russian Jew, good-natured, in a very thriving
+way of business, and, on equal terms, one of the most serviceable
+of men.&nbsp; He also had something of the expression of a Scotch
+country elder, who, by some peculiarity, should chance to be a
+Hebrew.&nbsp; He had a projecting under lip, with which he
+continually smiled, or rather smirked.&nbsp; Mrs. Kelmar was a
+singularly kind woman; and the oldest son had quite a dark and
+romantic bearing, and might be heard on summer evenings playing
+sentimental airs on the violin.</p>
+<p>I had no idea, at the time I made his acquaintance, what an
+important person Kelmar was.&nbsp; But the Jew store-keepers of
+California, profiting at once by the needs and habits of the
+people, have made themselves in too many cases the tyrants of the
+rural population.&nbsp; Credit is offered, is pressed on the new
+customer, and when once he is beyond his depth, the tune changes,
+and he is from thenceforth a white slave.&nbsp; I believe, even
+from the little I saw, that Kelmar, if he choose to put on the
+screw, could send half the settlers packing in a radius of seven
+or eight miles round Calistoga.&nbsp; These are continually
+paying him, but are never suffered to get out of debt.&nbsp; He
+palms dull goods upon them, for they dare not refuse to buy; he
+goes and dines with them when he is on an outing, and no man is
+loudlier welcomed; he is their family friend, the director of
+their business, and, to a degree elsewhere unknown in modern
+days, their king.</p>
+<p>For some reason, Kelmar always shook his head at the mention
+of Pine Flat, and for some days I thought he disapproved of the
+whole scheme and was proportionately sad.&nbsp; One fine morning,
+however, he met me, wreathed in smiles.&nbsp; He had found the
+very place for me&mdash;Silverado, another old mining town, right
+up the mountain.&nbsp; Rufe Hanson, the hunter, could take care
+of us&mdash;fine people the Hansons; we should be close to the
+Toll House, where the Lakeport stage called daily; it was the
+best place for my health, besides.&nbsp; Rufe had been
+consumptive, and was now quite a strong man, ain&rsquo;t
+it?&nbsp; In short, the place and all its accompaniments seemed
+made for us on purpose.</p>
+<p>He took me to his back door, whence, as from every point of
+Calistoga, Mount Saint Helena could be seen towering in the
+air.&nbsp; There, in the nick, just where the eastern foothills
+joined the mountain, and she herself began to rise above the zone
+of forest&mdash;there was Silverado.&nbsp; The name had already
+pleased me; the high station pleased me still more.&nbsp; I began
+to inquire with some eagerness.&nbsp; It was but a little while
+ago that Silverado was a great place.&nbsp; The mine&mdash;a
+silver mine, of course&mdash;had promised great things.&nbsp;
+There was quite a lively population, with several hotels and
+boarding-houses; and Kelmar himself had opened a branch store,
+and done extremely well&mdash;&ldquo;Ain&rsquo;t it?&rdquo; he
+said, appealing to his wife.&nbsp; And she said, &ldquo;Yes;
+extremely well.&rdquo; Now there was no one living in the town
+but Rufe the hunter; and once more I heard Rufe&rsquo;s praises
+by the yard, and this time sung in chorus.</p>
+<p>I could not help perceiving at the time that there was
+something underneath; that no unmixed desire to have us
+comfortably settled had inspired the Kelmars with this flow of
+words.&nbsp; But I was impatient to be gone, to be about my
+kingly project; and when we were offered seats in Kelmar&rsquo;s
+waggon, I accepted on the spot.&nbsp; The plan of their next
+Sunday&rsquo;s outing took them, by good fortune, over the border
+into Lake County.&nbsp; They would carry us so far, drop us at
+the Toll House, present us to the Hansons, and call for us again
+on Monday morning early.</p>
+<h3><a name="page68"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+68</span>CHAPTER II&mdash;FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF SILVERADO</h3>
+<p><span class="smcap">We</span> were to leave by six precisely;
+that was solemnly pledged on both sides; and a messenger came to
+us the last thing at night, to remind us of the hour.&nbsp; But
+it was eight before we got clear of Calistoga: Kelmar, Mrs.
+Kelmar, a friend of theirs whom we named Abramina, her little
+daughter, my wife, myself, and, stowed away behind us, a cluster
+of ship&rsquo;s coffee-kettles.&nbsp; These last were highly
+ornamental in the sheen of their bright tin, but I could invent
+no reason for their presence.&nbsp; Our carriageful reckoned up,
+as near as we could get at it, some three hundred years to the
+six of us.&nbsp; Four of the six, besides, were Hebrews.&nbsp;
+But I never, in all my life, was conscious of so strong an
+atmosphere of holiday.&nbsp; No word was spoken but of pleasure;
+and even when we drove in silence, nods and smiles went round the
+party like refreshments.</p>
+<p>The sun shone out of a cloudless sky.&nbsp; Close at the
+zenith rode the belated moon, still clearly visible, and, along
+one margin, even bright.&nbsp; The wind blew a gale from the
+north; the trees roared; the corn and the deep grass in the
+valley fled in whitening surges; the dust towered into the air
+along the road and dispersed like the smoke of battle.&nbsp; It
+was clear in our teeth from the first, and for all the windings
+of the road it managed to keep clear in our teeth until the
+end.</p>
+<p>For some two miles we rattled through the valley, skirting the
+eastern foothills; then we struck off to the right, through
+haugh-land, and presently, crossing a dry water-course, entered
+the Toll road, or, to be more local, entered on &ldquo;the
+grade.&rdquo;&nbsp; The road mounts the near shoulder of Mount
+Saint Helena, bound northward into Lake County.&nbsp; In one
+place it skirts along the edge of a narrow and deep canyon,
+filled with trees, and I was glad, indeed, not to be driven at
+this point by the dashing Foss.&nbsp; Kelmar, with his unvarying
+smile, jogging to the motion of the trap, drove for all the world
+like a good, plain, country clergyman at home; and I profess I
+blessed him unawares for his timidity.</p>
+<p>Vineyards and deep meadows, islanded and framed with thicket,
+gave place more and more as we ascended to woods of oak and
+madrona, dotted with enormous pines.&nbsp; It was these pines, as
+they shot above the lower wood, that produced that pencilling of
+single trees I had so often remarked from the valley.&nbsp;
+Thence, looking up and from however far, each fir stands separate
+against the sky no bigger than an eyelash; and all together lend
+a quaint, fringed aspect to the hills.&nbsp; The oak is no baby;
+even the madrona, upon these spurs of Mount Saint Helena, comes
+to a fine bulk and ranks with forest trees&mdash;but the pines
+look down upon the rest for underwood.&nbsp; As Mount Saint
+Helena among her foothills, so these dark giants out-top their
+fellow-vegetables.&nbsp; Alas! if they had left the redwoods, the
+pines, in turn, would have been dwarfed.&nbsp; But the redwoods,
+fallen from their high estate, are serving as family bedsteads,
+or yet more humbly as field fences, along all Napa Valley.</p>
+<p>A rough smack of resin was in the air, and a crystal mountain
+purity.&nbsp; It came pouring over these green slopes by the
+oceanful.&nbsp; The woods sang aloud, and gave largely of their
+healthful breath.&nbsp; Gladness seemed to inhabit these upper
+zones, and we had left indifference behind us in the
+valley.&nbsp; &ldquo;I to the hills lift mine eyes!&rdquo;&nbsp;
+There are days in a life when thus to climb out of the lowlands,
+seems like scaling heaven.</p>
+<p>As we continued to ascend, the wind fell upon us with
+increasing strength.&nbsp; It was a wonder how the two stout
+horses managed to pull us up that steep incline and still face
+the athletic opposition of the wind, or how their great eyes were
+able to endure the dust.&nbsp; Ten minutes after we went by, a
+tree fell, blocking the road; and even before us leaves were
+thickly strewn, and boughs had fallen, large enough to make the
+passage difficult.&nbsp; But now we were hard by the
+summit.&nbsp; The road crosses the ridge, just in the nick that
+Kelmar showed me from below, and then, without pause, plunges
+down a deep, thickly wooded glen on the farther side.&nbsp; At
+the highest point a trail strikes up the main hill to the
+leftward; and that leads to Silverado.&nbsp; A hundred yards
+beyond, and in a kind of elbow of the glen, stands the Toll House
+Hotel.&nbsp; We came up the one side, were caught upon the summit
+by the whole weight of the wind as it poured over into Napa
+Valley, and a minute after had drawn up in shelter, but all
+buffetted and breathless, at the Toll House door.</p>
+<p>A water-tank, and stables, and a gray house of two stories,
+with gable ends and a verandah, are jammed hard against the
+hillside, just where a stream has cut for itself a narrow canyon,
+filled with pines.&nbsp; The pines go right up overhead; a little
+more and the stream might have played, like a fire-hose, on the
+Toll House roof.&nbsp; In front the ground drops as sharply as it
+rises behind.&nbsp; There is just room for the road and a sort of
+promontory of croquet ground, and then you can lean over the edge
+and look deep below you through the wood.&nbsp; I said croquet
+<i>ground</i>, not <i>green</i>; for the surface was of brown,
+beaten earth.&nbsp; The toll-bar itself was the only other note
+of originality: a long beam, turning on a post, and kept slightly
+horizontal by a counterweight of stones.&nbsp; Regularly about
+sundown this rude barrier was swung, like a derrick, across the
+road and made fast, I think, to a tree upon the farther side.</p>
+<p>On our arrival there followed a gay scene in the bar.&nbsp; I
+was presented to Mr. Corwin, the landlord; to Mr. Jennings, the
+engineer, who lives there for his health; to Mr. Hoddy, a most
+pleasant little gentleman, once a member of the Ohio legislature,
+again the editor of a local paper, and now, with undiminished
+dignity, keeping the Toll House bar.&nbsp; I had a number of
+drinks and cigars bestowed on me, and enjoyed a famous
+opportunity of seeing Kelmar in his glory, friendly, radiant,
+smiling, steadily edging one of the ship&rsquo;s kettles on the
+reluctant Corwin.</p>
+<p>Corwin, plainly aghast, resisted gallantly, and for that bout
+victory crowned his arms.</p>
+<p>At last we set forth for Silverado on foot.&nbsp; Kelmar and
+his jolly Jew girls were full of the sentiment of Sunday outings,
+breathed geniality and vagueness, and suffered a little vile boy
+from the hotel to lead them here and there about the woods.&nbsp;
+For three people all so old, so bulky in body, and belonging to a
+race so venerable, they could not but surprise us by their
+extreme and almost imbecile youthfulness of spirit.&nbsp; They
+were only going to stay ten minutes at the Toll House; had they
+not twenty long miles of road before them on the other
+side?&nbsp; Stay to dinner?&nbsp; Not they!&nbsp; Put up the
+horses? Never.&nbsp; Let us attach them to the verandah by a wisp
+of straw rope, such as would not have held a person&rsquo;s hat
+on that blustering day.&nbsp; And with all these protestations of
+hurry, they proved irresponsible like children.&nbsp; Kelmar
+himself, shrewd old Russian Jew, with a smirk that seemed just to
+have concluded a bargain to its satisfaction, intrusted himself
+and us devoutly to that boy.&nbsp; Yet the boy was patently
+fallacious; and for that matter a most unsympathetic urchin,
+raised apparently on gingerbread.&nbsp; He was bent on his own
+pleasure, nothing else; and Kelmar followed him to his ruin, with
+the same shrewd smirk.&nbsp; If the boy said there was &ldquo;a
+hole there in the hill&rdquo;&mdash;a hole, pure and simple,
+neither more nor less&mdash;Kelmar and his Jew girls would follow
+him a hundred yards to look complacently down that hole.&nbsp;
+For two hours we looked for houses; and for two hours they
+followed us, smelling trees, picking flowers, foisting false
+botany on the unwary.&nbsp; Had we taken five, with that vile lad
+to head them off on idle divagations, for five they would have
+smiled and stumbled through the woods.</p>
+<p>However, we came forth at length, and as by accident, upon a
+lawn, sparse planted like an orchard, but with forest instead of
+fruit trees.&nbsp; That was the site of Silverado mining
+town.&nbsp; A piece of ground was levelled up, where
+Kelmar&rsquo;s store had been; and facing that we saw Rufe
+Hanson&rsquo;s house, still bearing on its front the legend
+<i>Silverado Hotel</i>.&nbsp; Not another sign of
+habitation.&nbsp; Silverado town had all been carted from the
+scene; one of the houses was now the school-house far down the
+road; one was gone here, one there, but all were gone away.</p>
+<p>It was now a sylvan solitude, and the silence was unbroken but
+by the great, vague voice of the wind.&nbsp; Some days before our
+visit, a grizzly bear had been sporting round the Hansons&rsquo;
+chicken-house.</p>
+<p>Mrs. Hanson was at home alone, we found.&nbsp; Rufe had been
+out after a &ldquo;bar,&rdquo; had risen late, and was now gone,
+it did not clearly appear whither.&nbsp; Perhaps he had had wind
+of Kelmar&rsquo;s coming, and was now ensconced among the
+underwood, or watching us from the shoulder of the
+mountain.&nbsp; We, hearing there were no houses to be had, were
+for immediately giving up all hopes of Silverado.&nbsp; But this,
+somehow, was not to Kelmar&rsquo;s fancy.&nbsp; He first proposed
+that we should &ldquo;camp someveres around, ain&rsquo;t
+it?&rdquo; waving his hand cheerily as though to weave a spell;
+and when that was firmly rejected, he decided that we must take
+up house with the Hansons.&nbsp; Mrs. Hanson had been, from the
+first, flustered, subdued, and a little pale; but from this
+proposition she recoiled with haggard indignation.&nbsp; So did
+we, who would have preferred, in a manner of speaking,
+death.&nbsp; But Kelmar was not to be put by.&nbsp; He edged Mrs.
+Hanson into a corner, where for a long time he threatened her
+with his forefinger, like a character in Dickens; and the poor
+woman, driven to her entrenchments, at last remembered with a
+shriek that there were still some houses at the tunnel.</p>
+<p>Thither we went; the Jews, who should already have been miles
+into Lake County, still cheerily accompanying us.&nbsp; For about
+a furlong we followed a good road alone, the hillside through the
+forest, until suddenly that road widened out and came abruptly to
+an end.&nbsp; A canyon, woody below, red, rocky, and naked
+overhead, was here walled across by a dump of rolling stones,
+dangerously steep, and from twenty to thirty feet in
+height.&nbsp; A rusty iron chute on wooden legs came flying, like
+a monstrous gargoyle, across the parapet.&nbsp; It was down this
+that they poured the precious ore; and below here the carts stood
+to wait their lading, and carry it mill-ward down the
+mountain.</p>
+<p>The whole canyon was so entirely blocked, as if by some rude
+guerilla fortification, that we could only mount by lengths of
+wooden ladder, fixed in the hillside.&nbsp; These led us round
+the farther corner of the dump; and when they were at an end, we
+still persevered over loose rubble and wading deep in poison oak,
+till we struck a triangular platform, filling up the whole glen,
+and shut in on either hand by bold projections of the
+mountain.&nbsp; Only in front the place was open like the
+proscenium of a theatre, and we looked forth into a great realm
+of air, and down upon treetops and hilltops, and far and near on
+wild and varied country.&nbsp; The place still stood as on the
+day it was deserted: a line of iron rails with a bifurcation; a
+truck in working order; a world of lumber, old wood, old iron; a
+blacksmith&rsquo;s forge on one side, half buried in the leaves
+of dwarf madronas; and on the other, an old brown wooden
+house.</p>
+<p>Fanny and I dashed at the house.&nbsp; It consisted of three
+rooms, and was so plastered against the hill, that one room was
+right atop of another, that the upper floor was more than twice
+as large as the lower, and that all three apartments must be
+entered from a different side and level.&nbsp; Not a window-sash
+remained.</p>
+<p>The door of the lower room was smashed, and one panel hung in
+splinters.&nbsp; We entered that, and found a fair amount of
+rubbish: sand and gravel that had been sifted in there by the
+mountain winds; straw, sticks, and stones; a table, a barrel; a
+plate-rack on the wall; two home-made bootjacks, signs of miners
+and their boots; and a pair of papers pinned on the boarding,
+headed respectively &ldquo;Funnel No. 1,&rdquo; and &ldquo;Funnel
+No. 2,&rdquo; but with the tails torn away.&nbsp; The window,
+sashless of course, was choked with the green and sweetly
+smelling foliage of a bay; and through a chink in the floor, a
+spray of poison oak had shot up and was handsomely prospering in
+the interior.&nbsp; It was my first care to cut away that poison
+oak, Fanny standing by at a respectful distance.&nbsp; That was
+our first improvement by which we took possession.</p>
+<p>The room immediately above could only be entered by a plank
+propped against the threshold, along which the intruder must foot
+it gingerly, clutching for support to sprays of poison oak, the
+proper product of the country.&nbsp; Herein was, on either hand,
+a triple tier of beds, where miners had once lain; and the other
+gable was pierced by a sashless window and a doorless doorway
+opening on the air of heaven, five feet above the ground.&nbsp;
+As for the third room, which entered squarely from the ground
+level, but higher up the hill and farther up the canyon, it
+contained only rubbish and the uprights for another triple tier
+of beds.</p>
+<p>The whole building was overhung by a bold, lion-like, red
+rock. Poison oak, sweet bay trees, calcanthus, brush, and
+chaparral, grew freely but sparsely all about it. In front, in
+the strong sunshine, the platform lay overstrewn with busy
+litter, as though the labours of the mine might begin again
+to-morrow in the morning.</p>
+<p>Following back into the canyon, among the mass of rotting
+plant and through the flowering bushes, we came to a great crazy
+staging, with a wry windless on the top; and clambering up, we
+could look into an open shaft, leading edgeways down into the
+bowels of the mountain, trickling with water, and lit by some
+stray sun-gleams, whence I know not.&nbsp; In that quiet place
+the still, far-away tinkle of the water-drops was loudly
+audible.&nbsp; Close by, another shaft led edgeways up into the
+superincumbent shoulder of the hill.&nbsp; It lay partly open;
+and sixty or a hundred feet above our head, we could see the
+strata propped apart by solid wooden wedges, and a pine, half
+undermined, precariously nodding on the verge.&nbsp; Here also a
+rugged, horizontal tunnel ran straight into the unsunned bowels
+of the rock.&nbsp; This secure angle in the mountain&rsquo;s
+flank was, even on this wild day, as still as my lady&rsquo;s
+chamber.&nbsp; But in the tunnel a cold, wet draught
+tempestuously blew.&nbsp; Nor have I ever known that place
+otherwise than cold and windy.</p>
+<p>Such was our fist prospect of Juan Silverado.&nbsp; I own I
+had looked for something different: a clique of neighbourly
+houses on a village green, we shall say, all empty to be sure,
+but swept and varnished; a trout stream brawling by; great elms
+or chestnuts, humming with bees and nested in by song-birds; and
+the mountains standing round about, as at Jerusalem.&nbsp; Here,
+mountain and house and the old tools of industry were all alike
+rusty and downfalling.&nbsp; The hill was here wedged up, and
+there poured forth its bowels in a spout of broken mineral; man
+with his picks and powder, and nature with her own great blasting
+tools of sun and rain, labouring together at the ruin of that
+proud mountain.&nbsp; The view up the canyon was a glimpse of
+devastation; dry red minerals sliding together, here and there a
+crag, here and there dwarf thicket clinging in the general
+glissade, and over all a broken outline trenching on the blue of
+heaven.&nbsp; Downwards indeed, from our rock eyrie, we behold
+the greener side of nature; and the bearing of the pines and the
+sweet smell of bays and nutmegs commanded themselves gratefully
+to our senses.&nbsp; One way and another, now the die was
+cast.&nbsp; Silverado be it!</p>
+<p>After we had got back to the Toll House, the Jews were not
+long of striking forward.&nbsp; But I observed that one of the
+Hanson lads came down, before their departure, and returned with
+a ship&rsquo;s kettle.&nbsp; Happy Hansons!&nbsp; Nor was it
+until after Kelmar was gone, if I remember rightly, that Rufe put
+in an appearance to arrange the details of our installation.</p>
+<p>The latter part of the day, Fanny and I sat in the verandah of
+the Toll House, utterly stunned by the uproar of the wind among
+the trees on the other side of the valley.&nbsp; Sometimes, we
+would have it it was like a sea, but it was not various enough
+for that; and again, we thought it like the roar of a cataract,
+but it was too changeful for the cataract; and then we would
+decide, speaking in sleepy voices, that it could be compared with
+nothing but itself.&nbsp; My mind was entirely preoccupied by the
+noise.&nbsp; I hearkened to it by the hour, gapingly hearkened,
+and let my cigarette go out.&nbsp; Sometimes the wind would make
+a sally nearer hand, and send a shrill, whistling crash among the
+foliage on our side of the glen; and sometimes a back-draught
+would strike into the elbow where we sat, and cast the gravel and
+torn leaves into our faces.&nbsp; But for the most part, this
+great, streaming gale passed unweariedly by us into Napa Valley,
+not two hundred yards away, visible by the tossing boughs,
+stunningly audible, and yet not moving a hair upon our
+heads.&nbsp; So it blew all night long while I was writing up my
+journal, and after we were in bed, under a cloudless, starset
+heaven; and so it was blowing still next morning when we
+rose.</p>
+<p>It was a laughable thought to us, what had become of our
+cheerful, wandering Hebrews.&nbsp; We could not suppose they had
+reached a destination.&nbsp; The meanest boy could lead them
+miles out of their way to see a gopher-hole.&nbsp; Boys, we felt
+to be their special danger; none others were of that exact pitch
+of cheerful irrelevancy to exercise a kindred sway upon their
+minds: but before the attractions of a boy their most settled
+resolutions would be war.&nbsp; We thought we could follow in
+fancy these three aged Hebrew truants wandering in and out on
+hilltop and in thicket, a demon boy trotting far ahead, their
+will-o&rsquo;-the-wisp conductor; and at last about midnight, the
+wind still roaring in the darkness, we had a vision of all three
+on their knees upon a mountain-top around a glow-worm.</p>
+<h3><a name="page92"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+92</span>CHAPTER III. THE RETURN</h3>
+<p><span class="smcap">Next</span> morning we were up by
+half-past five, according to agreement, and it was ten by the
+clock before our Jew boys returned to pick us up.&nbsp; Kelmar,
+Mrs. Kelmar, and Abramina, all smiling from ear to ear, and full
+of tales of the hospitality they had found on the other
+side.&nbsp; It had not gone unrewarded; for I observed with
+interest that the ship&rsquo;s kettles, all but one, had been
+&ldquo;placed.&rdquo;&nbsp; Three Lake County families, at least,
+endowed for life with a ship&rsquo;s kettle.&nbsp; Come, this was
+no misspent Sunday.&nbsp; The absence of the kettles told its own
+story: our Jews said nothing about them; but, on the other hand,
+they said many kind and comely things about the people they had
+met.&nbsp; The two women, in particular, had been charmed out of
+themselves by the sight of a young girl surrounded by her
+admirers; all evening, it appeared, they had been triumphing
+together in the girl&rsquo;s innocent successes, and to this
+natural and unselfish joy they gave expression in language that
+was beautiful by its simplicity and truth.</p>
+<p>Take them for all in all, few people have done my heart more
+good; they seemed so thoroughly entitled to happiness, and to
+enjoy it in so large a measure and so free from after-thought;
+almost they persuaded me to be a Jew.&nbsp; There was, indeed, a
+chink of money in their talk.&nbsp; They particularly commanded
+people who were well to do.&nbsp; &ldquo;<i>He</i> don&rsquo;t
+care&mdash;ain&rsquo;t it?&rdquo; was their highest word of
+commendation to an individual fate; and here I seem to grasp the
+root of their philosophy&mdash;it was to be free from care, to be
+free to make these Sunday wanderings, that they so eagerly
+pursued after wealth; and all this carefulness was to be
+careless.&nbsp; The fine, good humour of all three seemed to
+declare they had attained their end.&nbsp; Yet there was the
+other side to it; and the recipients of kettles perhaps cared
+greatly.</p>
+<p>No sooner had they returned, than the scene of yesterday began
+again.&nbsp; The horses were not even tied with a straw rope this
+time&mdash;it was not worth while; and Kelmar disappeared into
+the bar, leaving them under a tree on the other side of the
+road.&nbsp; I had to devote myself.&nbsp; I stood under the
+shadow of that tree for, I suppose, hard upon an hour, and had
+not the heart to be angry.&nbsp; Once some one remembered me, and
+brought me out half a tumblerful of the playful, innocuous
+American cocktail.&nbsp; I drank it, and lo! veins of living fire
+ran down my leg; and then a focus of conflagration remained
+seated in my stomach, not unpleasantly, for quarter of an
+hour.&nbsp; I love these sweet, fiery pangs, but I will not court
+them.&nbsp; The bulk of the time I spent in repeating as much
+French poetry as I could remember to the horses, who seemed to
+enjoy it hugely.&nbsp; And now it went&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;O ma vieille Font-georges<br />
+O&ugrave; volent les rouges-gorges:&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>and again, to a more trampling measure&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;Et tout tremble, Irun, Co&iuml;mbre,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Sautander, Almodovar,<br />
+Sit&ocirc;t qu&rsquo;on entend le timbre<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Des cymbales do Bivar.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>The redbreasts and the brooks of Europe, in that dry and
+songless land; brave old names and wars, strong cities, cymbals,
+and bright armour, in that nook of the mountain, sacred only to
+the Indian and the bear!&nbsp; This is still the strangest thing
+in all man&rsquo;s travelling, that he should carry about with
+him incongruous memories.&nbsp; There is no foreign land; it is
+the traveller only that is foreign, and now and again, by a flash
+of recollection, lights up the contrasts of the earth.</p>
+<p>But while I was thus wandering in my fancy, great feats had
+been transacted in the bar.&nbsp; Corwin the bold had fallen,
+Kelmar was again crowned with laurels, and the last of the
+ship&rsquo;s kettles had changed hands.&nbsp; If I had ever
+doubted the purity of Kelmar&rsquo;s motives, if I had ever
+suspected him of a single eye to business in his eternal
+dallyings, now at least, when the last kettle was disposed of, my
+suspicions must have been allayed.&nbsp; I dare not guess how
+much more time was wasted; nor how often we drove off, merely to
+drive back again and renew interrupted conversations about
+nothing, before the Toll House was fairly left behind.&nbsp;
+Alas! and not a mile down the grade there stands a ranche in a
+sunny vineyard, and here we must all dismount again and
+enter.</p>
+<p>Only the old lady was at home, Mrs. Guele, a brown old Swiss
+dame, the picture of honesty; and with her we drank a bottle of
+wine and had an age-long conversation, which would have been
+highly delightful if Fanny and I had not been faint with
+hunger.&nbsp; The ladies each narrated the story of her marriage,
+our two Hebrews with the prettiest combination of sentiment and
+financial bathos.&nbsp; Abramina, specially, endeared herself
+with every word.&nbsp; She was as simple, natural, and engaging
+as a kid that should have been brought up to the business of a
+money-changer.&nbsp; One touch was so resplendently Hebraic that
+I cannot pass it over.&nbsp; When her &ldquo;old man&rdquo; wrote
+home for her from America, her old man&rsquo;s family would not
+intrust her with the money for the passage, till she had bound
+herself by an oath&mdash;on her knees, I think she said&mdash;not
+to employ it otherwise.</p>
+<p>This had tickled Abramina hugely, but I think it tickled me
+fully more.</p>
+<p>Mrs. Guele told of her home-sickness up here in the long
+winters; of her honest, country-woman troubles and alarms upon
+the journey; how in the bank at Frankfort she had feared lest the
+banker, after having taken her cheque, should deny all knowledge
+of it&mdash;a fear I have myself every time I go to a bank; and
+how crossing the Luneburger Heath, an old lady, witnessing her
+trouble and finding whither she was bound, had given her
+&ldquo;the blessing of a person eighty years old, which would be
+sure to bring her safely to the States.&nbsp; And the first thing
+I did,&rdquo; added Mrs. Guele, &ldquo;was to fall
+downstairs.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>At length we got out of the house, and some of us into the
+trap, when&mdash;judgment of Heaven!&mdash;here came Mr. Guele
+from his vineyard.&nbsp; So another quarter of an hour went by;
+till at length, at our earnest pleading, we set forth again in
+earnest, Fanny and I white-faced and silent, but the Jews still
+smiling.&nbsp; The heart fails me.&nbsp; There was yet another
+stoppage!&nbsp; And we drove at last into Calistoga past two in
+the afternoon, Fanny and I having breakfasted at six in the
+morning, eight mortal hours before.&nbsp; We were a pallid
+couple; but still the Jews were smiling.</p>
+<p>So ended our excursion with the village usurers; and, now that
+it was done, we had no more idea of the nature of the business,
+nor of the part we had been playing in it, than the child
+unborn.&nbsp; That all the people we had met were the slaves of
+Kelmar, though in various degrees of servitude; that we ourselves
+had been sent up the mountain in the interests of none but
+Kelmar; that the money we laid out, dollar by dollar, cent by
+cent, and through the hands of various intermediaries, should all
+hop ultimately into Kelmar&rsquo;s till;&mdash;these were facts
+that we only grew to recognize in the course of time and by the
+accumulation of evidence.&nbsp; At length all doubt was quieted,
+when one of the kettle-holders confessed.&nbsp; Stopping his trap
+in the moonlight, a little way out of Calistoga, he told me, in
+so many words, that he dare not show face therewith an empty
+pocket.&nbsp; &ldquo;You see, I don&rsquo;t mind if it was only
+five dollars, Mr. Stevens,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;but I must give
+Mr. Kelmar <i>something</i>.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Even now, when the whole tyranny is plain to me, I cannot find
+it in my heart to be as angry as perhaps I should be with the
+Hebrew tyrant.&nbsp; The whole game of business is beggar my
+neighbour; and though perhaps that game looks uglier when played
+at such close quarters and on so small a scale, it is none the
+more intrinsically inhumane for that.&nbsp; The village usurer is
+not so sad a feature of humanity and human progress as the
+millionaire manufacturer, fattening on the toil and loss of
+thousands, and yet declaiming from the platform against the greed
+and dishonesty of landlords.&nbsp; If it were fair for Cobden to
+buy up land from owners whom he thought unconscious of its proper
+value, it was fair enough for my Russian Jew to give credit to
+his farmers.&nbsp; Kelmar, if he was unconscious of the beam in
+his own eye, was at least silent in the matter of his
+brother&rsquo;s mote.</p>
+<h2><a name="page103"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 103</span>THE
+ACT OF SQUATTING</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">There</span> were four of us
+squatters&mdash;myself and my wife, the King and Queen of
+Silverado; Sam, the Crown Prince; and Chuchu, the Grand
+Duke.&nbsp; Chuchu, a setter crossed with spaniel, was the most
+unsuited for a rough life.&nbsp; He had been nurtured tenderly in
+the society of ladies; his heart was large and soft; he regarded
+the sofa-cushion as a bed-rook necessary of existence.&nbsp;
+Though about the size of a sheep, he loved to sit in
+ladies&rsquo; laps; he never said a bad word in all his blameless
+days; and if he had seen a flute, I am sure he could have played
+upon it by nature.&nbsp; It may seem hard to say it of a dog, but
+Chuchu was a tame cat.</p>
+<p>The king and queen, the grand duke, and a basket of cold
+provender for immediate use, set forth from Calistoga in a double
+buggy; the crown prince, on horseback, led the way like an
+outrider.&nbsp; Bags and boxes and a second-hand stove were to
+follow close upon our heels by Hanson&rsquo;s team.</p>
+<p>It was a beautiful still day; the sky was one field of
+azure.&nbsp; Not a leaf moved, not a speck appeared in
+heaven.&nbsp; Only from the summit of the mountain one little
+snowy wisp of cloud after another kept detaching itself, like
+smoke from a volcano, and blowing southward in some high stream
+of air: Mount Saint Helena still at her interminable task, making
+the weather, like a Lapland witch.</p>
+<p>By noon we had come in sight of the mill: a great brown
+building, half-way up the hill, big as a factory, two stories
+high, and with tanks and ladders along the roof; which, as a
+pendicle of Silverado mine, we held to be an outlying province of
+our own.&nbsp; Thither, then, we went, crossing the valley by a
+grassy trail; and there lunched out of the basket, sitting in a
+kind of portico, and wondering, while we ate, at this great bulk
+of useless building.&nbsp; Through a chink we could look far down
+into the interior, and see sunbeams floating in the dust and
+striking on tier after tier of silent, rusty machinery.&nbsp; It
+cost six thousand dollars, twelve hundred English sovereigns; and
+now, here it stands deserted, like the temple of a forgotten
+religion, the busy millers toiling somewhere else.&nbsp; All the
+time we were there, mill and mill town showed no sign of life;
+that part of the mountain-side, which is very open and green, was
+tenanted by no living creature but ourselves and the insects; and
+nothing stirred but the cloud manufactory upon the mountain
+summit.&nbsp; It was odd to compare this with the former days,
+when the engine was in fall blast, the mill palpitating to its
+strokes, and the carts came rattling down from Silverado, charged
+with ore.</p>
+<p>By two we had been landed at the mine, the buggy was gone
+again, and we were left to our own reflections and the basket of
+cold provender, until Hanson should arrive.&nbsp; Hot as it was
+by the sun, there was something chill in such a home-coming, in
+that world of wreck and rust, splinter and rolling gravel, where
+for so many years no fire had smoked.</p>
+<p>Silverado platform filled the whole width of the canyon.&nbsp;
+Above, as I have said, this was a wild, red, stony gully in the
+mountains; but below it was a wooded dingle.&nbsp; And through
+this, I was told, there had gone a path between the mine and the
+Toll House&mdash;our natural north-west passage to
+civilization.&nbsp; I found and followed it, clearing my way as I
+went through fallen branches and dead trees.&nbsp; It went
+straight down that steep canyon, till it brought you out abruptly
+over the roofs of the hotel.&nbsp; There was nowhere any break in
+the descent.&nbsp; It almost seemed as if, were you to drop a
+stone down the old iron chute at our platform, it would never
+rest until it hopped upon the Toll House shingles.&nbsp; Signs
+were not wanting of the ancient greatness of Silverado.&nbsp; The
+footpath was well marked, and had been well trodden in the old
+clays by thirsty miners.&nbsp; And far down, buried in foliage,
+deep out of sight of Silverado, I came on a last outpost of the
+mine&mdash;a mound of gravel, some wreck of wooden aqueduct, and
+the mouth of a tunnel, like a treasure grotto in a fairy
+story.&nbsp; A stream of water, fed by the invisible leakage from
+our shaft, and dyed red with cinnabar or iron, ran trippingly
+forth out of the bowels of the cave; and, looking far under the
+arch, I could see something like an iron lantern fastened on the
+rocky wall.&nbsp; It was a promising spot for the
+imagination.&nbsp; No boy could have left it unexplored.</p>
+<p>The stream thenceforward stole along the bottom of the dingle,
+and made, for that dry land, a pleasant warbling in the
+leaves.&nbsp; Once, I suppose, it ran splashing down the whole
+length of the canyon, but now its head waters had been tapped by
+the shaft at Silverado, and for a great part of its course it
+wandered sunless among the joints of the mountain.&nbsp; No
+wonder that it should better its pace when it sees, far before
+it, daylight whitening in the arch, or that it should come
+trotting forth into the sunlight with a song.</p>
+<p>The two stages had gone by when I got down, and the Toll House
+stood, dozing in sun and dust and silence, like a place
+enchanted.&nbsp; My mission was after hay for bedding, and that I
+was readily promised.&nbsp; But when I mentioned that we were
+waiting for Rufe, the people shook their heads.&nbsp; Rufe was
+not a regular man any way, it seemed; and if he got playing
+poker&mdash;Well, poker was too many for Rufe.&nbsp; I had not
+yet heard them bracketted together; but it seemed a natural
+conjunction, and commended itself swiftly to my fears; and as
+soon as I returned to Silverado and had told my story, we
+practically gave Hanson up, and set ourselves to do what we could
+find do-able in our desert-island state.</p>
+<p>The lower room had been the assayer&rsquo;s office.&nbsp; The
+floor was thick with <i>d&eacute;bris</i>&mdash;part human, from
+the former occupants; part natural, sifted in by mountain
+winds.&nbsp; In a sea of red dust there swam or floated sticks,
+boards, hay, straw, stones, and paper; ancient newspapers, above
+all&mdash;for the newspaper, especially when torn, soon becomes
+an antiquity&mdash;and bills of the Silverado boarding-house,
+some dated Silverado, some Calistoga Mine.&nbsp; Here is one,
+verbatim; and if any one can calculate the scale of charges, he
+has my envious admiration.</p>
+<table>
+<tr>
+<td colspan="3"><p>Calistoga Mine, May 3rd, 1875.</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td colspan="3"><p>John Stanley<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; To S. Chapman, Cr.</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>To board from April 1st, to April 30</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">$25</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">75</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;,,&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;
+,,&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; ,,&nbsp; May 1st, to 3rd . . .</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">2</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">00</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>&nbsp;</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">27</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">75</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+<p>Where is John Stanley mining now?&nbsp; Where is S. Chapman,
+within whose hospitable walls we were to lodge?&nbsp; The date
+was but five years old, but in that time the world had changed
+for Silverado; like Palmyra in the desert, it had outlived its
+people and its purpose; we camped, like Layard, amid ruins, and
+these names spoke to us of prehistoric time.&nbsp; A boot-jack, a
+pair of boots, a dog-hutch, and these bills of Mr.
+Chapman&rsquo;s were the only speaking relics that we disinterred
+from all that vast Silverado rubbish-heap; but what would I not
+have given to unearth a letter, a pocket-book, a diary, only a
+ledger, or a roll of names, to take me back, in a more personal
+manner, to the past?&nbsp; It pleases me, besides, to fancy that
+Stanley or Chapman, or one of their companions, may light upon
+this chronicle, and be struck by the name, and read some news of
+their anterior home, coming, as it were, out of a subsequent
+epoch of history in that quarter of the world.</p>
+<p>As we were tumbling the mingled rubbish on the floor, kicking
+it with our feet, and groping for these written evidences of the
+past, Sam, with a somewhat whitened face, produced a paper
+bag.&nbsp; &ldquo;What&rsquo;s this?&rdquo; said he.&nbsp; It
+contained a granulated powder, something the colour of
+Gregory&rsquo;s Mixture, but rosier; and as there were several of
+the bags, and each more or less broken, the powder was spread
+widely on the floor.&nbsp; Had any of us ever seen giant
+powder?&nbsp; No, nobody had; and instantly there grew up in my
+mind a shadowy belief, verging with every moment nearer to
+certitude, that I had somewhere heard somebody describe it as
+just such a powder as the one around us.&nbsp; I have learnt
+since that it is a substance not unlike tallow, and is made up in
+rolls for all the world like tallow candles.</p>
+<p>Fanny, to add to our happiness, told us a story of a gentleman
+who had camped one night, like ourselves, by a deserted
+mine.&nbsp; He was a handy, thrifty fellow, and looked right and
+left for plunder, but all he could lay his hands on was a can of
+oil.&nbsp; After dark he had to see to the horses with a lantern;
+and not to miss an opportunity, filled up his lamp from the oil
+can.&nbsp; Thus equipped, he set forth into the forest.&nbsp; A
+little while after, his friends heard a loud explosion; the
+mountain echoes bellowed, and then all was still.&nbsp; On
+examination, the can proved to contain oil, with the trifling
+addition of nitro-glycerine; but no research disclosed a trace of
+either man or lantern.</p>
+<p>It was a pretty sight, after this anecdote, to see us sweeping
+out the giant powder.&nbsp; It seemed never to be far enough
+away.&nbsp; And, after all, it was only some rock pounded for
+assay.</p>
+<p>So much for the lower room.&nbsp; We scraped some of the
+rougher dirt off the floor, and left it.&nbsp; That was our
+sitting-room and kitchen, though there was nothing to sit upon
+but the table, and no provision for a fire except a hole in the
+roof of the room above, which had once contained the chimney of a
+stove.</p>
+<p>To that upper room we now proceeded.&nbsp; There were the
+eighteen bunks in a double tier, nine on either hand, where from
+eighteen to thirty-six miners had once snored together all night
+long, John Stanley, perhaps, snoring loudest.&nbsp; There was the
+roof, with a hole in it through which the sun now shot an
+arrow.&nbsp; There was the floor, in much the same state as the
+one below, though, perhaps, there was more hay, and certainly
+there was the added ingredient of broken glass, the man who stole
+the window-frames having apparently made a miscarriage with this
+one.&nbsp; Without a broom, without hay or bedding, we could but
+look about us with a beginning of despair.&nbsp; The one bright
+arrow of day, in that gaunt and shattered barrack, made the rest
+look dirtier and darker, and the sight drove us at last into the
+open.</p>
+<p>Here, also, the handiwork of man lay ruined: but the plants
+were all alive and thriving; the view below was fresh with the
+colours of nature; and we had exchanged a dim, human garret for a
+corner, even although it were untidy, of the blue hall of
+heaven.&nbsp; Not a bird, not a beast, not a reptile.&nbsp; There
+was no noise in that part of the world, save when we passed
+beside the staging, and heard the water musically falling in the
+shaft.</p>
+<p>We wandered to and fro.&nbsp; We searched among that drift of
+lumber-wood and iron, nails and rails, and sleepers and the
+wheels of tracks.&nbsp; We gazed up the cleft into the bosom of
+the mountain.&nbsp; We sat by the margin of the dump and saw, far
+below us, the green treetops standing still in the clear
+air.&nbsp; Beautiful perfumes, breaths of bay, resin, and nutmeg,
+came to us more often and grew sweeter and sharper as the
+afternoon declined.&nbsp; But still there was no word of
+Hanson.</p>
+<p>I set to with pick and shovel, and deepened the pool behind
+the shaft, till we were sure of sufficient water for the morning;
+and by the time I had finished, the sun had begun to go down
+behind the mountain shoulder, the platform was plunged in quiet
+shadow, and a chill descended from the sky.&nbsp; Night began
+early in our cleft.&nbsp; Before us, over the margin of the dump,
+we could see the sun still striking aslant into the wooded nick
+below, and on the battlemented, pine-bescattered ridges on the
+farther side.</p>
+<p>There was no stove, of course, and no hearth in our lodging,
+so we betook ourselves to the blacksmith&rsquo;s forge across the
+platform.&nbsp; If the platform be taken as a stage, and the
+out-curving margin of the dump to represent the line of the
+foot-lights, then our house would be the first wing on the
+actor&rsquo;s left, and this blacksmith&rsquo;s forge, although
+no match for it in size, the foremost on the right.&nbsp; It was
+a low, brown cottage, planted close against the hill, and
+overhung by the foliage and peeling boughs of a madrona
+thicket.&nbsp; Within it was full of dead leaves and mountain
+dust, and rubbish from the mine.&nbsp; But we soon had a good
+fire brightly blazing, and sat close about it on impromptu
+seats.&nbsp; Chuchu, the slave of sofa-cushions, whimpered for a
+softer bed; but the rest of us were greatly revived and comforted
+by that good creature-fire, which gives us warmth and light and
+companionable sounds, and colours up the emptiest building with
+better than frescoes.&nbsp; For a while it was even pleasant in
+the forge, with the blaze in the midst, and a look over our
+shoulders on the woods and mountains where the day was dying like
+a dolphin.</p>
+<p>It was between seven and eight before Hanson arrived, with a
+waggonful of our effects and two of his wife&rsquo;s relatives to
+lend him a hand.&nbsp; The elder showed surprising
+strength.&nbsp; He would pick up a huge packing-case, full of
+books of all things, swing it on his shoulder, and away up the
+two crazy ladders and the breakneck spout of rolling mineral,
+familiarly termed a path, that led from the cart-track to our
+house.&nbsp; Even for a man unburthened, the ascent was toilsome
+and precarious; but Irvine sealed it with a light foot, carrying
+box after box, as the hero whisks the stage child up the
+practicable footway beside the waterfall of the fifth act.&nbsp;
+With so strong a helper, the business was speedily
+transacted.&nbsp; Soon the assayer&rsquo;s office was thronged
+with our belongings, piled higgledy-piggledy, and upside down,
+about the floor.&nbsp; There were our boxes, indeed, but my wife
+had left her keys in Calistoga.&nbsp; There was the stove, but,
+alas! our carriers had forgot the chimney, and lost one of the
+plates along the road.&nbsp; The Silverado problem was scarce
+solved.</p>
+<p>Rufe himself was grave and good-natured over his share of
+blame; he even, if I remember right, expressed regret.&nbsp; But
+his crew, to my astonishment and anger, grinned from ear to ear,
+and laughed aloud at our distress.&nbsp; They thought it
+&ldquo;real funny&rdquo; about the stove-pipe they had forgotten;
+&ldquo;real funny&rdquo; that they should have lost a
+plate.&nbsp; As for hay, the whole party refused to bring us any
+till they should have supped.&nbsp; See how late they were!&nbsp;
+Never had there been such a job as coming up that grade!&nbsp;
+Nor often, I suspect, such a game of poker as that before they
+started.&nbsp; But about nine, as a particular favour, we should
+have some hay.</p>
+<p>So they took their departure, leaving me still staring, and we
+resigned ourselves to wait for their return.&nbsp; The fire in
+the forge had been suffered to go out, and we were one and all
+too weary to kindle another.&nbsp; We dined, or, not to take that
+word in vain, we ate after a fashion, in the nightmare disorder
+of the assayer&rsquo;s office, perched among boxes.&nbsp; A
+single candle lighted us.&nbsp; It could scarce be called a
+housewarming; for there was, of course, no fire, and with the two
+open doors and the open window gaping on the night, like breaches
+in a fortress, it began to grow rapidly chill.&nbsp; Talk ceased;
+nobody moved but the unhappy Chuchu, still in quest of
+sofa-cushions, who tumbled complainingly among the trunks.&nbsp;
+It required a certain happiness of disposition to look forward
+hopefully, from so dismal a beginning, across the brief hours of
+night, to the warm shining of to-morrow&rsquo;s sun.</p>
+<p>But the hay arrived at last, and we turned, with our last
+spark of courage, to the bedroom.&nbsp; We had improved the
+entrance, but it was still a kind of rope-walking; and it would
+have been droll to see us mounting, one after another, by
+candle-light, under the open stars.</p>
+<p>The western door&mdash;that which looked up the canyon, and
+through which we entered by our bridge of flying plank&mdash;was
+still entire, a handsome, panelled door, the most finished piece
+of carpentry in Silverado.&nbsp; And the two lowest bunks next to
+this we roughly filled with hay for that night&rsquo;s use.&nbsp;
+Through the opposite, or eastern-looking gable, with its open
+door and window, a faint, disused starshine came into the room
+like mist; and when we were once in bed, we lay, awaiting sleep,
+in a haunted, incomplete obscurity.&nbsp; At first the silence of
+the night was utter.&nbsp; Then a high wind began in the distance
+among the treetops, and for hours continued to grow higher.&nbsp;
+It seemed to me much such a wind as we had found on our visit;
+yet here in our open chamber we were fanned only by gentle and
+refreshing draughts, so deep was the canyon, so close our house
+was planted under the overhanging rock.</p>
+<h2><a name="page127"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 127</span>THE
+HUNTER&rsquo;S FAMILY</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">There</span> is quite a large race or
+class of people in America, for whom we scarcely seem to have a
+parallel in England.&nbsp; Of pure white blood, they are unknown
+or unrecognizable in towns; inhabit the fringe of settlements and
+the deep, quiet places of the country; rebellious to all labour,
+and pettily thievish, like the English gipsies; rustically
+ignorant, but with a touch of wood-lore and the dexterity of the
+savage.&nbsp; Whence they came is a moot point.&nbsp; At the time
+of the war, they poured north in crowds to escape the
+conscription; lived during summer on fruits, wild animals, and
+petty theft; and at the approach of winter, when these supplies
+failed, built great fires in the forest, and there died stoically
+by starvation.&nbsp; They are widely scattered, however, and
+easily recognized.&nbsp; Loutish, but not ill-looking, they will
+sit all day, swinging their legs on a field fence, the mind
+seemingly as devoid of all reflection as a Suffolk
+peasant&rsquo;s, careless of politics, for the most part
+incapable of reading, but with a rebellious vanity and a strong
+sense of independence.&nbsp; Hunting is their most congenial
+business, or, if the occasion offers, a little amateur
+detection.&nbsp; In tracking a criminal, following a particular
+horse along a beaten highway, and drawing inductions from a hair
+or a footprint, one of those somnolent, grinning Hodges will
+suddenly display activity of body and finesse of mind.&nbsp; By
+their names ye may know them, the women figuring as Loveina,
+Larsenia, Serena, Leanna, Orreana; the men answering to Alvin,
+Alva, or Orion, pronounced Orrion, with the accent on the
+first.&nbsp; Whether they are indeed a race, or whether this is
+the form of degeneracy common to all back-woodsmen, they are at
+least known by a generic byword, as Poor Whites or
+Low-downers.</p>
+<p>I will not say that the Hanson family was Poor White, because
+the name savours of offence; but I may go as far as
+this&mdash;they were, in many points, not unsimilar to the people
+usually so-cared.&nbsp; Rufe himself combined two of the
+qualifications, for he was both a hunter and an amateur
+detective.&nbsp; It was he who pursued Russel and Dollar, the
+robbers of the Lake Port stage, and captured them the very
+morning after the exploit, while they were still sleeping in a
+hayfield.&nbsp; Russel, a drunken Scotch carpenter, was even an
+acquaintance of his own, and he expressed much grave
+commiseration for his fate.&nbsp; In all that he said and did,
+Rufe was grave.&nbsp; I never saw him hurried.&nbsp; When he
+spoke, he took out his pipe with ceremonial deliberation, looked
+east and west, and then, in quiet tones and few words, stated his
+business or told his story.&nbsp; His gait was to match; it would
+never have surprised you if, at any step, he had turned round and
+walked away again, so warily and slowly, and with so much seeming
+hesitation did he go about.&nbsp; He lay long in bed in the
+morning&mdash;rarely indeed, rose before noon; he loved all
+games, from poker to clerical croquet; and in the Toll House
+croquet ground I have seen him toiling at the latter with the
+devotion of a curate.&nbsp; He took an interest in education, was
+an active member of the local school-board, and when I was there,
+he had recently lost the schoolhouse key.&nbsp; His waggon was
+broken, but it never seemed to occur to him to mend it.&nbsp;
+Like all truly idle people, he had an artistic eye.&nbsp; He
+chose the print stuff for his wife&rsquo;s dresses, and
+counselled her in the making of a patchwork quilt, always, as she
+thought, wrongly, but to the more educated eye, always with
+bizarre and admirable taste&mdash;the taste of an Indian.&nbsp;
+With all this, he was a perfect, unoffending gentleman in word
+and act.&nbsp; Take his clay pipe from him, and he was fit for
+any society but that of fools.&nbsp; Quiet as he was, there
+burned a deep, permanent excitement in his dark blue eyes; and
+when this grave man smiled, it was like sunshine in a shady
+place.</p>
+<p>Mrs. Hanson (<i>n&eacute;e</i>, if you please, Lovelands) was
+more commonplace than her lord.&nbsp; She was a comely woman,
+too, plump, fair-coloured, with wonderful white teeth; and in her
+print dresses (chosen by Rufe) and with a large sun-bonnet
+shading her valued complexion, made, I assure you, a very
+agreeable figure.&nbsp; But she was on the surface, what there
+was of her, out-spoken and loud-spoken.&nbsp; Her noisy laughter
+had none of the charm of one of Hanson&rsquo;s rare,
+slow-spreading smiles; there was no reticence, no mystery, no
+manner about the woman: she was a first-class dairymaid, but her
+husband was an unknown quantity between the savage and the
+nobleman.&nbsp; She was often in and out with us, merry, and
+healthy, and fair; he came far seldomer&mdash;only, indeed, when
+there was business, or now and again, to pay a visit of ceremony,
+brushed up for the occasion, with his wife on his arm, and a
+clean clay pipe in his teeth.&nbsp; These visits, in our forest
+state, had quite the air of an event, and turned our red canyon
+into a salon.</p>
+<p>Such was the pair who ruled in the old Silverado Hotel, among
+the windy trees, on the mountain shoulder overlooking the whole
+length of Napa Valley, as the man aloft looks down on the
+ship&rsquo;s deck.&nbsp; There they kept house, with sundry
+horses and fowls, and a family of sons, Daniel Webster, and I
+think George Washington, among the number.&nbsp; Nor did they
+want visitors.&nbsp; An old gentleman, of singular stolidity, and
+called Breedlove&mdash;I think he had crossed the plains in the
+same caravan with Rufe&mdash;housed with them for awhile during
+our stay; and they had besides a permanent lodger, in the form of
+Mrs. Hanson&rsquo;s brother, Irvine Lovelands.&nbsp; I spell
+Irvine by guess; for I could get no information on the subject,
+just as I could never find out, in spite of many inquiries,
+whether or not Rufe was a contraction for Rufus.&nbsp; They were
+all cheerfully at sea about their names in that generation.&nbsp;
+And this is surely the more notable where the names are all so
+strange, and even the family names appear to have been
+coined.&nbsp; At one time, at least, the ancestors of all these
+Alvins and Alvas, Loveinas, Lovelands, and Breedloves, must have
+taken serious council and found a certain poetry in these
+denominations; that must have been, then, their form of
+literature.&nbsp; But still times change; and their next
+descendants, the George Washingtons and Daniel Websters, will at
+least be clear upon the point.&nbsp; And anyway, and however his
+name should be spelt, this Irvine Lovelands was the most
+unmitigated Caliban I ever knew.</p>
+<p>Our very first morning at Silverado, when we were full of
+business, patching up doors and windows, making beds and seats,
+and getting our rough lodging into shape, Irvine and his sister
+made their appearance together, she for neighbourliness and
+general curiosity; he, because he was working for me, to my
+sorrow, cutting firewood at I forget how much a day.&nbsp; The
+way that he set about cutting wood was characteristic.&nbsp; We
+were at that moment patching up and unpacking in the
+kitchen.&nbsp; Down he sat on one side, and down sat his sister
+on the other.&nbsp; Both were chewing pine-tree gum, and he, to
+my annoyance, accompanied that simple pleasure with profuse
+expectoration.&nbsp; She rattled away, talking up hill and down
+dale, laughing, tossing her head, showing her brilliant
+teeth.&nbsp; He looked on in silence, now spitting heavily on the
+floor, now putting his head back and uttering a loud, discordant,
+joyless laugh.&nbsp; He had a tangle of shock hair, the colour of
+wool; his mouth was a grin; although as strong as a horse, he
+looked neither heavy nor yet adroit, only leggy, coltish, and in
+the road.&nbsp; But it was plain he was in high spirits,
+thoroughly enjoying his visit; and he laughed frankly whenever we
+failed to accomplish what we were about.&nbsp; This was scarcely
+helpful: it was even, to amateur carpenters, embarrassing; but it
+lasted until we knocked off work and began to get dinner.&nbsp;
+Then Mrs. Hanson remembered she should have been gone an hour
+ago; and the pair retired, and the lady&rsquo;s laughter died
+away among the nutmegs down the path.&nbsp; That was
+Irvine&rsquo;s first day&rsquo;s work in my employment&mdash;the
+devil take him!</p>
+<p>The next morning he returned and, as he was this time alone,
+he bestowed his conversation upon us with great liberality.&nbsp;
+He prided himself on his intelligence; asked us if we knew the
+school ma&rsquo;am.&nbsp; <i>He</i> didn&rsquo;t think much of
+her, anyway.&nbsp; He had tried her, he had.&nbsp; He had put a
+question to her.&nbsp; If a tree a hundred feet high were to fall
+a foot a day, how long would it take to fall right down?&nbsp;
+She had not been able to solve the problem.&nbsp; &ldquo;She
+don&rsquo;t know nothing,&rdquo; he opined.&nbsp; He told us how
+a friend of his kept a school with a revolver, and chuckled
+mightily over that; his friend could teach school, he
+could.&nbsp; All the time he kept chewing gum and spitting.&nbsp;
+He would stand a while looking down; and then he would toss back
+his shock of hair, and laugh hoarsely, and spit, and bring
+forward a new subject.&nbsp; A man, he told us, who bore a grudge
+against him, had poisoned his dog.&nbsp; &ldquo;That was a low
+thing for a man to do now, wasn&rsquo;t it?&nbsp; It wasn&rsquo;t
+like a man, that, nohow.&nbsp; But I got even with him: I pisoned
+<i>his</i> dog.&rdquo;&nbsp; His clumsy utterance, his rude
+embarrassed manner, set a fresh value on the stupidity of his
+remarks.&nbsp; I do not think I ever appreciated the meaning of
+two words until I knew Irvine&mdash;the verb, loaf, and the noun,
+oaf; between them, they complete his portrait.&nbsp; He could
+lounge, and wriggle, and rub himself against the wall, and grin,
+and be more in everybody&rsquo;s way than any other two people
+that I ever set my eyes on.&nbsp; Nothing that he did became him;
+and yet you were conscious that he was one of your own race, that
+his mind was cumbrously at work, revolving the problem of
+existence like a quid of gum, and in his own cloudy manner
+enjoying life, and passing judgment on his fellows.&nbsp; Above
+all things, he was delighted with himself.&nbsp; You would not
+have thought it, from his uneasy manners and troubled, struggling
+utterance; but he loved himself to the marrow, and was happy and
+proud like a peacock on a rail.</p>
+<p>His self-esteem was, indeed, the one joint in his
+harness.&nbsp; He could be got to work, and even kept at work, by
+flattery.&nbsp; As long as my wife stood over him, crying out how
+strong he was, so long exactly he would stick to the matter in
+hand; and the moment she turned her back, or ceased to praise
+him, he would stop.&nbsp; His physical strength was wonderful;
+and to have a woman stand by and admire his achievements, warmed
+his heart like sunshine.&nbsp; Yet he was as cowardly as he was
+powerful, and felt no shame in owning to the weakness.&nbsp;
+Something was once wanted from the crazy platform over the shaft,
+and he at once refused to venture there&mdash;&ldquo;did not
+like,&rdquo; as he said, &ldquo;foolen&rsquo; round them kind
+o&rsquo; places,&rdquo; and let my wife go instead of him,
+looking on with a grin.&nbsp; Vanity, where it rules, is usually
+more heroic: but Irvine steadily approved himself, and expected
+others to approve him; rather looked down upon my wife, and
+decidedly expected her to look up to him, on the strength of his
+superior prudence.</p>
+<p>Yet the strangest part of the whole matter was perhaps this,
+that Irvine was as beautiful as a statue.&nbsp; His features
+were, in themselves, perfect; it was only his cloudy, uncouth,
+and coarse expression that disfigured them.&nbsp; So much
+strength residing in so spare a frame was proof sufficient of the
+accuracy of his shape.&nbsp; He must have been built somewhat
+after the pattern of Jack Sheppard; but the famous housebreaker,
+we may be certain, was no lout.&nbsp; It was by the extraordinary
+powers of his mind no less than by the vigour of his body, that
+he broke his strong prison with such imperfect implements,
+turning the very obstacles to service.&nbsp; Irvine, in the same
+case, would have sat down and spat, and grumbled curses.&nbsp; He
+had the soul of a fat sheep, but, regarded as an artist&rsquo;s
+model, the exterior of a Greek God.&nbsp; It was a cruel thought
+to persons less favoured in their birth, that this creature,
+endowed&mdash;to use the language of theatres&mdash;with
+extraordinary &ldquo;means,&rdquo; should so manage to misemploy
+them that he looked ugly and almost deformed.&nbsp; It was only
+by an effort of abstraction, and after many days, that you
+discovered what he was.</p>
+<p>By playing on the oaf&rsquo;s conceit, and standing closely
+over him, we got a path made round the corner of the dump to our
+door, so that we could come and go with decent ease; and he even
+enjoyed the work, for in that there were boulders to be plucked
+up bodily, bushes to be uprooted, and other occasions for
+athletic display: but cutting wood was a different matter.&nbsp;
+Anybody could cut wood; and, besides, my wife was tired of
+supervising him, and had other things to attend to.&nbsp; And, in
+short, days went by, and Irvine came daily, and talked and
+lounged and spat; but the firewood remained intact as sleepers on
+the platform or growing trees upon the mountainside.&nbsp;
+Irvine, as a woodcutter, we could tolerate; but Irvine as a
+friend of the family, at so much a day, was too bald an
+imposition, and at length, on the afternoon of the fourth or
+fifth day of our connection, I explained to him, as clearly as I
+could, the light in which I had grown to regard his
+presence.&nbsp; I pointed out to him that I could not continue to
+give him a salary for spitting on the floor; and this expression,
+which came after a good many others, at last penetrated his
+obdurate wits.&nbsp; He rose at once, and said if that was the
+way he was going to be spoke to, he reckoned he would quit.&nbsp;
+And, no one interposing, he departed.</p>
+<p>So far, so good.&nbsp; But we had no firewood.&nbsp; The next
+afternoon, I strolled down to Rufe&rsquo;s and consulted him on
+the subject.&nbsp; It was a very droll interview, in the large,
+bare north room of the Silverado Hotel, Mrs. Hanson&rsquo;s
+patchwork on a frame, and Rufe, and his wife, and I, and the oaf
+himself, all more or less embarrassed.&nbsp; Rufe announced there
+was nobody in the neighbourhood but Irvine who could do a
+day&rsquo;s work for anybody.&nbsp; Irvine, thereupon, refused to
+have any more to do with my service; he &ldquo;wouldn&rsquo;t
+work no more for a man as had spoke to him&rsquo;s I had
+done.&rdquo;&nbsp; I found myself on the point of the last
+humiliation&mdash;driven to beseech the creature whom I had just
+dismissed with insult: but I took the high hand in despair, said
+there must be no talk of Irvine coming back unless matters were
+to be differently managed; that I would rather chop firewood for
+myself than be fooled; and, in short, the Hansons being eager for
+the lad&rsquo;s hire, I so imposed upon them with merely affected
+resolution, that they ended by begging me to re-employ him again,
+on a solemn promise that he should be more industrious.&nbsp; The
+promise, I am bound to say, was kept.&nbsp; We soon had a fine
+pile of firewood at our door; and if Caliban gave me the cold
+shoulder and spared me his conversation, I thought none the worse
+of him for that, nor did I find my days much longer for the
+deprivation.</p>
+<p>The leading spirit of the family was, I am inclined to fancy,
+Mrs. Hanson.&nbsp; Her social brilliancy somewhat dazzled the
+others, and she had more of the small change of sense.&nbsp; It
+was she who faced Kelmar, for instance; and perhaps, if she had
+been alone, Kelmar would have had no rule within her doors.&nbsp;
+Rufe, to be sure, had a fine, sober, open-air attitude of mind,
+seeing the world without exaggeration&mdash;perhaps, we may even
+say, without enough; for he lacked, along with the others, that
+commercial idealism which puts so high a value on time and
+money.&nbsp; Sanity itself is a kind of convention.&nbsp; Perhaps
+Rufe was wrong; but, looking on life plainly, he was unable to
+perceive that croquet or poker were in any way less important
+than, for instance, mending his waggon.&nbsp; Even his own
+profession, hunting, was dear to him mainly as a sort of play;
+even that he would have neglected, had it not appealed to his
+imagination.&nbsp; His hunting-suit, for instance, had cost I
+should be afraid to say how many bucks&mdash;the currency in
+which he paid his way: it was all befringed, after the Indian
+fashion, and it was dear to his heart.&nbsp; The pictorial side
+of his daily business was never forgotten.&nbsp; He was even
+anxious to stand for his picture in those buckskin hunting
+clothes; and I remember how he once warmed almost into
+enthusiasm, his dark blue eyes growing perceptibly larger, as he
+planned the composition in which he should appear, &ldquo;with
+the horns of some real big bucks, and dogs, and a camp on a
+crick&rdquo; (creek, stream).</p>
+<p>There was no trace in Irvine of this woodland poetry.&nbsp; He
+did not care for hunting, nor yet for buckskin suits.&nbsp; He
+had never observed scenery.&nbsp; The world, as it appeared to
+him, was almost obliterated by his own great grinning figure in
+the foreground: Caliban Malvolio.&nbsp; And it seems to me as if,
+in the persons of these brothers-in-law, we had the two sides of
+rusticity fairly well represented: the hunter living really in
+nature; the clodhopper living merely out of society: the one bent
+up in every corporal agent to capacity in one pursuit, doing at
+least one thing keenly and thoughtfully, and thoroughly alive to
+all that touches it; the other in the inert and bestial state,
+walking in a faint dream, and taking so dim an impression of the
+myriad sides of life that he is truly conscious of nothing but
+himself.&nbsp; It is only in the fastnesses of nature, forests,
+mountains, and the back of man&rsquo;s beyond, that a creature
+endowed with five senses can grow up into the perfection of this
+crass and earthy vanity.&nbsp; In towns or the busier country
+sides, he is roughly reminded of other men&rsquo;s existence; and
+if he learns no more, he learns at least to fear contempt.&nbsp;
+But Irvine had come scatheless through life, conscious only of
+himself, of his great strength and intelligence; and in the
+silence of the universe, to which he did not listen, dwelling
+with delight on the sound of his own thoughts.</p>
+<h2><a name="page153"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 153</span>THE
+SEA FOGS</h2>
+<p>A <span class="smcap">change</span> in the colour of the light
+usually called me in the morning.&nbsp; By a certain hour, the
+long, vertical chinks in our western gable, where the boards had
+shrunk and separated, flashed suddenly into my eyes as stripes of
+dazzling blue, at once so dark and splendid that I used to marvel
+how the qualities could be combined.&nbsp; At an earlier hour,
+the heavens in that quarter were still quietly coloured, but the
+shoulder of the mountain which shuts in the canyon already glowed
+with sunlight in a wonderful compound of gold and rose and green;
+and this too would kindle, although more mildly and with rainbow
+tints, the fissures of our crazy gable.&nbsp; If I were sleeping
+heavily, it was the bold blue that struck me awake; if more
+lightly, then I would come to myself in that earlier and fairier
+fight.</p>
+<p>One Sunday morning, about five, the first brightness called
+me.&nbsp; I rose and turned to the east, not for my devotions,
+but for air.&nbsp; The night had been very still.&nbsp; The
+little private gale that blew every evening in our canyon, for
+ten minutes or perhaps a quarter of an hour, had swiftly blown
+itself out; in the hours that followed not a sigh of wind had
+shaken the treetops; and our barrack, for all its breaches, was
+less fresh that morning than of wont.&nbsp; But I had no sooner
+reached the window than I forgot all else in the sight that met
+my eyes, and I made but two bounds into my clothes, and down the
+crazy plank to the platform.</p>
+<p>The sun was still concealed below the opposite hilltops,
+though it was shining already, not twenty feet above my head, on
+our own mountain slope.&nbsp; But the scene, beyond a few near
+features, was entirely changed.&nbsp; Napa valley was gone; gone
+were all the lower slopes and woody foothills of the range; and
+in their place, not a thousand feet below me, rolled a great
+level ocean.&nbsp; It was as though I had gone to bed the night
+before, safe in a nook of inland mountains, and had awakened in a
+bay upon the coast.&nbsp; I had seen these inundations from
+below; at Calistoga I had risen and gone abroad in the early
+morning, coughing and sneezing, under fathoms on fathoms of gray
+sea vapour, like a cloudy sky&mdash;a dull sight for the artist,
+and a painful experience for the invalid.&nbsp; But to sit aloft
+one&rsquo;s self in the pure air and under the unclouded dome of
+heaven, and thus look down on the submergence of the valley, was
+strangely different and even delightful to the eyes.&nbsp; Far
+away were hilltops like little islands.&nbsp; Nearer, a smoky
+surf beat about the foot of precipices and poured into all the
+coves of these rough mountains.&nbsp; The colour of that fog
+ocean was a thing never to be forgotten.&nbsp; For an instant,
+among the Hebrides and just about sundown, I have seen something
+like it on the sea itself.&nbsp; But the white was not so
+opaline; nor was there, what surprisingly increased the effect,
+that breathless, crystal stillness over all.&nbsp; Even in its
+gentlest moods the salt sea travails, moaning among the weeds or
+lisping on the sand; but that vast fog ocean lay in a trance of
+silence, nor did the sweet air of the morning tremble with a
+sound.</p>
+<p>As I continued to sit upon the dump, I began to observe that
+this sea was not so level as at first sight it appeared to
+be.&nbsp; Away in the extreme south, a little hill of fog arose
+against the sky above the general surface, and as it had already
+caught the sun, it shone on the horizon like the topsails of some
+giant ship.&nbsp; There were huge waves, stationary, as it
+seemed, like waves in a frozen sea; and yet, as I looked again, I
+was not sure but they were moving after all, with a slow and
+august advance.&nbsp; And while I was yet doubting, a promontory
+of the some four or five miles away, conspicuous by a bouquet of
+tall pines, was in a single instant overtaken and swallowed
+up.&nbsp; It reappeared in a little, with its pines, but this
+time as an islet, and only to be swallowed up once more and then
+for good.&nbsp; This set me looking nearer, and I saw that in
+every cove along the line of mountains the fog was being piled in
+higher and higher, as though by some wind that was inaudible to
+me.&nbsp; I could trace its progress, one pine tree first growing
+hazy and then disappearing after another; although sometimes
+there was none of this fore-running haze, but the whole opaque
+white ocean gave a start and swallowed a piece of mountain at a
+gulp.&nbsp; It was to flee these poisonous fogs that I had left
+the seaboard, and climbed so high among the mountains.&nbsp; And
+now, behold, here came the fog to besiege me in my chosen
+altitudes, and yet came so beautifully that my first thought was
+of welcome.</p>
+<p>The sun had now gotten much higher, and through all the gaps
+of the hills it cast long bars of gold across that white
+ocean.&nbsp; An eagle, or some other very great bird of the
+mountain, came wheeling over the nearer pine-tops, and hung,
+poised and something sideways, as if to look abroad on that
+unwonted desolation, spying, perhaps with terror, for the eyries
+of her comrades.&nbsp; Then, with a long cry, she disappeared
+again towards Lake County and the clearer air.&nbsp; At length it
+seemed to me as if the flood were beginning to subside.&nbsp; The
+old landmarks, by whose disappearance I had measured its advance,
+here a crag, there a brave pine tree, now began, in the inverse
+order, to make their reappearance into daylight.&nbsp; I judged
+all danger of the fog was over.&nbsp; This was not Noah&rsquo;s
+flood; it was but a morning spring, and would now drift out
+seaward whence it came.&nbsp; So, mightily relieved, and a good
+deal exhilarated by the sight, I went into the house to light the
+fire.</p>
+<p>I suppose it was nearly seven when I once more mounted the
+platform to look abroad.&nbsp; The fog ocean had swelled up
+enormously since last I saw it; and a few hundred feet below me,
+in the deep gap where the Toll House stands and the road runs
+through into Lake County, it had already topped the slope, and
+was pouring over and down the other side like driving
+smoke.&nbsp; The wind had climbed along with it; and though I was
+still in calm air, I could see the trees tossing below me, and
+their long, strident sighing mounted to me where I stood.</p>
+<p>Half an hour later, the fog had surmounted all the ridge on
+the opposite side of the gap, though a shoulder of the mountain
+still warded it out of our canyon.&nbsp; Napa valley and its
+bounding hills were now utterly blotted out.&nbsp; The fog, sunny
+white in the sunshine, was pouring over into Lake County in a
+huge, ragged cataract, tossing treetops appearing and
+disappearing in the spray.&nbsp; The air struck with a little
+chill, and set me coughing.&nbsp; It smelt strong of the fog,
+like the smell of a washing-house, but with a shrewd tang of the
+sea salt.</p>
+<p>Had it not been for two things&mdash;the sheltering spur which
+answered as a dyke, and the great valley on the other side which
+rapidly engulfed whatever mounted&mdash;our own little platform
+in the canyon must have been already buried a hundred feet in
+salt and poisonous air.&nbsp; As it was, the interest of the
+scene entirely occupied our minds.&nbsp; We were set just out of
+the wind, and but just above the fog; we could listen to the
+voice of the one as to music on the stage; we could plunge our
+eyes down into the other, as into some flowing stream from over
+the parapet of a bridge; thus we looked on upon a strange,
+impetuous, silent, shifting exhibition of the powers of nature,
+and saw the familiar landscape changing from moment to moment
+like figures in a dream.</p>
+<p>The imagination loves to trifle with what is not.&nbsp; Had
+this been indeed the deluge, I should have felt more strongly,
+but the emotion would have been similar in kind.&nbsp; I played
+with the idea, as the child flees in delighted terror from the
+creations of his fancy.&nbsp; The look of the thing helped
+me.&nbsp; And when at last I began to flee up the mountain, it
+was indeed partly to escape from the raw air that kept me
+coughing, but it was also part in play.</p>
+<p>As I ascended the mountain-side, I came once more to overlook
+the upper surface of the fog; but it wore a different appearance
+from what I had beheld at daybreak.&nbsp; For, first, the sun now
+fell on it from high overhead, and its surface shone and
+undulated like a great nor&rsquo;land moor country, sheeted with
+untrodden morning snow.&nbsp; And next the new level must have
+been a thousand or fifteen hundred feet higher than the old, so
+that only five or six points of all the broken country below me,
+still stood out.&nbsp; Napa valley was now one with Sonoma on the
+west.&nbsp; On the hither side, only a thin scattered fringe of
+bluffs was unsubmerged; and through all the gaps the fog was
+pouring over, like an ocean, into the blue clear sunny country on
+the east.&nbsp; There it was soon lost; for it fell instantly
+into the bottom of the valleys, following the water-shed; and the
+hilltops in that quarter were still clear cut upon the eastern
+sky.</p>
+<p>Through the Toll House gap and over the near ridges on the
+other side, the deluge was immense.&nbsp; A spray of thin vapour
+was thrown high above it, rising and falling, and blown into
+fantastic shapes.&nbsp; The speed of its course was like a
+mountain torrent.&nbsp; Here and there a few treetops were
+discovered and then whelmed again; and for one second, the bough
+of a dead pine beckoned out of the spray like the arm of a
+drowning man.&nbsp; But still the imagination was dissatisfied,
+still the ear waited for something more.&nbsp; Had this indeed
+been water (as it seemed so, to the eye), with what a plunge of
+reverberating thunder would it have rolled upon its course,
+disembowelling mountains and deracinating pines!&nbsp; And yet
+water it was, and sea-water at that&mdash;true Pacific billows,
+only somewhat rarefied, rolling in mid air among the
+hilltops.</p>
+<p>I climbed still higher, among the red rattling gravel and
+dwarf underwood of Mount Saint Helena, until I could look right
+down upon Silverado, and admire the favoured nook in which it
+lay.&nbsp; The sunny plain of fog was several hundred feet
+higher; behind the protecting spur a gigantic accumulation of
+cottony vapour threatened, with every second, to blow over and
+submerge our homestead; but the vortex setting past the Toll
+House was too strong; and there lay our little platform, in the
+arms of the deluge, but still enjoying its unbroken
+sunshine.&nbsp; About eleven, however, thin spray came flying
+over the friendly buttress, and I began to think the fog had
+hunted out its Jonah after all.&nbsp; But it was the last
+effort.&nbsp; The wind veered while we were at dinner, and began
+to blow squally from the mountain summit; and by half-past one,
+all that world of sea-fogs was utterly routed and flying here and
+there into the south in little rags of cloud.&nbsp; And instead
+of a lone sea-beach, we found ourselves once more inhabiting a
+high mountainside, with the clear green country far below us, and
+the light smoke of Calistoga blowing in the air.</p>
+<p>This was the great Russian campaign for that season.&nbsp; Now
+and then, in the early morning, a little white lakelet of fog
+would be seen far down in Napa Valley; but the heights were not
+again assailed, nor was the surrounding world again shut off from
+Silverado.</p>
+<h2><a name="page171"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 171</span>THE
+TOLL HOUSE</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> Toll House, standing alone by
+the wayside under nodding pines, with its streamlet and
+water-tank; its backwoods, toll-bar, and well trodden croquet
+ground; the ostler standing by the stable door, chewing a straw;
+a glimpse of the Chinese cook in the back parts; and Mr. Hoddy in
+the bar, gravely alert and serviceable, and equally anxious to
+lend or borrow books;&mdash;dozed all day in the dusty sunshine,
+more than half asleep.&nbsp; There were no neighbours, except the
+Hansons up the hill.&nbsp; The traffic on the road was
+infinitesimal; only, at rare intervals, a couple in a waggon, or
+a dusty farmer on a springboard, toiling over &ldquo;the
+grade&rdquo; to that metropolitan hamlet, Calistoga; and, at the
+fixed hours, the passage of the stages.</p>
+<p>The nearest building was the school-house, down the road; and
+the school-ma&rsquo;am boarded at the Toll House, walking thence
+in the morning to the little brown shanty, where she taught the
+young ones of the district, and returning thither pretty weary in
+the afternoon.&nbsp; She had chosen this outlying situation, I
+understood, for her health.&nbsp; Mr. Corwin was consumptive; so
+was Rufe; so was Mr. Jennings, the engineer.&nbsp; In short, the
+place was a kind of small Davos: consumptive folk consorting on a
+hilltop in the most unbroken idleness.&nbsp; Jennings never did
+anything that I could see, except now and then to fish, and
+generally to sit about in the bar and the verandah, waiting for
+something to happen.&nbsp; Corwin and Rufe did as little as
+possible; and if the school-ma&rsquo;am, poor lady, had to work
+pretty hard all morning, she subsided when it was over into much
+the same dazed beatitude as all the rest.</p>
+<p>Her special corner was the parlour&mdash;a very genteel room,
+with Bible prints, a crayon portrait of Mrs. Corwin in the height
+of fashion, a few years ago, another of her son (Mr. Corwin was
+not represented), a mirror, and a selection of dried
+grasses.&nbsp; A large book was laid religiously on the
+table&mdash;&ldquo;From Palace to Hovel,&rdquo; I believe, its
+name&mdash;full of the raciest experiences in England.&nbsp; The
+author had mingled freely with all classes, the nobility
+particularly meeting him with open arms; and I must say that
+traveller had ill requited his reception.&nbsp; His book, in
+short, was a capital instance of the Penny Messalina school of
+literature; and there arose from it, in that cool parlour, in
+that silent, wayside, mountain inn, a rank atmosphere of gold and
+blood and &ldquo;Jenkins,&rdquo; and the &ldquo;Mysteries of
+London,&rdquo; and sickening, inverted snobbery, fit to knock you
+down.&nbsp; The mention of this book reminds me of another and
+far racier picture of our island life.&nbsp; The latter parts of
+<i>Rocambole</i> are surely too sparingly consulted in the
+country which they celebrate.&nbsp; No man&rsquo;s education can
+be said to be complete, nor can he pronounce the world yet
+emptied of enjoyment, till he has made the acquaintance of
+&ldquo;the Reverend Patterson, director of the Evangelical
+Society.&rdquo;&nbsp; To follow the evolutions of that reverend
+gentleman, who goes through scenes in which even Mr. Duffield
+would hesitate to place a bishop, is to rise to new ideas.&nbsp;
+But, alas! there was no Patterson about the Toll House.&nbsp;
+Only, alongside of &ldquo;From Palace to Hovel,&rdquo; a sixpenny
+&ldquo;Ouida&rdquo; figured.&nbsp; So literature, you see, was
+not unrepresented.</p>
+<p>The school-ma&rsquo;am had friends to stay with her, other
+school-ma&rsquo;ams enjoying their holidays, quite a bevy of
+damsels.&nbsp; They seemed never to go out, or not beyond the
+verandah, but sat close in the little parlour, quietly talking or
+listening to the wind among the trees.&nbsp; Sleep dwelt in the
+Toll House, like a fixture: summer sleep, shallow, soft, and
+dreamless.&nbsp; A cuckoo-clock, a great rarity in such a place,
+hooted at intervals about the echoing house; and Mr. Jenning
+would open his eyes for a moment in the bar, and turn the leaf of
+a newspaper, and the resting school-ma&rsquo;ams in the parlour
+would be recalled to the consciousness of their inaction.&nbsp;
+Busy Mrs. Corwin and her busy Chinaman might be heard indeed, in
+the penetralia, pounding dough or rattling dishes; or perhaps
+Rufe had called up some of the sleepers for a game of croquet,
+and the hollow strokes of the mallet sounded far away among the
+woods: but with these exceptions, it was sleep and sunshine and
+dust, and the wind in the pine trees, all day long.</p>
+<p>A little before stage time, that castle of indolence
+awoke.&nbsp; The ostler threw his straw away and set to his
+preparations.&nbsp; Mr. Jennings rubbed his eyes; happy Mr.
+Jennings, the something he had been waiting for all day about to
+happen at last!&nbsp; The boarders gathered in the verandah,
+silently giving ear, and gazing down the road with shaded
+eyes.&nbsp; And as yet there was no sign for the senses, not a
+sound, not a tremor of the mountain road.&nbsp; The birds, to
+whom the secret of the hooting cuckoo is unknown, must have set
+down to instinct this premonitory bustle.</p>
+<p>And then the first of the two stages swooped upon the Toll
+House with a roar and in a cloud of dust; and the shock had not
+yet time to subside, before the second was abreast of it.&nbsp;
+Huge concerns they were, well-horsed and loaded, the men in their
+shirt-sleeves, the women swathed in veils, the long whip cracking
+like a pistol; and as they charged upon that slumbering hostelry,
+each shepherding a dust storm, the dead place blossomed into life
+and talk and clatter.&nbsp; This the Toll House?&mdash;with its
+city throng, its jostling shoulders, its infinity of instant
+business in the bar?&nbsp; The mind would not receive it!&nbsp;
+The heartfelt bustle of that hour is hardly credible; the thrill
+of the great shower of letters from the post-bag, the childish
+hope and interest with which one gazed in all these
+strangers&rsquo; eyes.&nbsp; They paused there but to pass: the
+blue-clad China-boy, the San Francisco magnate, the mystery in
+the dust coat, the secret memoirs in tweed, the ogling, well-shod
+lady with her troop of girls; they did but flash and go; they
+were hull-down for us behind life&rsquo;s ocean, and we but
+hailed their topsails on the line.&nbsp; Yet, out of our great
+solitude of four and twenty mountain hours, we thrilled to their
+momentary presence gauged and divined them, loved and hated; and
+stood light-headed in that storm of human electricity.&nbsp; Yes,
+like Piccadilly circus, this is also one of life&rsquo;s
+crossing-places.&nbsp; Here I beheld one man, already famous or
+infamous, a centre of pistol-shots: and another who, if not yet
+known to rumour, will fill a column of the Sunday paper when he
+comes to hang&mdash;a burly, thick-set, powerful Chinese
+desperado, six long bristles upon either lip; redolent of
+whiskey, playing cards, and pistols; swaggering in the bar with
+the lowest assumption of the lowest European manners; rapping out
+blackguard English oaths in his canorous oriental voice; and
+combining in one person the depravities of two races and two
+civilizations.&nbsp; For all his lust and vigour, he seemed to
+look cold upon me from the valley of the shadow of the
+gallows.&nbsp; He imagined a vain thing; and while he drained his
+cock-tail, Holbein&rsquo;s death was at his elbow.&nbsp; Once,
+too, I fell in talk with another of these flitting
+strangers&mdash;like the rest, in his shirt-sleeves and all
+begrimed with dust&mdash;and the next minute we were discussing
+Paris and London, theatres and wines.&nbsp; To him, journeying
+from one human place to another, this was a trifle; but to
+me!&nbsp; No, Mr. Lillie, I have not forgotten it.</p>
+<p>And presently the city-tide was at its flood and began to
+ebb.&nbsp; Life runs in Piccadilly Circus, say, from nine to one,
+and then, there also, ebbs into the small hours of the echoing
+policeman and the lamps and stars.&nbsp; But the Toll House is
+far up stream, and near its rural springs; the bubble of the tide
+but touches it.&nbsp; Before you had yet grasped your pleasure,
+the horses were put to, the loud whips volleyed, and the tide was
+gone.&nbsp; North and south had the two stages vanished, the
+towering dust subsided in the woods; but there was still an
+interval before the flush had fallen on your cheeks, before the
+ear became once more contented with the silence, or the seven
+sleepers of the Toll House dozed back to their accustomed
+corners.&nbsp; Yet a little, and the ostler would swing round the
+great barrier across the road; and in the golden evening, that
+dreamy inn begin to trim its lamps and spread the board for
+supper.</p>
+<p>As I recall the place&mdash;the green dell below; the spires
+of pine; the sun-warm, scented air; that gray, gabled inn, with
+its faint stirrings of life amid the slumber of the
+mountains&mdash;I slowly awake to a sense of admiration,
+gratitude, and almost love.&nbsp; A fine place, after all, for a
+wasted life to doze away in&mdash;the cuckoo clock hooting of its
+far home country; the croquet mallets, eloquent of English lawns;
+the stages daily bringing news of&mdash;the turbulent world away
+below there; and perhaps once in the summer, a salt fog pouring
+overhead with its tale of the Pacific.</p>
+<h2><a name="page185"></a><span class="pagenum">p. 185</span>A
+STARRY DRIVE</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">In</span> our rule at Silverado, there was
+a melancholy interregnum.&nbsp; The queen and the crown prince
+with one accord fell sick; and, as I was sick to begin with, our
+lone position on Mount Saint Helena was no longer tenable, and we
+had to hurry back to Calistoga and a cottage on the green.&nbsp;
+By that time we had begun to realize the difficulties of our
+position.&nbsp; We had found what an amount of labour it cost to
+support life in our red canyon; and it was the dearest desire of
+our hearts to get a China-boy to go along with us when we
+returned.&nbsp; We could have given him a whole house to himself,
+self-contained, as they say in the advertisements; and on the
+money question we were prepared to go far.&nbsp; Kong Sam Kee,
+the Calistoga washerman, was entrusted with the affair; and from
+day to day it languished on, with protestations on our part and
+mellifluous excuses on the part of Kong Sam Kee.</p>
+<p>At length, about half-past eight of our last evening, with the
+waggon ready harnessed to convey us up the grade, the washerman,
+with a somewhat sneering air, produced the boy.&nbsp; He was a
+handsome, gentlemanly lad, attired in rich dark blue, and shod
+with snowy white; but, alas! he had heard rumours of
+Silverado.&nbsp; He know it for a lone place on the
+mountain-side, with no friendly wash-house near by, where he
+might smoke a pipe of opium o&rsquo; nights with other
+China-boys, and lose his little earnings at the game of tan; and
+he first backed out for more money; and then, when that demand
+was satisfied, refused to come point-blank.&nbsp; He was wedded
+to his wash-houses; he had no taste for the rural life; and we
+must go to our mountain servantless.&nbsp; It must have been near
+half an hour before we reached that conclusion, standing in the
+midst of Calistoga high street under the stars, and the China-boy
+and Kong Sam Kee singing their pigeon English in the sweetest
+voices and with the most musical inflections.</p>
+<p>We were not, however, to return alone; for we brought with us
+Joe Strong, the painter, a most good-natured comrade and a
+capital hand at an omelette.&nbsp; I do not know in which
+capacity he was most valued&mdash;as a cook or a companion; and
+he did excellently well in both.</p>
+<p>The Kong Sam Kee negotiation had delayed us unduly; it must
+have been half-past nine before we left Calistoga, and night came
+fully ere we struck the bottom of the grade.&nbsp; I have never
+seen such a night.&nbsp; It seemed to throw calumny in the teeth
+of all the painters that ever dabbled in starlight.&nbsp; The sky
+itself was of a ruddy, powerful, nameless, changing colour, dark
+and glossy like a serpent&rsquo;s back.&nbsp; The stars, by
+innumerable millions, stuck boldly forth like lamps.&nbsp; The
+milky way was bright, like a moonlit cloud; half heaven seemed
+milky way.&nbsp; The greater luminaries shone each more clearly
+than a winter&rsquo;s moon.&nbsp; Their light was dyed in every
+sort of colour&mdash;red, like fire; blue, like steel; green,
+like the tracks of sunset; and so sharply did each stand forth in
+its own lustre that there was no appearance of that flat,
+star-spangled arch we know so well in pictures, but all the
+hollow of heaven was one chaos of contesting luminaries&mdash;a
+hurry-burly of stars.&nbsp; Against this the hills and rugged
+treetops stood out redly dark.</p>
+<p>As we continued to advance, the lesser lights and milky ways
+first grew pale, and then vanished; the countless hosts of heaven
+dwindled in number by successive millions; those that still shone
+had tempered their exceeding brightness and fallen back into
+their customary wistful distance; and the sky declined from its
+first bewildering splendour into the appearance of a common
+night.&nbsp; Slowly this change proceeded, and still there was no
+sign of any cause.&nbsp; Then a whiteness like mist was thrown
+over the spurs of the mountain.&nbsp; Yet a while, and, as we
+turned a corner, a great leap of silver light and net of forest
+shadows fell across the road and upon our wondering waggonful;
+and, swimming low among the trees, we beheld a strange,
+misshapen, waning moon, half-tilted on her back.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Where are ye when the moon appears?&rdquo; so the old
+poet sang, half-taunting, to the stars, bent upon a courtly
+purpose.</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;As the sunlight round the dim earth&rsquo;s
+midnight tower of shadow pours,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Streaming past the dim, wide portals,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Viewless to the eyes of mortals,<br />
+Till it floods the moon&rsquo;s pale islet or the morning&rsquo;s
+golden shores.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>So sings Mr. Trowbridge, with a noble inspiration.&nbsp; And
+so had the sunlight flooded that pale islet of the moon, and her
+lit face put out, one after another, that galaxy of stars.&nbsp;
+The wonder of the drive was over; but, by some nice conjunction
+of clearness in the air and fit shadow in the valley where we
+travelled, we had seen for a little while that brave display of
+the midnight heavens.&nbsp; It was gone, but it had been; nor
+shall I ever again behold the stars with the same mind.&nbsp; He
+who has seen the sea commoved with a great hurricane, thinks of
+it very differently from him who has seen it only in a
+calm.&nbsp; And the difference between a calm and a hurricane is
+not greatly more striking than that between the ordinary face of
+night and the splendour that shone upon us in that drive.&nbsp;
+Two in our waggon knew night as she shines upon the tropics, but
+even that bore no comparison.&nbsp; The nameless colour of the
+sky, the hues of the star-fire, and the incredible projection of
+the stars themselves, starting from their orbits, so that the eye
+seemed to distinguish their positions in the hollow of
+space&mdash;these were things that we had never seen before and
+shall never see again.</p>
+<p>Meanwhile, in this altered night, we proceeded on our way
+among the scents and silence of the forest, reached the top of
+the grade, wound up by Hanson&rsquo;s, and came at last to a
+stand under the flying gargoyle of the chute.&nbsp; Sam, who had
+been lying back, fast asleep, with the moon on his face, got
+down, with the remark that it was pleasant &ldquo;to be
+home.&rdquo;&nbsp; The waggon turned and drove away, the noise
+gently dying in the woods, and we clambered up the rough path,
+Caliban&rsquo;s great feat of engineering, and came home to
+Silverado.</p>
+<p>The moon shone in at the eastern doors and windows, and over
+the lumber on the platform.&nbsp; The one tall pine beside the
+ledge was steeped in silver.&nbsp; Away up the canyon, a wild cat
+welcomed us with three discordant squalls.&nbsp; But once we had
+lit a candle, and began to review our improvements, homely in
+either sense, and count our stores, it was wonderful what a
+feeling of possession and permanence grow up in the hearts of the
+lords of Silverado.&nbsp; A bed had still to be made up for
+Strong, and the morning&rsquo;s water to be fetched, with
+clinking pail; and as we set about these household duties, and
+showed off our wealth and conveniences before the stranger, and
+had a glass of wine, I think, in honour of our return, and
+trooped at length one after another up the flying bridge of
+plank, and lay down to sleep in our shattered, moon-pierced
+barrack, we were among the happiest sovereigns in the world, and
+certainly ruled over the most contented people.&nbsp; Yet, in our
+absence, the palace had been sacked.&nbsp; Wild cats, so the
+Hansons said, had broken in and carried off a side of bacon, a
+hatchet, and two knives.</p>
+<h2><a name="page197"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+197</span>EPISODES IN THE STORY OF A MINE</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">No</span> one could live at Silverado and
+not be curious about the story of the mine.&nbsp; We were
+surrounded by so many evidences of expense and toil, we lived so
+entirely in the wreck of that great enterprise, like mites in the
+ruins of a cheese, that the idea of the old din and bustle
+haunted our repose.&nbsp; Our own house, the forge, the dump, the
+chutes, the rails, the windlass, the mass of broken plant; the
+two tunnels, one far below in the green dell, the other on the
+platform where we kept our wine; the deep shaft, with the
+sun-glints and the water-drops; above all, the ledge, that great
+gaping slice out of the mountain shoulder, propped apart by
+wooden wedges, on whose immediate margin, high above our heads,
+the one tall pine precariously nodded&mdash;these stood for its
+greatness; while, the dog-hutch, boot-jacks, old boots, old
+tavern bills, and the very beds that we inherited from bygone
+miners, put in human touches and realized for us the story of the
+past.</p>
+<p>I have sat on an old sleeper, under the thick madronas near
+the forge, with just a look over the dump on the green world
+below, and seen the sun lying broad among the wreck, and heard
+the silence broken only by the tinkling water in the shaft, or a
+stir of the royal family about the battered palace, and my mind
+has gone back to the epoch of the Stanleys and the Chapmans, with
+a grand <i>tutti</i> of pick and drill, hammer and anvil, echoing
+about the canyon; the assayer hard at it in our dining-room; the
+carts below on the road, and their cargo of red mineral bounding
+and thundering down the iron chute.&nbsp; And now all
+gone&mdash;all fallen away into this sunny silence and desertion:
+a family of squatters dining in the assayer&rsquo;s office,
+making their beds in the big sleeping room erstwhile so crowded,
+keeping their wine in the tunnel that once rang with picks.</p>
+<p>But Silverado itself, although now fallen in its turn into
+decay, was once but a mushroom, and had succeeded to other mines
+and other flitting cities.&nbsp; Twenty years ago, away down the
+glen on the Lake County side there was a place, Jonestown by
+name, with two thousand inhabitants dwelling under canvas, and
+one roofed house for the sale of whiskey.&nbsp; Round on the
+western side of Mount Saint Helena, there was at the same date, a
+second large encampment, its name, if it ever had one, lost for
+me.&nbsp; Both of these have perished, leaving not a stick and
+scarce a memory behind them.&nbsp; Tide after tide of hopeful
+miners have thus flowed and ebbed about the mountain, coming and
+going, now by lone prospectors, now with a rush.&nbsp; Last, in
+order of time came Silverado, reared the big mill, in the valley,
+founded the town which is now represented, monumentally, by
+Hanson&rsquo;s, pierced all these slaps and shafts and tunnels,
+and in turn declined and died away.</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;Our noisy years seem moments in the wake<br
+/>
+Of the eternal silence.&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>As to the success of Silverado in its time of being, two
+reports were current.&nbsp; According to the first, six hundred
+thousand dollars were taken out of that great upright seam, that
+still hung open above us on crazy wedges.&nbsp; Then the ledge
+pinched out, and there followed, in quest of the remainder, a
+great drifting and tunnelling in all directions, and a great
+consequent effusion of dollars, until, all parties being sick of
+the expense, the mine was deserted, and the town decamped.&nbsp;
+According to the second version, told me with much secrecy of
+manner, the whole affair, mine, mill, and town, were parts of one
+majestic swindle.&nbsp; There had never come any silver out of
+any portion of the mine; there was no silver to come.&nbsp; At
+midnight trains of packhorses might have been observed winding by
+devious tracks about the shoulder of the mountain.&nbsp; They
+came from far away, from Amador or Placer, laden with silver in
+&ldquo;old cigar boxes.&rdquo;&nbsp; They discharged their load
+at Silverado, in the hour of sleep; and before the morning they
+were gone again with their mysterious drivers to their unknown
+source.&nbsp; In this way, twenty thousand pounds&rsquo; worth of
+silver was smuggled in under cover of night, in these old cigar
+boxes; mixed with Silverado mineral; carted down to the mill;
+crushed, amalgated, and refined, and despatched to the city as
+the proper product of the mine.&nbsp; Stock-jobbing, if it can
+cover such expenses, must be a profitable business in San
+Francisco.</p>
+<p>I give these two versions as I got them.&nbsp; But I place
+little reliance on either, my belief in history having been
+greatly shaken.&nbsp; For it chanced that I had come to dwell in
+Silverado at a critical hour; great events in its history were
+about to happen&mdash;did happen, as I am led to believe; nay,
+and it will be seen that I played a part in that revolution
+myself.&nbsp; And yet from first to last I never had a glimmer of
+an idea what was going on; and even now, after full reflection,
+profess myself at sea.&nbsp; That there was some obscure intrigue
+of the cigar-box order, and that I, in the character of a wooden
+puppet, set pen to paper in the interest of somebody, so much,
+and no more, is certain.</p>
+<p>Silverado, then under my immediate sway, belonged to one whom
+I will call a Mr. Ronalds.&nbsp; I only knew him through the
+extraordinarily distorting medium of local gossip, now as a
+momentous jobber; now as a dupe to point an adage; and again, and
+much more probably, as an ordinary Christian gentleman like you
+or me, who had opened a mine and worked it for a while with
+better and worse fortune.&nbsp; So, through a defective
+window-pane, you may see the passer-by shoot up into a
+hunchbacked giant or dwindle into a potbellied dwarf.</p>
+<p>To Ronalds, at least, the mine belonged; but the notice by
+which he held it would ran out upon the 30th of June&mdash;or
+rather, as I suppose, it had run out already, and the month of
+grace would expire upon that day, after which any American
+citizen might post a notice of his own, and make Silverado
+his.&nbsp; This, with a sort of quiet slyness, Rufe told me at an
+early period of our acquaintance.&nbsp; There was no silver, of
+course; the mine &ldquo;wasn&rsquo;t worth nothing, Mr.
+Stevens,&rdquo; but there was a deal of old iron and wood around,
+and to gain possession of this old wood and iron, and get a right
+to the water, Rufe proposed, if I had no objections, to
+&ldquo;jump the claim.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>Of course, I had no objection.&nbsp; But I was filled with
+wonder.&nbsp; If all he wanted was the wood and iron, what, in
+the name of fortune, was to prevent him taking them?&nbsp;
+&ldquo;His right there was none to dispute.&rdquo;&nbsp; He might
+lay hands on all to-morrow, as the wild cats had laid hands upon
+our knives and hatchet.&nbsp; Besides, was this mass of heavy
+mining plant worth transportation?&nbsp; If it was, why had not
+the rightful owners carted it away?&nbsp; If it was, would they
+not preserve their title to these movables, even after they had
+lost their title to the mine?&nbsp; And if it were not, what the
+better was Rufe?&nbsp; Nothing would grow at Silverado; there was
+even no wood to cut; beyond a sense of property, there was
+nothing to be gained.&nbsp; Lastly, was it at all credible that
+Ronalds would forget what Rufe remembered?&nbsp; The days of
+grace were not yet over: any fine morning he might appear, paper
+in hand, and enter for another year on his inheritance.&nbsp;
+However, it was none of my business; all seemed legal; Rufe or
+Ronalds, all was one to me.</p>
+<p>On the morning of the 27th, Mrs. Hanson appeared with the milk
+as usual, in her sun-bonnet.&nbsp; The time would be out on
+Tuesday, she reminded us, and bade me be in readiness to play my
+part, though I had no idea what it was to be.&nbsp; And suppose
+Ronalds came? we asked.&nbsp; She received the idea with
+derision, laughing aloud with all her fine teeth.&nbsp; He could
+not find the mine to save his life, it appeared, without Rufe to
+guide him.&nbsp; Last year, when he came, they heard him
+&ldquo;up and down the road a hollerin&rsquo; and a raisin&rsquo;
+Cain.&rdquo;&nbsp; And at last he had to come to the Hansons in
+despair, and bid Rufe, &ldquo;Jump into your pants and shoes, and
+show me where this old mine is, anyway!&rdquo;&nbsp; Seeing that
+Ronalds had laid out so much money in the spot, and that a beaten
+road led right up to the bottom of the clump, I thought this a
+remarkable example.&nbsp; The sense of locality must be
+singularly in abeyance in the case of Ronalds.</p>
+<p>That same evening, supper comfortably over, Joe Strong busy at
+work on a drawing of the dump and the opposite hills, we were all
+out on the platform together, sitting there, under the tented
+heavens, with the same sense of privacy as if we had been cabined
+in a parlour, when the sound of brisk footsteps came mounting up
+the path.&nbsp; We pricked our ears at this, for the tread seemed
+lighter and firmer than was usual with our country
+neighbours.&nbsp; And presently, sure enough, two town gentlemen,
+with cigars and kid gloves, came debauching past the house.&nbsp;
+They looked in that place like a blasphemy.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Good evening,&rdquo; they said.&nbsp; For none of us
+had stirred; we all sat stiff with wonder.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Good evening,&rdquo; I returned; and then, to put them
+at their ease, &ldquo;A stiff climb,&rdquo; I added.</p>
+<p>&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; replied the leader; &ldquo;but we have to
+thank you for this path.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>I did not like the man&rsquo;s tone.&nbsp; None of us liked
+it.&nbsp; He did not seem embarrassed by the meeting, but threw
+us his remarks like favours, and strode magisterially by us
+towards the shaft and tunnel.</p>
+<p>Presently we heard his voice raised to his companion.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;We drifted every sort of way, but couldn&rsquo;t strike
+the ledge.&rdquo;&nbsp; Then again: &ldquo;It pinched out
+here.&rdquo;&nbsp; And once more: &ldquo;Every minor that ever
+worked upon it says there&rsquo;s bound to be a ledge
+somewhere.&rdquo;</p>
+<p>These were the snatches of his talk that reached us, and they
+had a damning significance.&nbsp; We, the lords of Silverado, had
+come face to face with our superior.&nbsp; It is the worst of all
+quaint and of all cheap ways of life that they bring us at last
+to the pinch of some humiliation.&nbsp; I liked well enough to be
+a squatter when there was none but Hanson by; before Ronalds, I
+will own, I somewhat quailed.&nbsp; I hastened to do him fealty,
+said I gathered he was the Squattee, and apologized.&nbsp; He
+threatened me with ejection, in a manner grimly
+pleasant&mdash;more pleasant to him, I fancy, than to me; and
+then he passed off into praises of the former state of
+Silverado.&nbsp; &ldquo;It was the busiest little mining town you
+ever saw:&rdquo; a population of between a thousand and fifteen
+hundred souls, the engine in full blast, the mill newly erected;
+nothing going but champagne, and hope the order of the day.&nbsp;
+Ninety thousand dollars came out; a hundred and forty thousand
+were put in, making a net loss of fifty thousand.&nbsp; The last
+days, I gathered, the days of John Stanley, were not so bright;
+the champagne had ceased to flow, the population was already
+moving elsewhere, and Silverado had begun to wither in the branch
+before it was cut at the root.&nbsp; The last shot that was fired
+knocked over the stove chimney, and made that hole in the roof of
+our barrack, through which the sun was wont to visit slug-a-beds
+towards afternoon.&nbsp; A noisy, last shot, to inaugurate the
+days of silence.</p>
+<p>Throughout this interview, my conscience was a good deal
+exercised; and I was moved to throw myself on my knees and own
+the intended treachery.&nbsp; But then I had Hanson to
+consider.&nbsp; I was in much the same position as Old Rowley,
+that royal humourist, whom &ldquo;the rogue had taken into his
+confidence.&rdquo;&nbsp; And again, here was Ronalds on the
+spot.&nbsp; He must know the day of the month as well as Hanson
+and I.&nbsp; If a broad hint were necessary, he had the broadest
+in the world.&nbsp; For a large board had been nailed by the
+crown prince on the very front of our house, between the door and
+window, painted in cinnabar&mdash;the pigment of the
+country&mdash;with doggrel rhymes and contumelious pictures, and
+announcing, in terms unnecessarily figurative, that the trick was
+already played, the claim already jumped, and Master Sam the
+legitimate successor of Mr. Ronalds.&nbsp; But no, nothing could
+save that man; <i>quem deus vult perdere</i>, <i>prius
+dementat</i>.&nbsp; As he came so he went, and left his rights
+depending.</p>
+<p>Late at night, by Silverado reckoning, and after we were all
+abed, Mrs. Hanson returned to give us the newest of her
+news.&nbsp; It was like a scene in a ship&rsquo;s steerage: all
+of us abed in our different tiers, the single candle struggling
+with the darkness, and this plump, handsome woman, seated on an
+upturned valise beside the bunks, talking and showing her fine
+teeth, and laughing till the rafters rang.&nbsp; Any ship, to be
+sure, with a hundredth part as many holes in it as our barrack,
+must long ago have gone to her last port.&nbsp; Up to that time I
+had always imagined Mrs. Hanson&rsquo;s loquacity to be mere
+incontinence, that she said what was uppermost for the pleasure
+of speaking, and laughed and laughed again as a kind of musical
+accompaniment.&nbsp; But I now found there was an art in it, I
+found it less communicative than silence itself.&nbsp; I wished
+to know why Ronalds had come; how he had found his way without
+Rufe; and why, being on the spot, he had not refreshed his
+title.&nbsp; She talked interminably on, but her replies were
+never answers.&nbsp; She fled under a cloud of words; and when I
+had made sure that she was purposely eluding me, I dropped the
+subject in my turn, and let her rattle where she would.</p>
+<p>She had come to tell us that, instead of waiting for Tuesday,
+the claim was to be jumped on the morrow.&nbsp; How?&nbsp; If the
+time were not out, it was impossible.&nbsp; Why?&nbsp; If Ronalds
+had come and gone, and done nothing, there was the less cause for
+hurry.&nbsp; But again I could reach no satisfaction.&nbsp; The
+claim was to be jumped next morning, that was all that she would
+condescend upon.</p>
+<p>And yet it was not jumped the next morning, nor yet the next,
+and a whole week had come and gone before we heard more of this
+exploit.&nbsp; That day week, however, a day of great heat,
+Hanson, with a little roll of paper in his hand, and the eternal
+pipe alight; Breedlove, his large, dull friend, to act, I
+suppose, as witness; Mrs. Hanson, in her Sunday best; and all the
+children, from the oldest to the youngest;&mdash;arrived in a
+procession, tailing one behind another up the path.&nbsp; Caliban
+was absent, but he had been chary of his friendly visits since
+the row; and with that exception, the whole family was gathered
+together as for a marriage or a christening.&nbsp; Strong was
+sitting at work, in the shade of the dwarf madronas near the
+forge; and they planted themselves about him in a circle, one on
+a stone, another on the waggon rails, a third on a piece of
+plank.&nbsp; Gradually the children stole away up the canyon to
+where there was another chute, somewhat smaller than the one
+across the dump; and down this chute, for the rest of the
+afternoon, they poured one avalanche of stones after another,
+waking the echoes of the glen.&nbsp; Meantime we elders sat
+together on the platform, Hanson and his friend smoking in
+silence like Indian sachems, Mrs. Hanson rattling on as usual
+with an adroit volubility, saying nothing, but keeping the party
+at their ease like a courtly hostess.</p>
+<p>Not a word occurred about the business of the day.&nbsp; Once,
+twice, and thrice I tried to slide the subject in, but was
+discouraged by the stoic apathy of Rufe, and beaten down before
+the pouring verbiage of his wife.&nbsp; There is nothing of the
+Indian brave about me, and I began to grill with
+impatience.&nbsp; At last, like a highway robber, I cornered
+Hanson, and bade him stand and deliver his business.&nbsp;
+Thereupon he gravely rose, as though to hint that this was not a
+proper place, nor the subject one suitable for squaws, and I,
+following his example, led him up the plank into our
+barrack.&nbsp; There he bestowed himself on a box, and unrolled
+his papers with fastidious deliberation.&nbsp; There were two
+sheets of note-paper, and an old mining notice, dated May 30th,
+1879, part print, part manuscript, and the latter much
+obliterated by the rains.&nbsp; It was by this identical piece of
+paper that the mine had been held last year.&nbsp; For thirteen
+months it had endured the weather and the change of seasons on a
+cairn behind the shoulder of the canyon; and it was now my
+business, spreading it before me on the table, and sitting on a
+valise, to copy its terms, with some necessary changes, twice
+over on the two sheets of note-paper.&nbsp; One was then to be
+placed on the same cairn&mdash;a &ldquo;mound of rocks&rdquo; the
+notice put it; and the other to be lodged for registration.</p>
+<p>Rufe watched me, silently smoking, till I came to the place
+for the locator&rsquo;s name at the end of the first copy; and
+when I proposed that he should sign, I thought I saw a scare in
+his eye.&nbsp; &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t think that&rsquo;ll be
+necessary,&rdquo; he said slowly; &ldquo;just you write it
+down.&rdquo;&nbsp; Perhaps this mighty hunter, who was the most
+active member of the local school board, could not write.&nbsp;
+There would be nothing strange in that.&nbsp; The constable of
+Calistoga is, and has been for years, a bed-ridden man, and, if I
+remember rightly, blind.&nbsp; He had more need of the emoluments
+than another, it was explained; and it was easy for him to
+&ldquo;depytize,&rdquo; with a strong accent on the last.&nbsp;
+So friendly and so free are popular institutions.</p>
+<p>When I had done my scrivening, Hanson strolled out, and
+addressed Breedlove, &ldquo;Will you step up here a bit?&rdquo;
+and after they had disappeared a little while into the chaparral
+and madrona thicket, they came back again, minus a notice, and
+the deed was done.&nbsp; The claim was jumped; a tract of
+mountain-side, fifteen hundred feet long by six hundred wide,
+with all the earth&rsquo;s precious bowels, had passed from
+Ronalds to Hanson, and, in the passage, changed its name from the
+&ldquo;Mammoth&rdquo; to the &ldquo;Calistoga.&rdquo;&nbsp; I had
+tried to get Rufe to call it after his wife, after himself, and
+after Garfield, the Republican Presidential candidate of the
+hour&mdash;since then elected, and, alas! dead&mdash;but all was
+in vain.&nbsp; The claim had once been called the Calistoga
+before, and he seemed to feel safety in returning to that.</p>
+<p>And so the history of that mine became once more plunged in
+darkness, lit only by some monster pyrotechnical displays of
+gossip.&nbsp; And perhaps the most curious feature of the whole
+matter is this: that we should have dwelt in this quiet corner of
+the mountains, with not a dozen neighbours, and yet struggled all
+the while, like desperate swimmers, in this sea of falsities and
+contradictions.&nbsp; Wherever a man is, there will be a lie.</p>
+<h2><a name="page223"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+223</span>TOILS AND PLEASURES</h2>
+<p>I <span class="smcap">must</span> try to convey some notion of
+our life, of how the days passed and what pleasure we took in
+them, of what there was to do and how we set about doing it, in
+our mountain hermitage.&nbsp; The house, after we had repaired
+the worst of the damages, and filled in some of the doors and
+windows with white cotton cloth, became a healthy and a pleasant
+dwelling-place, always airy and dry, and haunted by the outdoor
+perfumes of the glen.&nbsp; Within, it had the look of
+habitation, the human look.&nbsp; You had only to go into the
+third room, which we did not use, and see its stones, its sifting
+earth, its tumbled litter; and then return to our lodging, with
+the beds made, the plates on the rack, the pail of bright water
+behind the door, the stove crackling in a corner, and perhaps the
+table roughly laid against a meal,&mdash;and man&rsquo;s order,
+the little clean spots that he creates to dwell in, were at once
+contrasted with the rich passivity of nature.&nbsp; And yet our
+house was everywhere so wrecked and shattered, the air came and
+went so freely, the sun found so many portholes, the golden
+outdoor glow shone in so many open chinks, that we enjoyed, at
+the same time, some of the comforts of a roof and much of the
+gaiety and brightness of al fresco life.&nbsp; A single shower of
+rain, to be sure, and we should have been drowned out like
+mice.&nbsp; But ours was a Californian summer, and an earthquake
+was a far likelier accident than a shower of rain.</p>
+<p>Trustful in this fine weather, we kept the house for kitchen
+and bedroom, and used the platform as our summer parlour.&nbsp;
+The sense of privacy, as I have said already, was complete.&nbsp;
+We could look over the clump on miles of forest and rough
+hilltop; our eyes commanded some of Napa Valley, where the train
+ran, and the little country townships sat so close together along
+the line of the rail.&nbsp; But here there was no man to
+intrude.&nbsp; None but the Hansons were our visitors.&nbsp; Even
+they came but at long intervals, or twice daily, at a stated
+hour, with milk.&nbsp; So our days, as they were never
+interrupted, drew out to the greater length; hour melted
+insensibly into hour; the household duties, though they were
+many, and some of them laborious, dwindled into mere islets of
+business in a sea of sunny day-time; and it appears to me,
+looking back, as though the far greater part of our life at
+Silverado had been passed, propped upon an elbow, or seated on a
+plank, listening to the silence that there is among the
+hills.</p>
+<p>My work, it is true, was over early in the morning.&nbsp; I
+rose before any one else, lit the stove, put on the water to
+boil, and strolled forth upon the platform to wait till it was
+ready.&nbsp; Silverado would then be still in shadow, the sun
+shining on the mountain higher up.&nbsp; A clean smell of trees,
+a smell of the earth at morning, hung in the air.&nbsp;
+Regularly, every day, there was a single bird, not singing, but
+awkwardly chirruping among the green madronas, and the sound was
+cheerful, natural, and stirring.&nbsp; It did not hold the
+attention, nor interrupt the thread of meditation, like a
+blackbird or a nightingale; it was mere woodland prattle, of
+which the mind was conscious like a perfume.&nbsp; The freshness
+of these morning seasons remained with me far on into the
+day.</p>
+<p>As soon as the kettle boiled, I made porridge and coffee; and
+that, beyond the literal drawing of water, and the preparation of
+kindling, which it would be hyperbolical to call the hewing of
+wood, ended my domestic duties for the day.&nbsp; Thenceforth my
+wife laboured single-handed in the palace, and I lay or wandered
+on the platform at my own sweet will.&nbsp; The little corner
+near the forge, where we found a refuge under the madronas from
+the unsparing early sun, is indeed connected in my mind with some
+nightmare encounters over Euclid, and the Latin Grammar.&nbsp;
+These were known as Sam&rsquo;s lessons.&nbsp; He was supposed to
+be the victim and the sufferer; but here there must have been
+some misconception, for whereas I generally retired to bed after
+one of these engagements, he was no sooner set free than he
+dashed up to the Chinaman&rsquo;s house, where he had installed a
+printing press, that great element of civilization, and the sound
+of his labours would be faintly audible about the canyon half the
+day.</p>
+<p>To walk at all was a laborious business; the foot sank and
+slid, the boots were cut to pieces, among sharp, uneven, rolling
+stones.&nbsp; When we crossed the platform in any direction, it
+was usual to lay a course, following as much as possible the line
+of waggon rails.&nbsp; Thus, if water were to be drawn, the
+water-carrier left the house along some tilting planks that we
+had laid down, and not laid down very well.&nbsp; These carried
+him to that great highroad, the railway; and the railway served
+him as far as to the head of the shaft.&nbsp; But from thence to
+the spring and back again he made the best of his unaided way,
+staggering among the stones, and wading in low growth of the
+calcanthus, where the rattlesnakes lay hissing at his
+passage.&nbsp; Yet I liked to draw water.&nbsp; It was pleasant
+to dip the gray metal pail into the clean, colourless, cool
+water; pleasant to carry it back, with the water ripping at the
+edge, and a broken sunbeam quivering in the midst.</p>
+<p>But the extreme roughness of the walking confined us in common
+practice to the platform, and indeed to those parts of it that
+were most easily accessible along the line of rails.&nbsp; The
+rails came straight forward from the shaft, here and there
+overgrown with little green bushes, but still entire, and still
+carrying a truck, which it was Sam&rsquo;s delight to trundle to
+and fro by the hour with various ladings.&nbsp; About midway down
+the platform, the railroad trended to the right, leaving our
+house and coasting along the far side within a few yards of the
+madronas and the forge, and not far of the latter, ended in a
+sort of platform on the edge of the dump.&nbsp; There, in old
+days, the trucks were tipped, and their load sent thundering down
+the chute.&nbsp; There, besides, was the only spot where we could
+approach the margin of the dump.&nbsp; Anywhere else, you took
+your life in your right hand when you came within a yard and a
+half to peer over.&nbsp; For at any moment the dump might begin
+to slide and carry you down and bury you below its ruins.&nbsp;
+Indeed, the neighbourhood of an old mine is a place beset with
+dangers.&nbsp; For as still as Silverado was, at any moment the
+report of rotten wood might tell us that the platform had fallen
+into the shaft; the dump might begin to pour into the road below;
+or a wedge slip in the great upright seam, and hundreds of tons
+of mountain bury the scene of our encampment.</p>
+<p>I have already compared the dump to a rampart, built certainly
+by some rude people, and for prehistoric wars.&nbsp; It was
+likewise a frontier.&nbsp; All below was green and woodland, the
+tall pines soaring one above another, each with a firm outline
+and full spread of bough.&nbsp; All above was arid, rocky, and
+bald.&nbsp; The great spout of broken mineral, that had dammed
+the canyon up, was a creature of man&rsquo;s handiwork, its
+material dug out with a pick and powder, and spread by the
+service of the tracks.&nbsp; But nature herself, in that upper
+district, seemed to have had an eye to nothing besides mining;
+and even the natural hill-side was all sliding gravel and
+precarious boulder.&nbsp; Close at the margin of the well leaves
+would decay to skeletons and mummies, which at length some
+stronger gust would carry clear of the canyon and scatter in the
+subjacent woods.&nbsp; Even moisture and decaying vegetable
+matter could not, with all nature&rsquo;s alchemy, concoct enough
+soil to nourish a few poor grasses.&nbsp; It is the same, they
+say, in the neighbourhood of all silver mines; the nature of that
+precious rock being stubborn with quartz and poisonous with
+cinnabar.&nbsp; Both were plenty in our Silverado.&nbsp; The
+stones sparkled white in the sunshine with quartz; they were all
+stained red with cinnabar.&nbsp; Here, doubtless, came the
+Indians of yore to paint their faces for the war-path; and
+cinnabar, if I remember rightly, was one of the few articles of
+Indian commerce.&nbsp; Now, Sam had it in his undisturbed
+possession, to pound down and slake, and paint his rude designs
+with.&nbsp; But to me it had always a fine flavour of poetry,
+compounded out of Indian story and Hawthornden&rsquo;s
+allusion:</p>
+<blockquote><p>&ldquo;Desire, alas! I desire a Zeuxis new,<br />
+From Indies borrowing gold, from Eastern skies<br />
+Most bright cinoper . . .&rdquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Yet this is but half the picture; our Silverado platform has
+another side to it.&nbsp; Though there was no soil, and scarce a
+blade of grass, yet out of these tumbled gravel-heaps and broken
+boulders, a flower garden bloomed as at home in a
+conservatory.&nbsp; Calcanthus crept, like a hardy weed, all over
+our rough parlour, choking the railway, and pushing forth its
+rusty, aromatic cones from between two blocks of shattered
+mineral.&nbsp; Azaleas made a big snow-bed just above the
+well.&nbsp; The shoulder of the hill waved white with
+Mediterranean heath.&nbsp; In the crannies of the ledge and about
+the spurs of the tall pine, a red flowering stone-plant hung in
+clusters.&nbsp; Even the low, thorny chaparral was thick with
+pea-like blossom.&nbsp; Close at the foot of our path nutmegs
+prospered, delightful to the sight and smell.&nbsp; At sunrise,
+and again late at night, the scent of the sweet bay trees filled
+the canyon, and the down-blowing night wind must have borne it
+hundreds of feet into the outer air.</p>
+<p>All this vegetation, to be sure, was stunted.&nbsp; The
+madrona was here no bigger than the manzanita; the bay was but a
+stripling shrub; the very pines, with four or five exceptions in
+all our upper canyon, were not so tall as myself, or but a little
+taller, and the most of them came lower than my waist.&nbsp; For
+a prosperous forest tree, we must look below, where the glen was
+crowded with green spires.&nbsp; But for flowers and ravishing
+perfume, we had none to envy: our heap of road-metal was thick
+with bloom, like a hawthorn in the front of June; our red, baking
+angle in the mountain, a laboratory of poignant scents.&nbsp; It
+was an endless wonder to my mind, as I dreamed about the
+platform, following the progress of the shadows, where the
+madrona with its leaves, the azalea and calcanthus with their
+blossoms, could find moisture to support such thick, wet, waxy
+growths, or the bay tree collect the ingredients of its
+perfume.&nbsp; But there they all grew together, healthy, happy,
+and happy-making, as though rooted in a fathom of black soil.</p>
+<p>Nor was it only vegetable life that prospered.&nbsp; We had,
+indeed, few birds, and none that had much of a voice or anything
+worthy to be called a song.&nbsp; My morning comrade had a thin
+chirp, unmusical and monotonous, but friendly and pleasant to
+hear.&nbsp; He had but one rival: a fellow with an ostentatious
+cry of near an octave descending, not one note of which properly
+followed another.&nbsp; This is the only bird I ever knew with a
+wrong ear; but there was something enthralling about his
+performance.&nbsp; You listened and listened, thinking each time
+he must surely get it right; but no, it was always wrong, and
+always wrong the same way.&nbsp; Yet he seemed proud of his song,
+delivered it with execution and a manner of his own, and was
+charming to his mate.&nbsp; A very incorrect, incessant human
+whistler had thus a chance of knowing how his own music pleased
+the world.&nbsp; Two great birds&mdash;eagles, we
+thought&mdash;dwelt at the top of the canyon, among the crags
+that were printed on the sky.&nbsp; Now and again, but very
+rarely, they wheeled high over our heads in silence, or with a
+distant, dying scream; and then, with a fresh impulse, winged
+fleetly forward, dipped over a hilltop, and were gone.&nbsp; They
+seemed solemn and ancient things, sailing the blue air: perhaps
+co-oeval with the mountain where they haunted, perhaps emigrants
+from Rome, where the glad legions may have shouted to behold them
+on the morn of battle.</p>
+<p>But if birds were rare, the place abounded with
+rattlesnakes&mdash;the rattlesnake&rsquo;s nest, it might have
+been named.&nbsp; Wherever we brushed among the bushes, our
+passage woke their angry buzz.&nbsp; One dwelt habitually in the
+wood-pile, and sometimes, when we came for firewood, thrust up
+his small head between two logs, and hissed at the
+intrusion.&nbsp; The rattle has a legendary credit; it is said to
+be awe-inspiring, and, once heard, to stamp itself for ever in
+the memory.&nbsp; But the sound is not at all alarming; the hum
+of many insects, and the buzz of the wasp convince the ear of
+danger quite as readily.&nbsp; As a matter of fact, we lived for
+weeks in Silverado, coming and going, with rattles sprung on
+every side, and it never occurred to us to be afraid.&nbsp; I
+used to take sun-baths and do calisthenics in a certain pleasant
+nook among azalea and calcanthus, the rattles whizzing on every
+side like spinning-wheels, and the combined hiss or buzz rising
+louder and angrier at any sudden movement; but I was never in the
+least impressed, nor ever attacked.&nbsp; It was only towards the
+end of our stay, that a man down at Calistoga, who was
+expatiating on the terrifying nature of the sound, gave me at
+last a very good imitation; and it burst on me at once that we
+dwelt in the very metropolis of deadly snakes, and that the
+rattle was simply the commonest noise in Silverado.&nbsp;
+Immediately on our return, we attacked the Hansons on the
+subject.&nbsp; They had formerly assured us that our canyon was
+favoured, like Ireland, with an entire immunity from poisonous
+reptiles; but, with the perfect inconsequence of the natural man,
+they were no sooner found out than they went off at score in the
+contrary direction, and we were told that in no part of the world
+did rattlesnakes attain to such a monstrous bigness as among the
+warm, flower-dotted rocks of Silverado.&nbsp; This is a
+contribution rather to the natural history of the Hansons, than
+to that of snakes.</p>
+<p>One person, however, better served by his instinct, had known
+the rattle from the first; and that was Chuchu, the dog.&nbsp; No
+rational creature has ever led an existence more poisoned by
+terror than that dog&rsquo;s at Silverado.&nbsp; Every whiz of
+the rattle made him bound.&nbsp; His eyes rolled; he trembled; he
+would be often wet with sweat.&nbsp; One of our great mysteries
+was his terror of the mountain.&nbsp; A little away above our
+nook, the azaleas and almost all the vegetation ceased.&nbsp;
+Dwarf pines not big enough to be Christmas trees, grew thinly
+among loose stone and gravel scaurs.&nbsp; Here and there a big
+boulder sat quiescent on a knoll, having paused there till the
+next rain in his long slide down the mountain.&nbsp; There was
+here no ambuscade for the snakes, you could see clearly where you
+trod; and yet the higher I went, the more abject and appealing
+became Chuchu&rsquo;s terror.&nbsp; He was an excellent master of
+that composite language in which dogs communicate with men, and
+he would assure me, on his honour, that there was some peril on
+the mountain; appeal to me, by all that I held holy, to turn
+back; and at length, finding all was in vain, and that I still
+persisted, ignorantly foolhardy, he would suddenly whip round and
+make a bee-line down the slope for Silverado, the gravel
+showering after him.&nbsp; What was he afraid of?&nbsp; There
+were admittedly brown bears and California lions on the mountain;
+and a grizzly visited Rufe&rsquo;s poultry yard not long before,
+to the unspeakable alarm of Caliban, who dashed out to chastise
+the intruder, and found himself, by moonlight, face to face with
+such a tartar.&nbsp; Something at least there must have been:
+some hairy, dangerous brute lodged permanently among the rocks a
+little to the north-west of Silverado, spending his summer
+thereabout, with wife and family.</p>
+<p>And there was, or there had been, another animal.&nbsp; Once,
+under the broad daylight, on that open stony hillside, where the
+baby pines were growing, scarcely tall enough to be a badge for a
+MacGregor&rsquo;s bonnet, I came suddenly upon his innocent body,
+lying mummified by the dry air and sun: a pigmy kangaroo.&nbsp; I
+am ingloriously ignorant of these subjects; had never heard of
+such a beast; thought myself face to face with some incomparable
+sport of nature; and began to cherish hopes of immortality in
+science.&nbsp; Rarely have I been conscious of a stranger thrill
+than when I raised that singular creature from the stones, dry as
+a board, his innocent heart long quiet, and all warm with
+sunshine.&nbsp; His long hind legs were stiff, his tiny forepaws
+clutched upon his breast, as if to leap; his poor life cut short
+upon that mountain by some unknown accident.&nbsp; But the
+kangaroo rat, it proved, was no such unknown animal; and my
+discovery was nothing.</p>
+<p>Crickets were not wanting.&nbsp; I thought I could make out
+exactly four of them, each with a corner of his own, who used to
+make night musical at Silverado.&nbsp; In the matter of voice,
+they far excelled the birds, and their ringing whistle sounded
+from rock to rock, calling and replying the same thing, as in a
+meaningless opera.&nbsp; Thus, children in full health and
+spirits shout together, to the dismay of neighbours; and their
+idle, happy, deafening vociferations rise and fall, like the song
+of the crickets.&nbsp; I used to sit at night on the platform,
+and wonder why these creatures were so happy; and what was wrong
+with man that he also did not wind up his days with an hour or
+two of shouting; but I suspect that all long-lived animals are
+solemn.&nbsp; The dogs alone are hardly used by nature; and it
+seems a manifest injustice for poor Chuchu to die in his teens,
+after a life so shadowed and troubled, continually shaken with
+alarm, and the tear of elegant sentiment permanently in his
+eye.</p>
+<p>There was another neighbour of ours at Silverado, small but
+very active, a destructive fellow.&nbsp; This was a black, ugly
+fly&mdash;a bore, the Hansons called him&mdash;who lived by
+hundreds in the boarding of our house.&nbsp; He entered by a
+round hole, more neatly pierced than a man could do it with a
+gimlet, and he seems to have spent his life in cutting out the
+interior of the plank, but whether as a dwelling or a
+store-house, I could never find.&nbsp; When I used to lie in bed
+in the morning for a rest&mdash;we had no easy-chairs in
+Silverado&mdash;I would hear, hour after hour, the sharp cutting
+sound of his labours, and from time to time a dainty shower of
+sawdust would fall upon the blankets.&nbsp; There lives no more
+industrious creature than a bore.</p>
+<p>And now that I have named to the reader all our animals and
+insects without exception&mdash;only I find I have forgotten the
+flies&mdash;he will be able to appreciate the singular privacy
+and silence of our days.&nbsp; It was not only man who was
+excluded: animals, the song of birds, the lowing of cattle, the
+bleating of sheep, clouds even, and the variations of the
+weather, were here also wanting; and as, day after day, the sky
+was one dome of blue, and the pines below us stood motionless in
+the still air, so the hours themselves were marked out from each
+other only by the series of our own affairs, and the sun&rsquo;s
+great period as he ranged westward through the heavens.&nbsp; The
+two birds cackled a while in the early morning; all day the water
+tinkled in the shaft, the bores ground sawdust in the planking of
+our crazy palace&mdash;infinitesimal sounds; and it was only with
+the return of night that any change would fall on our
+surroundings, or the four crickets begin to flute together in the
+dark.</p>
+<p>Indeed, it would be hard to exaggerate the pleasure that we
+took in the approach of evening.&nbsp; Our day was not very long,
+but it was very tiring.&nbsp; To trip along unsteady planks or
+wade among shifting stones, to go to and fro for water, to
+clamber down the glen to the Toll House after meat and letters,
+to cook, to make fires and beds, were all exhausting to the
+body.&nbsp; Life out of doors, besides, under the fierce eye of
+day, draws largely on the animal spirits.&nbsp; There are certain
+hours in the afternoon when a man, unless he is in strong health
+or enjoys a vacant mind, would rather creep into a cool corner of
+a house and sit upon the chairs of civilization.&nbsp; About that
+time, the sharp stones, the planks, the upturned boxes of
+Silverado, began to grow irksome to my body; I set out on that
+hopeless, never-ending quest for a more comfortable posture; I
+would be fevered and weary of the staring sun; and just then he
+would begin courteously to withdraw his countenance, the shadows
+lengthened, the aromatic airs awoke, and an indescribable but
+happy change announced the coming of the night.</p>
+<p>The hours of evening, when we were once curtained in the
+friendly dark, sped lightly.&nbsp; Even as with the crickets,
+night brought to us a certain spirit of rejoicing.&nbsp; It was
+good to taste the air; good to mark the dawning of the stars, as
+they increased their glittering company; good, too, to gather
+stones, and send them crashing down the chute, a wave of
+light.&nbsp; It seemed, in some way, the reward and the
+fulfilment of the day.&nbsp; So it is when men dwell in the open
+air; it is one of the simple pleasures that we lose by living
+cribbed and covered in a house, that, though the coming of the
+day is still the most inspiriting, yet day&rsquo;s departure,
+also, and the return of night refresh, renew, and quiet us; and
+in the pastures of the dusk we stand, like cattle, exulting in
+the absence of the load.</p>
+<p>Our nights wore never cold, and they were always still, but
+for one remarkable exception.&nbsp; Regularly, about nine
+o&rsquo;clock, a warm wind sprang up, and blew for ten minutes,
+or maybe a quarter of an hour, right down the canyon, fanning it
+well out, airing it as a mother airs the night nursery before the
+children sleep.&nbsp; As far as I could judge, in the clear
+darkness of the night, this wind was purely local: perhaps
+dependant on the configuration of the glen.&nbsp; At least, it
+was very welcome to the hot and weary squatters; and if we were
+not abed already, the springing up of this lilliputian
+valley-wind would often be our signal to retire.</p>
+<p>I was the last to go to bed, as I was still the first to
+rise.&nbsp; Many a night I have strolled about the platform,
+taking a bath of darkness before I slept.&nbsp; The rest would be
+in bed, and even from the forge I could hear them talking
+together from bunk to bunk.&nbsp; A single candle in the neck of
+a pint bottle was their only illumination; and yet the old
+cracked house seemed literally bursting with the light.&nbsp; It
+shone keen as a knife through all the vertical chinks; it struck
+upward through the broken shingles; and through the eastern door
+and window, it fell in a great splash upon the thicket and the
+overhanging rock.&nbsp; You would have said a conflagration, or
+at the least a roaring forge; and behold, it was but a
+candle.&nbsp; Or perhaps it was yet more strange to see the
+procession moving bedwards round the corner of the house, and up
+the plank that brought us to the bedroom door; under the immense
+spread of the starry heavens, down in a crevice of the giant
+mountain these few human shapes, with their unshielded taper,
+made so disproportionate a figure in the eye and mind.&nbsp; But
+the more he is alone with nature, the greater man and his doings
+bulk in the consideration of his fellow-men.&nbsp; Miles and
+miles away upon the opposite hill-tops, if there were any hunter
+belated or any traveller who had lost his way, he must have
+stood, and watched and wondered, from the time the candle issued
+from the door of the assayer&rsquo;s office till it had mounted
+the plank and disappeared again into the miners&rsquo;
+dormitory.</p>
+<p>***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS***</p>
+<pre>
+
+
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Silverado Squatters, by Robert Louis Stevenson
+(#23 in our series by Robert Louis Stevenson)
+
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+*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****
+
+
+Title: The Silverado Squatters
+
+Author: Robert Louis Stevenson
+
+Release Date: May, 1996  [EBook #516]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on March 12, 1996]
+[Most recently updated: August 27, 2002]
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+Edition: 10
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+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS ***
+
+
+
+
+Transcribed from the 1906 Chatto & Windus edition by David Price,
+email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
+
+
+
+
+THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
+
+
+
+
+The scene of this little book is on a high mountain.  There are,
+indeed, many higher; there are many of a nobler outline.  It is no
+place of pilgrimage for the summary globe-trotter; but to one who
+lives upon its sides, Mount Saint Helena soon becomes a centre of
+interest.  It is the Mont Blanc of one section of the Californian
+Coast Range, none of its near neighbours rising to one-half its
+altitude.  It looks down on much green, intricate country.  It
+feeds in the spring-time many splashing brooks.  From its summit
+you must have an excellent lesson of geography:  seeing, to the
+south, San Francisco Bay, with Tamalpais on the one hand and Monte
+Diablo on the other; to the west and thirty miles away, the open
+ocean; eastward, across the corn-lands and thick tule swamps of
+Sacramento Valley, to where the Central Pacific railroad begins to
+climb the sides of the Sierras; and northward, for what I know, the
+white head of Shasta looking down on Oregon.  Three counties, Napa
+County, Lake County, and Sonoma County, march across its cliffy
+shoulders.  Its naked peak stands nearly four thousand five hundred
+feet above the sea; its sides are fringed with forest; and the
+soil, where it is bare, glows warm with cinnabar.
+
+Life in its shadow goes rustically forward.  Bucks, and bears, and
+rattle-snakes, and former mining operations, are the staple of
+men's talk.  Agriculture has only begun to mount above the valley.
+And though in a few years from now the whole district may be
+smiling with farms, passing trains shaking the mountain to the
+heart, many-windowed hotels lighting up the night like factories,
+and a prosperous city occupying the site of sleepy Calistoga; yet
+in the mean time, around the foot of that mountain the silence of
+nature reigns in a great measure unbroken, and the people of hill
+and valley go sauntering about their business as in the days before
+the flood.
+
+To reach Mount Saint Helena from San Francisco, the traveller has
+twice to cross the bay:  once by the busy Oakland Ferry, and again,
+after an hour or so of the railway, from Vallejo junction to
+Vallejo.  Thence he takes rail once more to mount the long green
+strath of Napa Valley.
+
+In all the contractions and expansions of that inland sea, the Bay
+of San Francisco, there can be few drearier scenes than the Vallejo
+Ferry.  Bald shores and a low, bald islet inclose the sea; through
+the narrows the tide bubbles, muddy like a river.  When we made the
+passage (bound, although yet we knew it not, for Silverado) the
+steamer jumped, and the black buoys were dancing in the jabble; the
+ocean breeze blew killing chill; and, although the upper sky was
+still unflecked with vapour, the sea fogs were pouring in from
+seaward, over the hilltops of Marin county, in one great,
+shapeless, silver cloud.
+
+South Vallejo is typical of many Californian towns.  It was a
+blunder; the site has proved untenable; and, although it is still
+such a young place by the scale of Europe, it has already begun to
+be deserted for its neighbour and namesake, North Vallejo.  A long
+pier, a number of drinking saloons, a hotel of a great size, marshy
+pools where the frogs keep up their croaking, and even at high noon
+the entire absence of any human face or voice--these are the marks
+of South Vallejo.  Yet there was a tall building beside the pier,
+labelled the Star Flour Mills; and sea-going, full-rigged ships lay
+close along shore, waiting for their cargo.  Soon these would be
+plunging round the Horn, soon the flour from the Star Flour Mills
+would be landed on the wharves of Liverpool.  For that, too, is one
+of England's outposts; thither, to this gaunt mill, across the
+Atlantic and Pacific deeps and round about the icy Horn, this crowd
+of great, three-masted, deep-sea ships come, bringing nothing, and
+return with bread.
+
+The Frisby House, for that was the name of the hotel, was a place
+of fallen fortunes, like the town.  It was now given up to
+labourers, and partly ruinous.  At dinner there was the ordinary
+display of what is called in the west a TWO-BIT HOUSE:  the
+tablecloth checked red and white, the plague of flies, the wire
+hencoops over the dishes, the great variety and invariable vileness
+of the food and the rough coatless men devoting it in silence.  In
+our bedroom, the stove would not burn, though it would smoke; and
+while one window would not open, the other would not shut.  There
+was a view on a bit of empty road, a few dark houses, a donkey
+wandering with its shadow on a slope, and a blink of sea, with a
+tall ship lying anchored in the moonlight.  All about that dreary
+inn frogs sang their ungainly chorus.
+
+Early the next morning we mounted the hill along a wooden footway,
+bridging one marish spot after another.  Here and there, as we
+ascended, we passed a house embowered in white roses.  More of the
+bay became apparent, and soon the blue peak of Tamalpais rose above
+the green level of the island opposite.  It told us we were still
+but a little way from the city of the Golden Gates, already, at
+that hour, beginning to awake among the sand-hills.  It called to
+us over the waters as with the voice of a bird.  Its stately head,
+blue as a sapphire on the paler azure of the sky, spoke to us of
+wider outlooks and the bright Pacific.  For Tamalpais stands
+sentry, like a lighthouse, over the Golden Gates, between the bay
+and the open ocean, and looks down indifferently on both.  Even as
+we saw and hailed it from Vallejo, seamen, far out at sea, were
+scanning it with shaded eyes; and, as if to answer to the thought,
+one of the great ships below began silently to clothe herself with
+white sails, homeward bound for England.
+
+For some way beyond Vallejo the railway led us through bald green
+pastures.  On the west the rough highlands of Marin shut off the
+ocean; in the midst, in long, straggling, gleaming arms, the bay
+died out among the grass; there were few trees and few enclosures;
+the sun shone wide over open uplands, the displumed hills stood
+clear against the sky.  But by-and-by these hills began to draw
+nearer on either hand, and first thicket and then wood began to
+clothe their sides; and soon we were away from all signs of the
+sea's neighbourhood, mounting an inland, irrigated valley.  A great
+variety of oaks stood, now severally, now in a becoming grove,
+among the fields and vineyards.  The towns were compact, in about
+equal proportions, of bright, new wooden houses and great and
+growing forest trees; and the chapel bell on the engine sounded
+most festally that sunny Sunday, as we drew up at one green town
+after another, with the townsfolk trooping in their Sunday's best
+to see the strangers, with the sun sparkling on the clean houses,
+and great domes of foliage humming overhead in the breeze.
+
+This pleasant Napa Valley is, at its north end, blockaded by our
+mountain.  There, at Calistoga, the railroad ceases, and the
+traveller who intends faring farther, to the Geysers or to the
+springs in Lake County, must cross the spurs of the mountain by
+stage.  Thus, Mount Saint Helena is not only a summit, but a
+frontier; and, up to the time of writing, it has stayed the
+progress of the iron horse.
+
+
+
+
+PART I--IN THE VALLEY
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I--CALISTOGA
+
+
+
+It is difficult for a European to imagine Calistoga, the whole
+place is so new, and of such an accidental pattern; the very name,
+I hear, was invented at a supper-party by the man who found the
+springs.
+
+The railroad and the highway come up the valley about parallel to
+one another.  The street of Calistoga joins the perpendicular to
+both--a wide street, with bright, clean, low houses, here and there
+a verandah over the sidewalk, here and there a horse-post, here and
+there lounging townsfolk.  Other streets are marked out, and most
+likely named; for these towns in the New World begin with a firm
+resolve to grow larger, Washington and Broadway, and then First and
+Second, and so forth, being boldly plotted out as soon as the
+community indulges in a plan.  But, in the meanwhile, all the life
+and most of the houses of Calistoga are concentrated upon that
+street between the railway station and the road.  I never heard it
+called by any name, but I will hazard a guess that it is either
+Washington or Broadway.  Here are the blacksmith's, the chemist's,
+the general merchant's, and Kong Sam Kee, the Chinese laundryman's;
+here, probably, is the office of the local paper (for the place has
+a paper--they all have papers); and here certainly is one of the
+hotels, Cheeseborough's, whence the daring Foss, a man dear to
+legend, starts his horses for the Geysers.
+
+It must be remembered that we are here in a land of stage-drivers
+and highwaymen:  a land, in that sense, like England a hundred
+years ago.  The highway robber--road-agent, he is quaintly called--
+is still busy in these parts.  The fame of Vasquez is still young.
+Only a few years go, the Lakeport stage was robbed a mile or two
+from Calistoga.  In 1879, the dentist of Mendocino City, fifty
+miles away upon the coast, suddenly threw off the garments of his
+trade, like Grindoff, in The Miller and his Men, and flamed forth
+in his second dress as a captain of banditti.  A great robbery was
+followed by a long chase, a chase of days if not of weeks, among
+the intricate hill-country; and the chase was followed by much
+desultory fighting, in which several--and the dentist, I believe,
+amongst the number--bit the dust.  The grass was springing for the
+first time, nourished upon their blood, when I arrived in
+Calistoga.  I am reminded of another highwayman of that same year.
+"He had been unwell," so ran his humorous defence, "and the doctor
+told him to take something, so he took the express-box."
+
+The cultus of the stage-coachman always flourishes highest where
+there are thieves on the road, and where the guard travels armed,
+and the stage is not only a link between country and city, and the
+vehicle of news, but has a faint warfaring aroma, like a man who
+should be brother to a soldier.  California boasts her famous
+stage-drivers, and among the famous Foss is not forgotten.  Along
+the unfenced, abominable mountain roads, he launches his team with
+small regard to human life or the doctrine of probabilities.
+Flinching travellers, who behold themselves coasting eternity at
+every corner, look with natural admiration at their driver's huge,
+impassive, fleshy countenance.  He has the very face for the driver
+in Sam Weller's anecdote, who upset the election party at the
+required point.  Wonderful tales are current of his readiness and
+skill.  One in particular, of how one of his horses fell at a
+ticklish passage of the road, and how Foss let slip the reins, and,
+driving over the fallen animal, arrived at the next stage with only
+three.  This I relate as I heard it, without guarantee.
+
+I only saw Foss once, though, strange as it may sound, I have twice
+talked with him.  He lives out of Calistoga, at a ranche called
+Fossville.  One evening, after he was long gone home, I dropped
+into Cheeseborough's, and was asked if I should like to speak with
+Mr. Foss.  Supposing that the interview was impossible, and that I
+was merely called upon to subscribe the general sentiment, I boldly
+answered "Yes."  Next moment, I had one instrument at my ear,
+another at my mouth and found myself, with nothing in the world to
+say, conversing with a man several miles off among desolate hills.
+Foss rapidly and somewhat plaintively brought the conversation to
+an end; and he returned to his night's grog at Fossville, while I
+strolled forth again on Calistoga high street.  But it was an odd
+thing that here, on what we are accustomed to consider the very
+skirts of civilization, I should have used the telephone for the
+first time in my civilized career.  So it goes in these young
+countries; telephones, and telegraphs, and newspapers, and
+advertisements running far ahead among the Indians and the grizzly
+bears.
+
+Alone, on the other side of the railway, stands the Springs Hotel,
+with its attendant cottages.  The floor of the valley is extremely
+level to the very roots of the hills; only here and there a
+hillock, crowned with pines, rises like the barrow of some
+chieftain famed in war; and right against one of these hillocks is
+the Springs Hotel--is or was; for since I was there the place has
+been destroyed by fire, and has risen again from its ashes.  A lawn
+runs about the house, and the lawn is in its turn surrounded by a
+system of little five-roomed cottages, each with a verandah and a
+weedy palm before the door.  Some of the cottages are let to
+residents, and these are wreathed in flowers.  The rest are
+occupied by ordinary visitors to the Hotel; and a very pleasant way
+this is, by which you have a little country cottage of your own,
+without domestic burthens, and by the day or week.
+
+The whole neighbourhood of Mount Saint Helena is full of sulphur
+and of boiling springs.  The Geysers are famous; they were the
+great health resort of the Indians before the coming of the whites.
+Lake County is dotted with spas; Hot Springs and White Sulphur
+Springs are the names of two stations on the Napa Valley railroad;
+and Calistoga itself seems to repose on a mere film above a
+boiling, subterranean lake.  At one end of the hotel enclosure are
+the springs from which it takes its name, hot enough to scald a
+child seriously while I was there.  At the other end, the tenant of
+a cottage sank a well, and there also the water came up boiling.
+It keeps this end of the valley as warm as a toast.  I have gone
+across to the hotel a little after five in the morning, when a sea
+fog from the Pacific was hanging thick and gray, and dark and dirty
+overhead, and found the thermometer had been up before me, and had
+already climbed among the nineties; and in the stress of the day it
+was sometimes too hot to move about.
+
+But in spite of this heat from above and below, doing one on both
+sides, Calistoga was a pleasant place to dwell in; beautifully
+green, for it was then that favoured moment in the Californian
+year, when the rains are over and the dusty summer has not yet set
+in; often visited by fresh airs, now from the mountain, now across
+Sonoma from the sea; very quiet, very idle, very silent but for the
+breezes and the cattle bells afield.  And there was something
+satisfactory in the sight of that great mountain that enclosed us
+to the north:  whether it stood, robed in sunshine, quaking to its
+topmost pinnacle with the heat and brightness of the day; or
+whether it set itself to weaving vapours, wisp after wisp growing,
+trembling, fleeting, and fading in the blue.
+
+The tangled, woody, and almost trackless foot-hills that enclose
+the valley, shutting it off from Sonoma on the west, and from Yolo
+on the east--rough as they were in outline, dug out by winter
+streams, crowned by cliffy bluffs and nodding pine trees--wore
+dwarfed into satellites by the bulk and bearing of Mount Saint
+Helena.  She over-towered them by two-thirds of her own stature.
+She excelled them by the boldness of her profile.  Her great bald
+summit, clear of trees and pasture, a cairn of quartz and cinnabar,
+rejected kinship with the dark and shaggy wilderness of lesser
+hill-tops.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II--THE PETRIFIED FOREST
+
+
+
+We drove off from the Springs Hotel about three in the afternoon.
+The sun warmed me to the heart.  A broad, cool wind streamed
+pauselessly down the valley, laden with perfume.  Up at the top
+stood Mount Saint Helena, a bulk of mountain, bare atop, with tree-
+fringed spurs, and radiating warmth.  Once we saw it framed in a
+grove of tall and exquisitely graceful white oaks, in line and
+colour a finished composition.  We passed a cow stretched by the
+roadside, her bell slowly beating time to the movement of her
+ruminating jaws, her big red face crawled over by half a dozen
+flies, a monument of content.
+
+A little farther, and we struck to the left up a mountain road, and
+for two hours threaded one valley after another, green, tangled,
+full of noble timber, giving us every now and again a sight of
+Mount Saint Helena and the blue hilly distance, and crossed by many
+streams, through which we splashed to the carriage-step.  To the
+right or the left, there was scarce any trace of man but the road
+we followed; I think we passed but one ranchero's house in the
+whole distance, and that was closed and smokeless.  But we had the
+society of these bright streams--dazzlingly clear, as is their
+wont, splashing from the wheels in diamonds, and striking a lively
+coolness through the sunshine.  And what with the innumerable
+variety of greens, the masses of foliage tossing in the breeze, the
+glimpses of distance, the descents into seemingly impenetrable
+thickets, the continual dodging of the road which made haste to
+plunge again into the covert, we had a fine sense of woods, and
+spring-time, and the open air.
+
+Our driver gave me a lecture by the way on Californian trees--a
+thing I was much in need of, having fallen among painters who know
+the name of nothing, and Mexicans who know the name of nothing in
+English.  He taught me the madrona, the manzanita, the buck-eye,
+the maple; he showed me the crested mountain quail; he showed me
+where some young redwoods were already spiring heavenwards from the
+ruins of the old; for in this district all had already perished:
+redwoods and redskins, the two noblest indigenous living things,
+alike condemned.
+
+At length, in a lonely dell, we came on a huge wooden gate with a
+sign upon it like an inn.  "The Petrified Forest.  Proprietor:  C.
+Evans," ran the legend.  Within, on a knoll of sward, was the house
+of the proprietor, and another smaller house hard by to serve as a
+museum, where photographs and petrifactions were retailed.  It was
+a pure little isle of touristry among these solitary hills.
+
+The proprietor was a brave old white-faced Swede.  He had wandered
+this way, Heaven knows how, and taken up his acres--I forget how
+many years ago--all alone, bent double with sciatica, and with six
+bits in his pocket and an axe upon his shoulder.  Long, useless
+years of seafaring had thus discharged him at the end, penniless
+and sick.  Without doubt he had tried his luck at the diggings, and
+got no good from that; without doubt he had loved the bottle, and
+lived the life of Jack ashore.  But at the end of these adventures,
+here he came; and, the place hitting his fancy, down he sat to make
+a new life of it, far from crimps and the salt sea.  And the very
+sight of his ranche had done him good.  It was "the handsomest spot
+in the Californy mountains."  "Isn't it handsome, now?" he said.
+Every penny he makes goes into that ranche to make it handsomer.
+Then the climate, with the sea-breeze every afternoon in the
+hottest summer weather, had gradually cured the sciatica; and his
+sister and niece were now domesticated with him for company--or,
+rather, the niece came only once in the two days, teaching music
+the meanwhile in the valley.  And then, for a last piece of luck,
+"the handsomest spot in the Californy mountains" had produced a
+petrified forest, which Mr. Evans now shows at the modest figure of
+half a dollar a head, or two-thirds of his capital when he first
+came there with an axe and a sciatica.
+
+This tardy favourite of fortune--hobbling a little, I think, as if
+in memory of the sciatica, but with not a trace that I can remember
+of the sea--thoroughly ruralized from head to foot, proceeded to
+escort us up the hill behind his house.
+
+"Who first found the forest?" asked my wife.
+
+"The first?  I was that man," said he.  "I was cleaning up the
+pasture for my beasts, when I found THIS"--kicking a great redwood
+seven feet in diameter, that lay there on its side, hollow heart,
+clinging lumps of bark, all changed into gray stone, with veins of
+quartz between what had been the layers of the wood.
+
+"Were you surprised?"
+
+"Surprised?  No!  What would I be surprised about?  What did I know
+about petrifactions--following the sea?  Petrifaction!  There was
+no such word in my language!  I knew about putrifaction, though!  I
+thought it was a stone; so would you, if you was cleaning up
+pasture."
+
+And now he had a theory of his own, which I did not quite grasp,
+except that the trees had not "grewed" there.  But he mentioned,
+with evident pride, that he differed from all the scientific people
+who had visited the spot; and he flung about such words as "tufa"
+and "scilica" with careless freedom.
+
+When I mentioned I was from Scotland, "My old country," he said;
+"my old country"--with a smiling look and a tone of real affection
+in his voice.  I was mightily surprised, for he was obviously
+Scandinavian, and begged him to explain.  It seemed he had learned
+his English and done nearly all his sailing in Scotch ships.  "Out
+of Glasgow," said he, "or Greenock; but that's all the same--they
+all hail from Glasgow." And he was so pleased with me for being a
+Scotsman, and his adopted compatriot, that he made me a present of
+a very beautiful piece of petrifaction--I believe the most
+beautiful and portable he had.
+
+Here was a man, at least, who was a Swede, a Scot, and an American,
+acknowledging some kind allegiance to three lands.  Mr. Wallace's
+Scoto-Circassian will not fail to come before the reader.  I have
+myself met and spoken with a Fifeshire German, whose combination of
+abominable accents struck me dumb.  But, indeed, I think we all
+belong to many countries.  And perhaps this habit of much travel,
+and the engendering of scattered friendships, may prepare the
+euthanasia of ancient nations.
+
+And the forest itself?  Well, on a tangled, briery hillside--for
+the pasture would bear a little further cleaning up, to my eyes--
+there lie scattered thickly various lengths of petrified trunk,
+such as the one already mentioned.  It is very curious, of course,
+and ancient enough, if that were all.  Doubtless, the heart of the
+geologist beats quicker at the sight; but, for my part, I was
+mightily unmoved.  Sight-seeing is the art of disappointment.
+
+
+"There's nothing under heaven so blue,
+That's fairly worth the travelling to."
+
+
+But, fortunately, Heaven rewards us with many agreeable prospects
+and adventures by the way; and sometimes, when we go out to see a
+petrified forest, prepares a far more delightful curiosity, in the
+form of Mr. Evans, whom may all prosperity attend throughout a long
+and green old age.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III--NAPA WINE
+
+
+
+I was interested in Californian wine.  Indeed, I am interested in
+all wines, and have been all my life, from the raisin wine that a
+schoolfellow kept secreted in his play-box up to my last discovery,
+those notable Valtellines, that once shone upon the board of
+Caesar.
+
+Some of us, kind old Pagans, watch with dread the shadows falling
+on the age:  how the unconquerable worm invades the sunny terraces
+of France, and Bordeaux is no more, and the Rhone a mere Arabia
+Petraea.  Chateau Neuf is dead, and I have never tasted it;
+Hermitage--a hermitage indeed from all life's sorrows--lies
+expiring by the river.  And in the place of these imperial elixirs,
+beautiful to every sense, gem-hued, flower-scented, dream-
+compellers:- behold upon the quays at Cette the chemicals arrayed;
+behold the analyst at Marseilles, raising hands in obsecration,
+attesting god Lyoeus, and the vats staved in, and the dishonest
+wines poured forth among the sea.  It is not Pan only; Bacchus,
+too, is dead.
+
+If wine is to withdraw its most poetic countenance, the sun of the
+white dinner-cloth, a deity to be invoked by two or three, all
+fervent, hushing their talk, degusting tenderly, and storing
+reminiscences--for a bottle of good wine, like a good act, shines
+ever in the retrospect--if wine is to desert us, go thy ways, old
+Jack!  Now we begin to have compunctions, and look back at the
+brave bottles squandered upon dinner-parties, where the guests
+drank grossly, discussing politics the while, and even the
+schoolboy "took his whack," like liquorice water.  And at the same
+time, we look timidly forward, with a spark of hope, to where the
+new lands, already weary of producing gold, begin to green with
+vineyards.  A nice point in human history falls to be decided by
+Californian and Australian wines.
+
+Wine in California is still in the experimental stage; and when you
+taste a vintage, grave economical questions are involved.  The
+beginning of vine-planting is like the beginning of mining for the
+precious metals:  the wine-grower also "Prospects." One corner of
+land after another is tried with one kind of grape after another.
+This is a failure; that is better; a third best.  So, bit by bit,
+they grope about for their Clos Vougeot and Lafite.  Those lodes
+and pockets of earth, more precious than the precious ores, that
+yield inimitable fragrance and soft fire; those virtuous Bonanzas,
+where the soil has sublimated under sun and stars to something
+finer, and the wine is bottled poetry:  these still lie
+undiscovered; chaparral conceals, thicket embowers them; the miner
+chips the rock and wanders farther, and the grizzly muses
+undisturbed.  But there they bide their hour, awaiting their
+Columbus; and nature nurses and prepares them.  The smack of
+Californian earth shall linger on the palate of your grandson.
+
+Meanwhile the wine is merely a good wine; the best that I have
+tasted better than a Beaujolais, and not unlike.  But the trade is
+poor; it lives from hand to mouth, putting its all into
+experiments, and forced to sell its vintages.  To find one properly
+matured, and bearing its own name, is to be fortune's favourite.
+
+Bearing its own name, I say, and dwell upon the innuendo.
+
+"You want to know why California wine is not drunk in the States?"
+a San Francisco wine merchant said to me, after he had shown me
+through his premises.  "Well, here's the reason."
+
+And opening a large cupboard, fitted with many little drawers, he
+proceeded to shower me all over with a great variety of gorgeously
+tinted labels, blue, red, or yellow, stamped with crown or coronet,
+and hailing from such a profusion of clos and chateaux, that a
+single department could scarce have furnished forth the names.  But
+it was strange that all looked unfamiliar.
+
+"Chateau X-?" said I.  "I never heard of that."
+
+"I dare say not," said he.  "I had been reading one of X-'s
+novels."
+
+They were all castles in Spain!  But that sure enough is the reason
+why California wine is not drunk in the States.
+
+Napa valley has been long a seat of the wine-growing industry.  It
+did not here begin, as it does too often, in the low valley lands
+along the river, but took at once to the rough foot-hills, where
+alone it can expect to prosper.  A basking inclination, and stones,
+to be a reservoir of the day's heat, seem necessary to the soil for
+wine; the grossness of the earth must be evaporated, its marrow
+daily melted and refined for ages; until at length these clods that
+break below our footing, and to the eye appear but common earth,
+are truly and to the perceiving mind, a masterpiece of nature.  The
+dust of Richebourg, which the wind carries away, what an apotheosis
+of the dust!  Not man himself can seem a stranger child of that
+brown, friable powder, than the blood and sun in that old flask
+behind the faggots.
+
+A Californian vineyard, one of man's outposts in the wilderness,
+has features of its own.  There is nothing here to remind you of
+the Rhine or Rhone, of the low cote d'or, or the infamous and
+scabby deserts of Champagne; but all is green, solitary, covert.
+We visited two of them, Mr. Schram's and Mr. M'Eckron's, sharing
+the same glen.
+
+Some way down the valley below Calistoga, we turned sharply to the
+south and plunged into the thick of the wood.  A rude trail rapidly
+mounting; a little stream tinkling by on the one hand, big enough
+perhaps after the rains, but already yielding up its life; overhead
+and on all sides a bower of green and tangled thicket, still
+fragrant and still flower-bespangled by the early season, where
+thimble-berry played the part of our English hawthorn, and the
+buck-eyes were putting forth their twisted horns of blossom:
+through all this, we struggled toughly upwards, canted to and fro
+by the roughness of the trail, and continually switched across the
+face by sprays of leaf or blossom.  The last is no great
+inconvenience at home; but here in California it is a matter of
+some moment.  For in all woods and by every wayside there prospers
+an abominable shrub or weed, called poison-oak, whose very
+neighbourhood is venomous to some, and whose actual touch is
+avoided by the most impervious.
+
+The two houses, with their vineyards, stood each in a green niche
+of its own in this steep and narrow forest dell.  Though they were
+so near, there was already a good difference in level; and Mr.
+M'Eckron's head must be a long way under the feet of Mr. Schram.
+No more had been cleared than was necessary for cultivation; close
+around each oasis ran the tangled wood; the glen enfolds them;
+there they lie basking in sun and silence, concealed from all but
+the clouds and the mountain birds.
+
+Mr. M'Eckron's is a bachelor establishment; a little bit of a
+wooden house, a small cellar hard by in the hillside, and a patch
+of vines planted and tended single-handed by himself.  He had but
+recently began; his vines were young, his business young also; but
+I thought he had the look of the man who succeeds.  He hailed from
+Greenock:  he remembered his father putting him inside Mons Meg,
+and that touched me home; and we exchanged a word or two of Scotch,
+which pleased me more than you would fancy.
+
+Mr. Schram's, on the other hand, is the oldest vineyard in the
+valley, eighteen years old, I think; yet he began a penniless
+barber, and even after he had broken ground up here with his black
+malvoisies, continued for long to tramp the valley with his razor.
+Now, his place is the picture of prosperity:  stuffed birds in the
+verandah, cellars far dug into the hillside, and resting on pillars
+like a bandit's cave:- all trimness, varnish, flowers, and
+sunshine, among the tangled wildwood.  Stout, smiling Mrs. Schram,
+who has been to Europe and apparently all about the States for
+pleasure, entertained Fanny in the verandah, while I was tasting
+wines in the cellar.  To Mr. Schram this was a solemn office; his
+serious gusto warmed my heart; prosperity had not yet wholly
+banished a certain neophite and girlish trepidation, and he
+followed every sip and read my face with proud anxiety.  I tasted
+all.  I tasted every variety and shade of Schramberger, red and
+white Schramberger, Burgundy Schramberger, Schramberger Hock,
+Schramberger Golden Chasselas, the latter with a notable bouquet,
+and I fear to think how many more.  Much of it goes to London--
+most, I think; and Mr. Schram has a great notion of the English
+taste.
+
+In this wild spot, I did not feel the sacredness of ancient
+cultivation.  It was still raw, it was no Marathon, and no
+Johannisberg; yet the stirring sunlight, and the growing vines, and
+the vats and bottles in the cavern, made a pleasant music for the
+mind.  Here, also, earth's cream was being skimmed and garnered;
+and the London customers can taste, such as it is, the tang of the
+earth in this green valley.  So local, so quintessential is a wine,
+that it seems the very birds in the verandah might communicate a
+flavour, and that romantic cellar influence the bottle next to be
+uncorked in Pimlico, and the smile of jolly Mr. Schram might mantle
+in the glass.
+
+But these are but experiments.  All things in this new land are
+moving farther on:  the wine-vats and the miner's blasting tools
+but picket for a night, like Bedouin pavillions; and to-morrow, to
+fresh woods!  This stir of change and these perpetual echoes of the
+moving footfall, haunt the land.  Men move eternally, still chasing
+Fortune; and, fortune found, still wander.  As we drove back to
+Calistoga, the road lay empty of mere passengers, but its green
+side was dotted with the camps of travelling families:  one
+cumbered with a great waggonful of household stuff, settlers going
+to occupy a ranche they had taken up in Mendocino, or perhaps
+Tehama County; another, a party in dust coats, men and women, whom
+we found camped in a grove on the roadside, all on pleasure bent,
+with a Chinaman to cook for them, and who waved their hands to us
+as we drove by.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV--THE SCOT ABROAD
+
+
+
+A few pages back, I wrote that a man belonged, in these days, to a
+variety of countries; but the old land is still the true love, the
+others are but pleasant infidelities.  Scotland is indefinable; it
+has no unity except upon the map.  Two languages, many dialects,
+innumerable forms of piety, and countless local patriotisms and
+prejudices, part us among ourselves more widely than the extreme
+east and west of that great continent of America.  When I am at
+home, I feel a man from Glasgow to be something like a rival, a man
+from Barra to be more than half a foreigner.  Yet let us meet in
+some far country, and, whether we hail from the braes of Manor or
+the braes of Mar, some ready-made affection joins us on the
+instant.  It is not race.  Look at us.  One is Norse, one Celtic,
+and another Saxon.  It is not community of tongue.  We have it not
+among ourselves; and we have it almost to perfection, with English,
+or Irish, or American.  It is no tie of faith, for we detest each
+other's errors.  And yet somewhere, deep down in the heart of each
+one of us, something yearns for the old land, and the old kindly
+people.
+
+Of all mysteries of the human heart, this is perhaps the most
+inscrutable.  There is no special loveliness in that gray country,
+with its rainy, sea-beat archipelago; its fields of dark mountains;
+its unsightly places, black with coal; its treeless, sour,
+unfriendly looking corn-lands; its quaint, gray, castled city,
+where the bells clash of a Sunday, and the wind squalls, and the
+salt showers fly and beat.  I do not even know if I desire to live
+there; but let me hear, in some far land, a kindred voice sing out,
+"Oh, why left I my hame?" and it seems at once as if no beauty
+under the kind heavens, and no society of the wise and good, can
+repay me for my absence from my country.  And though I think I
+would rather die elsewhere, yet in my heart of hearts I long to be
+buried among good Scots clods.  I will say it fairly, it grows on
+me with every year:  there are no stars so lovely as Edinburgh
+street-lamps.  When I forget thee, auld Reekie, may my right hand
+forget its cunning!
+
+The happiest lot on earth is to be born a Scotchman.  You must pay
+for it in many ways, as for all other advantages on earth.  You
+have to learn the paraphrases and the shorter catechism; you
+generally take to drink; your youth, as far as I can find out, is a
+time of louder war against society, of more outcry and tears and
+turmoil, than if you had been born, for instance, in England.  But
+somehow life is warmer and closer; the hearth burns more redly; the
+lights of home shine softer on the rainy street; the very names,
+endeared in verse and music, cling nearer round our hearts.  An
+Englishman may meet an Englishman to-morrow, upon Chimborazo, and
+neither of them care; but when the Scotch wine-grower told me of
+Mons Meg, it was like magic.
+
+
+"From the dim shieling on the misty island
+Mountains divide us, and a world of seas;
+Yet still our hearts are true, our hearts are Highland,
+And we, in dreams, behold the Hebrides."
+
+
+And, Highland and Lowland, all our hearts are Scotch.
+
+Only a few days after I had seen M'Eckron, a message reached me in
+my cottage.  It was a Scotchman who had come down a long way from
+the hills to market.  He had heard there was a countryman in
+Calistoga, and came round to the hotel to see him.  We said a few
+words to each other; we had not much to say--should never have seen
+each other had we stayed at home, separated alike in space and in
+society; and then we shook hands, and he went his way again to his
+ranche among the hills, and that was all.
+
+Another Scotchman there was, a resident, who for the more love of
+the common country, douce, serious, religious man, drove me all
+about the valley, and took as much interest in me as if I had been
+his son:  more, perhaps; for the son has faults too keenly felt,
+while the abstract countryman is perfect--like a whiff of peats.
+
+And there was yet another.  Upon him I came suddenly, as he was
+calmly entering my cottage, his mind quite evidently bent on
+plunder:  a man of about fifty, filthy, ragged, roguish, with a
+chimney-pot hat and a tail coat, and a pursing of his mouth that
+might have been envied by an elder of the kirk.  He had just such a
+face as I have seen a dozen times behind the plate.
+
+"Hullo, sir!" I cried.  "Where are you going?"
+
+He turned round without a quiver.
+
+"You're a Scotchman, sir?" he said gravely.  "So am I; I come from
+Aberdeen.  This is my card," presenting me with a piece of
+pasteboard which he had raked out of some gutter in the period of
+the rains.  "I was just examining this palm," he continued,
+indicating the misbegotten plant before our door, "which is the
+largest spAcimen I have yet observed in Califoarnia."
+
+There were four or five larger within sight.  But where was the use
+of argument?  He produced a tape-line, made me help him to measure
+the tree at the level of the ground, and entered the figures in a
+large and filthy pocket-book, all with the gravity of Solomon.  He
+then thanked me profusely, remarking that such little services were
+due between countrymen; shook hands with me, "for add lang syne,"
+as he said; and took himself solemnly away, radiating dirt and
+humbug as he went.
+
+A month or two after this encounter of mine, there came a Scot to
+Sacramento--perhaps from Aberdeen.  Anyway, there never was any one
+more Scotch in this wide world.  He could sing and dance, and
+drink, I presume; and he played the pipes with vigour and success.
+All the Scotch in Sacramento became infatuated with him, and spent
+their spare time and money, driving him about in an open cab,
+between drinks, while he blew himself scarlet at the pipes.  This
+is a very sad story.  After he had borrowed money from every one,
+he and his pipes suddenly disappeared from Sacramento, and when I
+last heard, the police were looking for him.
+
+I cannot say how this story amused me, when I felt myself so
+thoroughly ripe on both sides to be duped in the same way.
+
+It is at least a curious thing, to conclude, that the races which
+wander widest, Jews and Scotch, should be the most clannish in the
+world.  But perhaps these two are cause and effect:  "For ye were
+strangers in the land of Egypt."
+
+
+
+
+PART II--WITH THE CHILDREN OF ISRAEL
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.--TO INTRODUCE MR. KELMAR
+
+
+
+One thing in this new country very particularly strikes a stranger,
+and that is the number of antiquities.  Already there have been
+many cycles of population succeeding each other, and passing away
+and leaving behind them relics.  These, standing on into changed
+times, strike the imagination as forcibly as any pyramid or feudal
+tower.  The towns, like the vineyards, are experimentally founded:
+they grow great and prosper by passing occasions; and when the lode
+comes to an end, and the miners move elsewhere, the town remains
+behind them, like Palmyra in the desert.  I suppose there are, in
+no country in the world, so many deserted towns as here in
+California.
+
+The whole neighbourhood of Mount Saint Helena, now so quiet and
+sylvan, was once alive with mining camps and villages.  Here there
+would be two thousand souls under canvas; there one thousand or
+fifteen hundred ensconced, as if for ever, in a town of comfortable
+houses.  But the luck had failed, the mines petered out; and the
+army of miners had departed, and left this quarter of the world to
+the rattlesnakes and deer and grizzlies, and to the slower but
+steadier advance of husbandry.
+
+It was with an eye on one of these deserted places, Pine Flat, on
+the Geysers road, that we had come first to Calistoga.  There is
+something singularly enticing in the idea of going, rent-free, into
+a ready-made house.  And to the British merchant, sitting at home
+at ease, it may appear that, with such a roof over your head and a
+spring of clear water hard by, the whole problem of the squatter's
+existence would be solved.  Food, however, has yet to be
+considered, I will go as far as most people on tinned meats; some
+of the brightest moments of my life were passed over tinned mulli-
+gatawney in the cabin of a sixteen-ton schooner, storm-stayed in
+Portree Bay; but after suitable experiments, I pronounce
+authoritatively that man cannot live by tins alone.  Fresh meat
+must be had on an occasion.  It is true that the great Foss,
+driving by along the Geysers road, wooden-faced, but glorified with
+legend, might have been induced to bring us meat, but the great
+Foss could hardly bring us milk.  To take a cow would have involved
+taking a field of grass and a milkmaid; after which it would have
+been hardly worth while to pause, and we might have added to our
+colony a flock of sheep and an experienced butcher.
+
+It is really very disheartening how we depend on other people in
+this life.  "Mihi est propositum," as you may see by the motto, "id
+quod regibus;" and behold it cannot be carried out, unless I find a
+neighbour rolling in cattle.
+
+Now, my principal adviser in this matter was one whom I will call
+Kelmar.  That was not what he called himself, but as soon as I set
+eyes on him, I knew it was or ought to be his name; I am sure it
+will be his name among the angels.  Kelmar was the store-keeper, a
+Russian Jew, good-natured, in a very thriving way of business, and,
+on equal terms, one of the most serviceable of men.  He also had
+something of the expression of a Scotch country elder, who, by some
+peculiarity, should chance to be a Hebrew.  He had a projecting
+under lip, with which he continually smiled, or rather smirked.
+Mrs. Kelmar was a singularly kind woman; and the oldest son had
+quite a dark and romantic bearing, and might be heard on summer
+evenings playing sentimental airs on the violin.
+
+I had no idea, at the time I made his acquaintance, what an
+important person Kelmar was.  But the Jew store-keepers of
+California, profiting at once by the needs and habits of the
+people, have made themselves in too many cases the tyrants of the
+rural population.  Credit is offered, is pressed on the new
+customer, and when once he is beyond his depth, the tune changes,
+and he is from thenceforth a white slave.  I believe, even from the
+little I saw, that Kelmar, if he choose to put on the screw, could
+send half the settlers packing in a radius of seven or eight miles
+round Calistoga.  These are continually paying him, but are never
+suffered to get out of debt.  He palms dull goods upon them, for
+they dare not refuse to buy; he goes and dines with them when he is
+on an outing, and no man is loudlier welcomed; he is their family
+friend, the director of their business, and, to a degree elsewhere
+unknown in modern days, their king.
+
+For some reason, Kelmar always shook his head at the mention of
+Pine Flat, and for some days I thought he disapproved of the whole
+scheme and was proportionately sad.  One fine morning, however, he
+met me, wreathed in smiles.  He had found the very place for me--
+Silverado, another old mining town, right up the mountain.  Rufe
+Hanson, the hunter, could take care of us--fine people the Hansons;
+we should be close to the Toll House, where the Lakeport stage
+called daily; it was the best place for my health, besides.  Rufe
+had been consumptive, and was now quite a strong man, ain't it?  In
+short, the place and all its accompaniments seemed made for us on
+purpose.
+
+He took me to his back door, whence, as from every point of
+Calistoga, Mount Saint Helena could be seen towering in the air.
+There, in the nick, just where the eastern foothills joined the
+mountain, and she herself began to rise above the zone of forest--
+there was Silverado.  The name had already pleased me; the high
+station pleased me still more.  I began to inquire with some
+eagerness.  It was but a little while ago that Silverado was a
+great place.  The mine--a silver mine, of course--had promised
+great things.  There was quite a lively population, with several
+hotels and boarding-houses; and Kelmar himself had opened a branch
+store, and done extremely well--"Ain't it?" he said, appealing to
+his wife.  And she said, "Yes; extremely well." Now there was no
+one living in the town but Rufe the hunter; and once more I heard
+Rufe's praises by the yard, and this time sung in chorus.
+
+I could not help perceiving at the time that there was something
+underneath; that no unmixed desire to have us comfortably settled
+had inspired the Kelmars with this flow of words.  But I was
+impatient to be gone, to be about my kingly project; and when we
+were offered seats in Kelmar's waggon, I accepted on the spot.  The
+plan of their next Sunday's outing took them, by good fortune, over
+the border into Lake County.  They would carry us so far, drop us
+at the Toll House, present us to the Hansons, and call for us again
+on Monday morning early.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II--FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF SILVERADO
+
+
+
+We were to leave by six precisely; that was solemnly pledged on
+both sides; and a messenger came to us the last thing at night, to
+remind us of the hour.  But it was eight before we got clear of
+Calistoga:  Kelmar, Mrs. Kelmar, a friend of theirs whom we named
+Abramina, her little daughter, my wife, myself, and, stowed away
+behind us, a cluster of ship's coffee-kettles.  These last were
+highly ornamental in the sheen of their bright tin, but I could
+invent no reason for their presence.  Our carriageful reckoned up,
+as near as we could get at it, some three hundred years to the six
+of us.  Four of the six, besides, were Hebrews.  But I never, in
+all my life, was conscious of so strong an atmosphere of holiday.
+No word was spoken but of pleasure; and even when we drove in
+silence, nods and smiles went round the party like refreshments.
+
+The sun shone out of a cloudless sky.  Close at the zenith rode the
+belated moon, still clearly visible, and, along one margin, even
+bright.  The wind blew a gale from the north; the trees roared; the
+corn and the deep grass in the valley fled in whitening surges; the
+dust towered into the air along the road and dispersed like the
+smoke of battle.  It was clear in our teeth from the first, and for
+all the windings of the road it managed to keep clear in our teeth
+until the end.
+
+For some two miles we rattled through the valley, skirting the
+eastern foothills; then we struck off to the right, through haugh-
+land, and presently, crossing a dry water-course, entered the Toll
+road, or, to be more local, entered on "the grade."  The road
+mounts the near shoulder of Mount Saint Helena, bound northward
+into Lake County.  In one place it skirts along the edge of a
+narrow and deep canyon, filled with trees, and I was glad, indeed,
+not to be driven at this point by the dashing Foss.  Kelmar, with
+his unvarying smile, jogging to the motion of the trap, drove for
+all the world like a good, plain, country clergyman at home; and I
+profess I blessed him unawares for his timidity.
+
+Vineyards and deep meadows, islanded and framed with thicket, gave
+place more and more as we ascended to woods of oak and madrona,
+dotted with enormous pines.  It was these pines, as they shot above
+the lower wood, that produced that pencilling of single trees I had
+so often remarked from the valley.  Thence, looking up and from
+however far, each fir stands separate against the sky no bigger
+than an eyelash; and all together lend a quaint, fringed aspect to
+the hills.  The oak is no baby; even the madrona, upon these spurs
+of Mount Saint Helena, comes to a fine bulk and ranks with forest
+trees--but the pines look down upon the rest for underwood.  As
+Mount Saint Helena among her foothills, so these dark giants out-
+top their fellow-vegetables.  Alas! if they had left the redwoods,
+the pines, in turn, would have been dwarfed.  But the redwoods,
+fallen from their high estate, are serving as family bedsteads, or
+yet more humbly as field fences, along all Napa Valley.
+
+A rough smack of resin was in the air, and a crystal mountain
+purity.  It came pouring over these green slopes by the oceanful.
+The woods sang aloud, and gave largely of their healthful breath.
+Gladness seemed to inhabit these upper zones, and we had left
+indifference behind us in the valley.  "I to the hills lift mine
+eyes!"  There are days in a life when thus to climb out of the
+lowlands, seems like scaling heaven.
+
+As we continued to ascend, the wind fell upon us with increasing
+strength.  It was a wonder how the two stout horses managed to pull
+us up that steep incline and still face the athletic opposition of
+the wind, or how their great eyes were able to endure the dust.
+Ten minutes after we went by, a tree fell, blocking the road; and
+even before us leaves were thickly strewn, and boughs had fallen,
+large enough to make the passage difficult.  But now we were hard
+by the summit.  The road crosses the ridge, just in the nick that
+Kelmar showed me from below, and then, without pause, plunges down
+a deep, thickly wooded glen on the farther side.  At the highest
+point a trail strikes up the main hill to the leftward; and that
+leads to Silverado.  A hundred yards beyond, and in a kind of elbow
+of the glen, stands the Toll House Hotel.  We came up the one side,
+were caught upon the summit by the whole weight of the wind as it
+poured over into Napa Valley, and a minute after had drawn up in
+shelter, but all buffetted and breathless, at the Toll House door.
+
+A water-tank, and stables, and a gray house of two stories, with
+gable ends and a verandah, are jammed hard against the hillside,
+just where a stream has cut for itself a narrow canyon, filled with
+pines.  The pines go right up overhead; a little more and the
+stream might have played, like a fire-hose, on the Toll House roof.
+In front the ground drops as sharply as it rises behind.  There is
+just room for the road and a sort of promontory of croquet ground,
+and then you can lean over the edge and look deep below you through
+the wood.  I said croquet GROUND, not GREEN; for the surface was of
+brown, beaten earth.  The toll-bar itself was the only other note
+of originality:  a long beam, turning on a post, and kept slightly
+horizontal by a counterweight of stones.  Regularly about sundown
+this rude barrier was swung, like a derrick, across the road and
+made fast, I think, to a tree upon the farther side.
+
+On our arrival there followed a gay scene in the bar.  I was
+presented to Mr. Corwin, the landlord; to Mr. Jennings, the
+engineer, who lives there for his health; to Mr. Hoddy, a most
+pleasant little gentleman, once a member of the Ohio legislature,
+again the editor of a local paper, and now, with undiminished
+dignity, keeping the Toll House bar.  I had a number of drinks and
+cigars bestowed on me, and enjoyed a famous opportunity of seeing
+Kelmar in his glory, friendly, radiant, smiling, steadily edging
+one of the ship's kettles on the reluctant Corwin.
+
+Corwin, plainly aghast, resisted gallantly, and for that bout
+victory crowned his arms.
+
+At last we set forth for Silverado on foot.  Kelmar and his jolly
+Jew girls were full of the sentiment of Sunday outings, breathed
+geniality and vagueness, and suffered a little vile boy from the
+hotel to lead them here and there about the woods.  For three
+people all so old, so bulky in body, and belonging to a race so
+venerable, they could not but surprise us by their extreme and
+almost imbecile youthfulness of spirit.  They were only going to
+stay ten minutes at the Toll House; had they not twenty long miles
+of road before them on the other side?  Stay to dinner?  Not they!
+Put up the horses? Never.  Let us attach them to the verandah by a
+wisp of straw rope, such as would not have held a person's hat on
+that blustering day.  And with all these protestations of hurry,
+they proved irresponsible like children.  Kelmar himself, shrewd
+old Russian Jew, with a smirk that seemed just to have concluded a
+bargain to its satisfaction, intrusted himself and us devoutly to
+that boy.  Yet the boy was patently fallacious; and for that matter
+a most unsympathetic urchin, raised apparently on gingerbread.  He
+was bent on his own pleasure, nothing else; and Kelmar followed him
+to his ruin, with the same shrewd smirk.  If the boy said there was
+"a hole there in the hill"--a hole, pure and simple, neither more
+nor less--Kelmar and his Jew girls would follow him a hundred yards
+to look complacently down that hole.  For two hours we looked for
+houses; and for two hours they followed us, smelling trees, picking
+flowers, foisting false botany on the unwary.  Had we taken five,
+with that vile lad to head them off on idle divagations, for five
+they would have smiled and stumbled through the woods.
+
+However, we came forth at length, and as by accident, upon a lawn,
+sparse planted like an orchard, but with forest instead of fruit
+trees.  That was the site of Silverado mining town.  A piece of
+ground was levelled up, where Kelmar's store had been; and facing
+that we saw Rufe Hanson's house, still bearing on its front the
+legend Silverado Hotel.  Not another sign of habitation.  Silverado
+town had all been carted from the scene; one of the houses was now
+the school-house far down the road; one was gone here, one there,
+but all were gone away.
+
+It was now a sylvan solitude, and the silence was unbroken but by
+the great, vague voice of the wind.  Some days before our visit, a
+grizzly bear had been sporting round the Hansons' chicken-house.
+
+Mrs. Hanson was at home alone, we found.  Rufe had been out after a
+"bar," had risen late, and was now gone, it did not clearly appear
+whither.  Perhaps he had had wind of Kelmar's coming, and was now
+ensconced among the underwood, or watching us from the shoulder of
+the mountain.  We, hearing there were no houses to be had, were for
+immediately giving up all hopes of Silverado.  But this, somehow,
+was not to Kelmar's fancy.  He first proposed that we should "camp
+someveres around, ain't it?" waving his hand cheerily as though to
+weave a spell; and when that was firmly rejected, he decided that
+we must take up house with the Hansons.  Mrs. Hanson had been, from
+the first, flustered, subdued, and a little pale; but from this
+proposition she recoiled with haggard indignation.  So did we, who
+would have preferred, in a manner of speaking, death.  But Kelmar
+was not to be put by.  He edged Mrs. Hanson into a corner, where
+for a long time he threatened her with his forefinger, like a
+character in Dickens; and the poor woman, driven to her
+entrenchments, at last remembered with a shriek that there were
+still some houses at the tunnel.
+
+Thither we went; the Jews, who should already have been miles into
+Lake County, still cheerily accompanying us.  For about a furlong
+we followed a good road alone, the hillside through the forest,
+until suddenly that road widened out and came abruptly to an end.
+A canyon, woody below, red, rocky, and naked overhead, was here
+walled across by a dump of rolling stones, dangerously steep, and
+from twenty to thirty feet in height.  A rusty iron chute on wooden
+legs came flying, like a monstrous gargoyle, across the parapet.
+It was down this that they poured the precious ore; and below here
+the carts stood to wait their lading, and carry it mill-ward down
+the mountain.
+
+The whole canyon was so entirely blocked, as if by some rude
+guerilla fortification, that we could only mount by lengths of
+wooden ladder, fixed in the hillside.  These led us round the
+farther corner of the dump; and when they were at an end, we still
+persevered over loose rubble and wading deep in poison oak, till we
+struck a triangular platform, filling up the whole glen, and shut
+in on either hand by bold projections of the mountain.  Only in
+front the place was open like the proscenium of a theatre, and we
+looked forth into a great realm of air, and down upon treetops and
+hilltops, and far and near on wild and varied country.  The place
+still stood as on the day it was deserted:  a line of iron rails
+with a bifurcation; a truck in working order; a world of lumber,
+old wood, old iron; a blacksmith's forge on one side, half buried
+in the leaves of dwarf madronas; and on the other, an old brown
+wooden house.
+
+Fanny and I dashed at the house.  It consisted of three rooms, and
+was so plastered against the hill, that one room was right atop of
+another, that the upper floor was more than twice as large as the
+lower, and that all three apartments must be entered from a
+different side and level.  Not a window-sash remained.
+
+The door of the lower room was smashed, and one panel hung in
+splinters.  We entered that, and found a fair amount of rubbish:
+sand and gravel that had been sifted in there by the mountain
+winds; straw, sticks, and stones; a table, a barrel; a plate-rack
+on the wall; two home-made bootjacks, signs of miners and their
+boots; and a pair of papers pinned on the boarding, headed
+respectively "Funnel No. 1," and "Funnel No. 2," but with the tails
+torn away.  The window, sashless of course, was choked with the
+green and sweetly smelling foliage of a bay; and through a chink in
+the floor, a spray of poison oak had shot up and was handsomely
+prospering in the interior.  It was my first care to cut away that
+poison oak, Fanny standing by at a respectful distance.  That was
+our first improvement by which we took possession.
+
+The room immediately above could only be entered by a plank propped
+against the threshold, along which the intruder must foot it
+gingerly, clutching for support to sprays of poison oak, the proper
+product of the country.  Herein was, on either hand, a triple tier
+of beds, where miners had once lain; and the other gable was
+pierced by a sashless window and a doorless doorway opening on the
+air of heaven, five feet above the ground.  As for the third room,
+which entered squarely from the ground level, but higher up the
+hill and farther up the canyon, it contained only rubbish and the
+uprights for another triple tier of beds.
+
+The whole building was overhung by a bold, lion-like, red rock.
+Poison oak, sweet bay trees, calcanthus, brush, and chaparral, grew
+freely but sparsely all about it. In front, in the strong sunshine,
+the platform lay overstrewn with busy litter, as though the labours
+of the mine might begin again to-morrow in the morning.
+
+Following back into the canyon, among the mass of rotting plant and
+through the flowering bushes, we came to a great crazy staging,
+with a wry windless on the top; and clambering up, we could look
+into an open shaft, leading edgeways down into the bowels of the
+mountain, trickling with water, and lit by some stray sun-gleams,
+whence I know not.  In that quiet place the still, far-away tinkle
+of the water-drops was loudly audible.  Close by, another shaft led
+edgeways up into the superincumbent shoulder of the hill.  It lay
+partly open; and sixty or a hundred feet above our head, we could
+see the strata propped apart by solid wooden wedges, and a pine,
+half undermined, precariously nodding on the verge.  Here also a
+rugged, horizontal tunnel ran straight into the unsunned bowels of
+the rock.  This secure angle in the mountain's flank was, even on
+this wild day, as still as my lady's chamber.  But in the tunnel a
+cold, wet draught tempestuously blew.  Nor have I ever known that
+place otherwise than cold and windy.
+
+Such was our fist prospect of Juan Silverado.  I own I had looked
+for something different:  a clique of neighbourly houses on a
+village green, we shall say, all empty to be sure, but swept and
+varnished; a trout stream brawling by; great elms or chestnuts,
+humming with bees and nested in by song-birds; and the mountains
+standing round about, as at Jerusalem.  Here, mountain and house
+and the old tools of industry were all alike rusty and downfalling.
+The hill was here wedged up, and there poured forth its bowels in a
+spout of broken mineral; man with his picks and powder, and nature
+with her own great blasting tools of sun and rain, labouring
+together at the ruin of that proud mountain.  The view up the
+canyon was a glimpse of devastation; dry red minerals sliding
+together, here and there a crag, here and there dwarf thicket
+clinging in the general glissade, and over all a broken outline
+trenching on the blue of heaven.  Downwards indeed, from our rock
+eyrie, we behold the greener side of nature; and the bearing of the
+pines and the sweet smell of bays and nutmegs commanded themselves
+gratefully to our senses.  One way and another, now the die was
+cast.  Silverado be it!
+
+After we had got back to the Toll House, the Jews were not long of
+striking forward.  But I observed that one of the Hanson lads came
+down, before their departure, and returned with a ship's kettle.
+Happy Hansons!  Nor was it until after Kelmar was gone, if I
+remember rightly, that Rufe put in an appearance to arrange the
+details of our installation.
+
+The latter part of the day, Fanny and I sat in the verandah of the
+Toll House, utterly stunned by the uproar of the wind among the
+trees on the other side of the valley.  Sometimes, we would have it
+it was like a sea, but it was not various enough for that; and
+again, we thought it like the roar of a cataract, but it was too
+changeful for the cataract; and then we would decide, speaking in
+sleepy voices, that it could be compared with nothing but itself.
+My mind was entirely preoccupied by the noise.  I hearkened to it
+by the hour, gapingly hearkened, and let my cigarette go out.
+Sometimes the wind would make a sally nearer hand, and send a
+shrill, whistling crash among the foliage on our side of the glen;
+and sometimes a back-draught would strike into the elbow where we
+sat, and cast the gravel and torn leaves into our faces.  But for
+the most part, this great, streaming gale passed unweariedly by us
+into Napa Valley, not two hundred yards away, visible by the
+tossing boughs, stunningly audible, and yet not moving a hair upon
+our heads.  So it blew all night long while I was writing up my
+journal, and after we were in bed, under a cloudless, starset
+heaven; and so it was blowing still next morning when we rose.
+
+It was a laughable thought to us, what had become of our cheerful,
+wandering Hebrews.  We could not suppose they had reached a
+destination.  The meanest boy could lead them miles out of their
+way to see a gopher-hole.  Boys, we felt to be their special
+danger; none others were of that exact pitch of cheerful
+irrelevancy to exercise a kindred sway upon their minds:  but
+before the attractions of a boy their most settled resolutions
+would be war.  We thought we could follow in fancy these three aged
+Hebrew truants wandering in and out on hilltop and in thicket, a
+demon boy trotting far ahead, their will-o'-the-wisp conductor; and
+at last about midnight, the wind still roaring in the darkness, we
+had a vision of all three on their knees upon a mountain-top around
+a glow-worm.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III. THE RETURN
+
+
+
+Next morning we were up by half-past five, according to agreement,
+and it was ten by the clock before our Jew boys returned to pick us
+up.  Kelmar, Mrs. Kelmar, and Abramina, all smiling from ear to
+ear, and full of tales of the hospitality they had found on the
+other side.  It had not gone unrewarded; for I observed with
+interest that the ship's kettles, all but one, had been "placed."
+Three Lake County families, at least, endowed for life with a
+ship's kettle.  Come, this was no misspent Sunday.  The absence of
+the kettles told its own story:  our Jews said nothing about them;
+but, on the other hand, they said many kind and comely things about
+the people they had met.  The two women, in particular, had been
+charmed out of themselves by the sight of a young girl surrounded
+by her admirers; all evening, it appeared, they had been triumphing
+together in the girl's innocent successes, and to this natural and
+unselfish joy they gave expression in language that was beautiful
+by its simplicity and truth.
+
+Take them for all in all, few people have done my heart more good;
+they seemed so thoroughly entitled to happiness, and to enjoy it in
+so large a measure and so free from after-thought; almost they
+persuaded me to be a Jew.  There was, indeed, a chink of money in
+their talk.  They particularly commanded people who were well to
+do.  "HE don't care--ain't it?" was their highest word of
+commendation to an individual fate; and here I seem to grasp the
+root of their philosophy--it was to be free from care, to be free
+to make these Sunday wanderings, that they so eagerly pursued after
+wealth; and all this carefulness was to be careless.  The fine,
+good humour of all three seemed to declare they had attained their
+end.  Yet there was the other side to it; and the recipients of
+kettles perhaps cared greatly.
+
+No sooner had they returned, than the scene of yesterday began
+again.  The horses were not even tied with a straw rope this time--
+it was not worth while; and Kelmar disappeared into the bar,
+leaving them under a tree on the other side of the road.  I had to
+devote myself.  I stood under the shadow of that tree for, I
+suppose, hard upon an hour, and had not the heart to be angry.
+Once some one remembered me, and brought me out half a tumblerful
+of the playful, innocuous American cocktail.  I drank it, and lo!
+veins of living fire ran down my leg; and then a focus of
+conflagration remained seated in my stomach, not unpleasantly, for
+quarter of an hour.  I love these sweet, fiery pangs, but I will
+not court them.  The bulk of the time I spent in repeating as much
+French poetry as I could remember to the horses, who seemed to
+enjoy it hugely.  And now it went -
+
+
+"O ma vieille Font-georges
+Ou volent les rouges-gorges:"
+
+
+and again, to a more trampling measure -
+
+
+"Et tout tremble, Irun, Coimbre,
+Sautander, Almodovar,
+Sitot qu'on entend le timbre
+Des cymbales do Bivar."
+
+
+The redbreasts and the brooks of Europe, in that dry and songless
+land; brave old names and wars, strong cities, cymbals, and bright
+armour, in that nook of the mountain, sacred only to the Indian and
+the bear!  This is still the strangest thing in all man's
+travelling, that he should carry about with him incongruous
+memories.  There is no foreign land; it is the traveller only that
+is foreign, and now and again, by a flash of recollection, lights
+up the contrasts of the earth.
+
+But while I was thus wandering in my fancy, great feats had been
+transacted in the bar.  Corwin the bold had fallen, Kelmar was
+again crowned with laurels, and the last of the ship's kettles had
+changed hands.  If I had ever doubted the purity of Kelmar's
+motives, if I had ever suspected him of a single eye to business in
+his eternal dallyings, now at least, when the last kettle was
+disposed of, my suspicions must have been allayed.  I dare not
+guess how much more time was wasted; nor how often we drove off,
+merely to drive back again and renew interrupted conversations
+about nothing, before the Toll House was fairly left behind.  Alas!
+and not a mile down the grade there stands a ranche in a sunny
+vineyard, and here we must all dismount again and enter.
+
+Only the old lady was at home, Mrs. Guele, a brown old Swiss dame,
+the picture of honesty; and with her we drank a bottle of wine and
+had an age-long conversation, which would have been highly
+delightful if Fanny and I had not been faint with hunger.  The
+ladies each narrated the story of her marriage, our two Hebrews
+with the prettiest combination of sentiment and financial bathos.
+Abramina, specially, endeared herself with every word.  She was as
+simple, natural, and engaging as a kid that should have been
+brought up to the business of a money-changer.  One touch was so
+resplendently Hebraic that I cannot pass it over.  When her "old
+man" wrote home for her from America, her old man's family would
+not intrust her with the money for the passage, till she had bound
+herself by an oath--on her knees, I think she said--not to employ
+it otherwise.
+
+This had tickled Abramina hugely, but I think it tickled me fully
+more.
+
+Mrs. Guele told of her home-sickness up here in the long winters;
+of her honest, country-woman troubles and alarms upon the journey;
+how in the bank at Frankfort she had feared lest the banker, after
+having taken her cheque, should deny all knowledge of it--a fear I
+have myself every time I go to a bank; and how crossing the
+Luneburger Heath, an old lady, witnessing her trouble and finding
+whither she was bound, had given her "the blessing of a person
+eighty years old, which would be sure to bring her safely to the
+States.  And the first thing I did," added Mrs. Guele, "was to fall
+downstairs."
+
+At length we got out of the house, and some of us into the trap,
+when--judgment of Heaven!--here came Mr. Guele from his vineyard.
+So another quarter of an hour went by; till at length, at our
+earnest pleading, we set forth again in earnest, Fanny and I white-
+faced and silent, but the Jews still smiling.  The heart fails me.
+There was yet another stoppage!  And we drove at last into
+Calistoga past two in the afternoon, Fanny and I having breakfasted
+at six in the morning, eight mortal hours before.  We were a pallid
+couple; but still the Jews were smiling.
+
+So ended our excursion with the village usurers; and, now that it
+was done, we had no more idea of the nature of the business, nor of
+the part we had been playing in it, than the child unborn.  That
+all the people we had met were the slaves of Kelmar, though in
+various degrees of servitude; that we ourselves had been sent up
+the mountain in the interests of none but Kelmar; that the money we
+laid out, dollar by dollar, cent by cent, and through the hands of
+various intermediaries, should all hop ultimately into Kelmar's
+till;--these were facts that we only grew to recognize in the
+course of time and by the accumulation of evidence.  At length all
+doubt was quieted, when one of the kettle-holders confessed.
+Stopping his trap in the moonlight, a little way out of Calistoga,
+he told me, in so many words, that he dare not show face therewith
+an empty pocket.  "You see, I don't mind if it was only five
+dollars, Mr. Stevens," he said, "but I must give Mr. Kelmar
+SOMETHING."
+
+Even now, when the whole tyranny is plain to me, I cannot find it
+in my heart to be as angry as perhaps I should be with the Hebrew
+tyrant.  The whole game of business is beggar my neighbour; and
+though perhaps that game looks uglier when played at such close
+quarters and on so small a scale, it is none the more intrinsically
+inhumane for that.  The village usurer is not so sad a feature of
+humanity and human progress as the millionaire manufacturer,
+fattening on the toil and loss of thousands, and yet declaiming
+from the platform against the greed and dishonesty of landlords.
+If it were fair for Cobden to buy up land from owners whom he
+thought unconscious of its proper value, it was fair enough for my
+Russian Jew to give credit to his farmers.  Kelmar, if he was
+unconscious of the beam in his own eye, was at least silent in the
+matter of his brother's mote.
+
+
+
+THE ACT OF SQUATTING
+
+
+
+There were four of us squatters--myself and my wife, the King and
+Queen of Silverado; Sam, the Crown Prince; and Chuchu, the Grand
+Duke.  Chuchu, a setter crossed with spaniel, was the most unsuited
+for a rough life.  He had been nurtured tenderly in the society of
+ladies; his heart was large and soft; he regarded the sofa-cushion
+as a bed-rook necessary of existence.  Though about the size of a
+sheep, he loved to sit in ladies' laps; he never said a bad word in
+all his blameless days; and if he had seen a flute, I am sure he
+could have played upon it by nature.  It may seem hard to say it of
+a dog, but Chuchu was a tame cat.
+
+The king and queen, the grand duke, and a basket of cold provender
+for immediate use, set forth from Calistoga in a double buggy; the
+crown prince, on horseback, led the way like an outrider.  Bags and
+boxes and a second-hand stove were to follow close upon our heels
+by Hanson's team.
+
+It was a beautiful still day; the sky was one field of azure.  Not
+a leaf moved, not a speck appeared in heaven.  Only from the summit
+of the mountain one little snowy wisp of cloud after another kept
+detaching itself, like smoke from a volcano, and blowing southward
+in some high stream of air:  Mount Saint Helena still at her
+interminable task, making the weather, like a Lapland witch.
+
+By noon we had come in sight of the mill:  a great brown building,
+half-way up the hill, big as a factory, two stories high, and with
+tanks and ladders along the roof; which, as a pendicle of Silverado
+mine, we held to be an outlying province of our own.  Thither,
+then, we went, crossing the valley by a grassy trail; and there
+lunched out of the basket, sitting in a kind of portico, and
+wondering, while we ate, at this great bulk of useless building.
+Through a chink we could look far down into the interior, and see
+sunbeams floating in the dust and striking on tier after tier of
+silent, rusty machinery.  It cost six thousand dollars, twelve
+hundred English sovereigns; and now, here it stands deserted, like
+the temple of a forgotten religion, the busy millers toiling
+somewhere else.  All the time we were there, mill and mill town
+showed no sign of life; that part of the mountain-side, which is
+very open and green, was tenanted by no living creature but
+ourselves and the insects; and nothing stirred but the cloud
+manufactory upon the mountain summit.  It was odd to compare this
+with the former days, when the engine was in fall blast, the mill
+palpitating to its strokes, and the carts came rattling down from
+Silverado, charged with ore.
+
+By two we had been landed at the mine, the buggy was gone again,
+and we were left to our own reflections and the basket of cold
+provender, until Hanson should arrive.  Hot as it was by the sun,
+there was something chill in such a home-coming, in that world of
+wreck and rust, splinter and rolling gravel, where for so many
+years no fire had smoked.
+
+Silverado platform filled the whole width of the canyon.  Above, as
+I have said, this was a wild, red, stony gully in the mountains;
+but below it was a wooded dingle.  And through this, I was told,
+there had gone a path between the mine and the Toll House--our
+natural north-west passage to civilization.  I found and followed
+it, clearing my way as I went through fallen branches and dead
+trees.  It went straight down that steep canyon, till it brought
+you out abruptly over the roofs of the hotel.  There was nowhere
+any break in the descent.  It almost seemed as if, were you to drop
+a stone down the old iron chute at our platform, it would never
+rest until it hopped upon the Toll House shingles.  Signs were not
+wanting of the ancient greatness of Silverado.  The footpath was
+well marked, and had been well trodden in the old clays by thirsty
+miners.  And far down, buried in foliage, deep out of sight of
+Silverado, I came on a last outpost of the mine--a mound of gravel,
+some wreck of wooden aqueduct, and the mouth of a tunnel, like a
+treasure grotto in a fairy story.  A stream of water, fed by the
+invisible leakage from our shaft, and dyed red with cinnabar or
+iron, ran trippingly forth out of the bowels of the cave; and,
+looking far under the arch, I could see something like an iron
+lantern fastened on the rocky wall.  It was a promising spot for
+the imagination.  No boy could have left it unexplored.
+
+The stream thenceforward stole along the bottom of the dingle, and
+made, for that dry land, a pleasant warbling in the leaves.  Once,
+I suppose, it ran splashing down the whole length of the canyon,
+but now its head waters had been tapped by the shaft at Silverado,
+and for a great part of its course it wandered sunless among the
+joints of the mountain.  No wonder that it should better its pace
+when it sees, far before it, daylight whitening in the arch, or
+that it should come trotting forth into the sunlight with a song.
+
+The two stages had gone by when I got down, and the Toll House
+stood, dozing in sun and dust and silence, like a place enchanted.
+My mission was after hay for bedding, and that I was readily
+promised.  But when I mentioned that we were waiting for Rufe, the
+people shook their heads.  Rufe was not a regular man any way, it
+seemed; and if he got playing poker--Well, poker was too many for
+Rufe.  I had not yet heard them bracketted together; but it seemed
+a natural conjunction, and commended itself swiftly to my fears;
+and as soon as I returned to Silverado and had told my story, we
+practically gave Hanson up, and set ourselves to do what we could
+find do-able in our desert-island state.
+
+The lower room had been the assayer's office.  The floor was thick
+with debris--part human, from the former occupants; part natural,
+sifted in by mountain winds.  In a sea of red dust there swam or
+floated sticks, boards, hay, straw, stones, and paper; ancient
+newspapers, above all--for the newspaper, especially when torn,
+soon becomes an antiquity--and bills of the Silverado boarding-
+house, some dated Silverado, some Calistoga Mine.  Here is one,
+verbatim; and if any one can calculate the scale of charges, he has
+my envious admiration.
+
+
+Calistoga Mine, May 3rd, 1875.
+John Stanley
+To S. Chapman, Cr.
+To board from April 1st, to April 30  $25 75
+  "    "     "  May lst, to 3rd  ...    2 00
+                                       27 75
+
+
+Where is John Stanley mining now?  Where is S. Chapman, within
+whose hospitable walls we were to lodge?  The date was but five
+years old, but in that time the world had changed for Silverado;
+like Palmyra in the desert, it had outlived its people and its
+purpose; we camped, like Layard, amid ruins, and these names spoke
+to us of prehistoric time.  A boot-jack, a pair of boots, a dog-
+hutch, and these bills of Mr. Chapman's were the only speaking
+relics that we disinterred from all that vast Silverado rubbish-
+heap; but what would I not have given to unearth a letter, a
+pocket-book, a diary, only a ledger, or a roll of names, to take me
+back, in a more personal manner, to the past?  It pleases me,
+besides, to fancy that Stanley or Chapman, or one of their
+companions, may light upon this chronicle, and be struck by the
+name, and read some news of their anterior home, coming, as it
+were, out of a subsequent epoch of history in that quarter of the
+world.
+
+As we were tumbling the mingled rubbish on the floor, kicking it
+with our feet, and groping for these written evidences of the past,
+Sam, with a somewhat whitened face, produced a paper bag.  "What's
+this?" said he.  It contained a granulated powder, something the
+colour of Gregory's Mixture, but rosier; and as there were several
+of the bags, and each more or less broken, the powder was spread
+widely on the floor.  Had any of us ever seen giant powder?  No,
+nobody had; and instantly there grew up in my mind a shadowy
+belief, verging with every moment nearer to certitude, that I had
+somewhere heard somebody describe it as just such a powder as the
+one around us.  I have learnt since that it is a substance not
+unlike tallow, and is made up in rolls for all the world like
+tallow candles.
+
+Fanny, to add to our happiness, told us a story of a gentleman who
+had camped one night, like ourselves, by a deserted mine.  He was a
+handy, thrifty fellow, and looked right and left for plunder, but
+all he could lay his hands on was a can of oil.  After dark he had
+to see to the horses with a lantern; and not to miss an
+opportunity, filled up his lamp from the oil can.  Thus equipped,
+he set forth into the forest.  A little while after, his friends
+heard a loud explosion; the mountain echoes bellowed, and then all
+was still.  On examination, the can proved to contain oil, with the
+trifling addition of nitro-glycerine; but no research disclosed a
+trace of either man or lantern.
+
+It was a pretty sight, after this anecdote, to see us sweeping out
+the giant powder.  It seemed never to be far enough away.  And,
+after all, it was only some rock pounded for assay.
+
+So much for the lower room.  We scraped some of the rougher dirt
+off the floor, and left it.  That was our sitting-room and kitchen,
+though there was nothing to sit upon but the table, and no
+provision for a fire except a hole in the roof of the room above,
+which had once contained the chimney of a stove.
+
+To that upper room we now proceeded.  There were the eighteen bunks
+in a double tier, nine on either hand, where from eighteen to
+thirty-six miners had once snored together all night long, John
+Stanley, perhaps, snoring loudest.  There was the roof, with a hole
+in it through which the sun now shot an arrow.  There was the
+floor, in much the same state as the one below, though, perhaps,
+there was more hay, and certainly there was the added ingredient of
+broken glass, the man who stole the window-frames having apparently
+made a miscarriage with this one.  Without a broom, without hay or
+bedding, we could but look about us with a beginning of despair.
+The one bright arrow of day, in that gaunt and shattered barrack,
+made the rest look dirtier and darker, and the sight drove us at
+last into the open.
+
+Here, also, the handiwork of man lay ruined:  but the plants were
+all alive and thriving; the view below was fresh with the colours
+of nature; and we had exchanged a dim, human garret for a corner,
+even although it were untidy, of the blue hall of heaven.  Not a
+bird, not a beast, not a reptile.  There was no noise in that part
+of the world, save when we passed beside the staging, and heard the
+water musically falling in the shaft.
+
+We wandered to and fro.  We searched among that drift of lumber-
+wood and iron, nails and rails, and sleepers and the wheels of
+tracks.  We gazed up the cleft into the bosom of the mountain.  We
+sat by the margin of the dump and saw, far below us, the green
+treetops standing still in the clear air.  Beautiful perfumes,
+breaths of bay, resin, and nutmeg, came to us more often and grew
+sweeter and sharper as the afternoon declined.  But still there was
+no word of Hanson.
+
+I set to with pick and shovel, and deepened the pool behind the
+shaft, till we were sure of sufficient water for the morning; and
+by the time I had finished, the sun had begun to go down behind the
+mountain shoulder, the platform was plunged in quiet shadow, and a
+chill descended from the sky.  Night began early in our cleft.
+Before us, over the margin of the dump, we could see the sun still
+striking aslant into the wooded nick below, and on the
+battlemented, pine-bescattered ridges on the farther side.
+
+There was no stove, of course, and no hearth in our lodging, so we
+betook ourselves to the blacksmith's forge across the platform.  If
+the platform be taken as a stage, and the out-curving margin of the
+dump to represent the line of the foot-lights, then our house would
+be the first wing on the actor's left, and this blacksmith's forge,
+although no match for it in size, the foremost on the right.  It
+was a low, brown cottage, planted close against the hill, and
+overhung by the foliage and peeling boughs of a madrona thicket.
+Within it was full of dead leaves and mountain dust, and rubbish
+from the mine.  But we soon had a good fire brightly blazing, and
+sat close about it on impromptu seats.  Chuchu, the slave of sofa-
+cushions, whimpered for a softer bed; but the rest of us were
+greatly revived and comforted by that good creature-fire, which
+gives us warmth and light and companionable sounds, and colours up
+the emptiest building with better than frescoes.  For a while it
+was even pleasant in the forge, with the blaze in the midst, and a
+look over our shoulders on the woods and mountains where the day
+was dying like a dolphin.
+
+It was between seven and eight before Hanson arrived, with a
+waggonful of our effects and two of his wife's relatives to lend
+him a hand.  The elder showed surprising strength.  He would pick
+up a huge packing-case, full of books of all things, swing it on
+his shoulder, and away up the two crazy ladders and the breakneck
+spout of rolling mineral, familiarly termed a path, that led from
+the cart-track to our house.  Even for a man unburthened, the
+ascent was toilsome and precarious; but Irvine sealed it with a
+light foot, carrying box after box, as the hero whisks the stage
+child up the practicable footway beside the waterfall of the fifth
+act.  With so strong a helper, the business was speedily
+transacted.  Soon the assayer's office was thronged with our
+belongings, piled higgledy-piggledy, and upside down, about the
+floor.  There were our boxes, indeed, but my wife had left her keys
+in Calistoga.  There was the stove, but, alas! our carriers had
+forgot the chimney, and lost one of the plates along the road.  The
+Silverado problem was scarce solved.
+
+Rufe himself was grave and good-natured over his share of blame; he
+even, if I remember right, expressed regret.  But his crew, to my
+astonishment and anger, grinned from ear to ear, and laughed aloud
+at our distress.  They thought it "real funny" about the stove-pipe
+they had forgotten; "real funny" that they should have lost a
+plate.  As for hay, the whole party refused to bring us any till
+they should have supped.  See how late they were!  Never had there
+been such a job as coming up that grade!  Nor often, I suspect,
+such a game of poker as that before they started.  But about nine,
+as a particular favour, we should have some hay.
+
+So they took their departure, leaving me still staring, and we
+resigned ourselves to wait for their return.  The fire in the forge
+had been suffered to go out, and we were one and all too weary to
+kindle another.  We dined, or, not to take that word in vain, we
+ate after a fashion, in the nightmare disorder of the assayer's
+office, perched among boxes.  A single candle lighted us.  It could
+scarce be called a housewarming; for there was, of course, no fire,
+and with the two open doors and the open window gaping on the
+night, like breaches in a fortress, it began to grow rapidly chill.
+Talk ceased; nobody moved but the unhappy Chuchu, still in quest of
+sofa-cushions, who tumbled complainingly among the trunks.  It
+required a certain happiness of disposition to look forward
+hopefully, from so dismal a beginning, across the brief hours of
+night, to the warm shining of to-morrow's sun.
+
+But the hay arrived at last, and we turned, with our last spark of
+courage, to the bedroom.  We had improved the entrance, but it was
+still a kind of rope-walking; and it would have been droll to see
+us mounting, one after another, by candle-light, under the open
+stars.
+
+The western door--that which looked up the canyon, and through
+which we entered by our bridge of flying plank--was still entire, a
+handsome, panelled door, the most finished piece of carpentry in
+Silverado.  And the two lowest bunks next to this we roughly filled
+with hay for that night's use.  Through the opposite, or eastern-
+looking gable, with its open door and window, a faint, disused
+starshine came into the room like mist; and when we were once in
+bed, we lay, awaiting sleep, in a haunted, incomplete obscurity.
+At first the silence of the night was utter.  Then a high wind
+began in the distance among the tree-tops, and for hours continued
+to grow higher.  It seemed to me much such a wind as we had found
+on our visit; yet here in our open chamber we were fanned only by
+gentle and refreshing draughts, so deep was the canyon, so close
+our house was planted under the overhanging rock.
+
+
+
+THE HUNTER'S FAMILY
+
+
+
+There is quite a large race or class of people in America, for whom
+we scarcely seem to have a parallel in England.  Of pure white
+blood, they are unknown or unrecognizable in towns; inhabit the
+fringe of settlements and the deep, quiet places of the country;
+rebellious to all labour, and pettily thievish, like the English
+gipsies; rustically ignorant, but with a touch of wood-lore and the
+dexterity of the savage.  Whence they came is a moot point.  At the
+time of the war, they poured north in crowds to escape the
+conscription; lived during summer on fruits, wild animals, and
+petty theft; and at the approach of winter, when these supplies
+failed, built great fires in the forest, and there died stoically
+by starvation.  They are widely scattered, however, and easily
+recognized.  Loutish, but not ill-looking, they will sit all day,
+swinging their legs on a field fence, the mind seemingly as devoid
+of all reflection as a Suffolk peasant's, careless of politics, for
+the most part incapable of reading, but with a rebellious vanity
+and a strong sense of independence.  Hunting is their most
+congenial business, or, if the occasion offers, a little amateur
+detection.  In tracking a criminal, following a particular horse
+along a beaten highway, and drawing inductions from a hair or a
+footprint, one of those somnolent, grinning Hodges will suddenly
+display activity of body and finesse of mind.  By their names ye
+may know them, the women figuring as Loveina, Larsenia, Serena,
+Leanna, Orreana; the men answering to Alvin, Alva, or Orion,
+pronounced Orrion, with the accent on the first.  Whether they are
+indeed a race, or whether this is the form of degeneracy common to
+all back-woodsmen, they are at least known by a generic byword, as
+Poor Whites or Low-downers.
+
+I will not say that the Hanson family was Poor White, because the
+name savours of offence; but I may go as far as this--they were, in
+many points, not unsimilar to the people usually so-cared.  Rufe
+himself combined two of the qualifications, for he was both a
+hunter and an amateur detective.  It was he who pursued Russel and
+Dollar, the robbers of the Lake Port stage, and captured them the
+very morning after the exploit, while they were still sleeping in a
+hayfield.  Russel, a drunken Scotch carpenter, was even an
+acquaintance of his own, and he expressed much grave commiseration
+for his fate.  In all that he said and did, Rufe was grave.  I
+never saw him hurried.  When he spoke, he took out his pipe with
+ceremonial deliberation, looked east and west, and then, in quiet
+tones and few words, stated his business or told his story.  His
+gait was to match; it would never have surprised you if, at any
+step, he had turned round and walked away again, so warily and
+slowly, and with so much seeming hesitation did he go about.  He
+lay long in bed in the morning--rarely indeed, rose before noon; he
+loved all games, from poker to clerical croquet; and in the Toll
+House croquet ground I have seen him toiling at the latter with the
+devotion of a curate.  He took an interest in education, was an
+active member of the local school-board, and when I was there, he
+had recently lost the schoolhouse key.  His waggon was broken, but
+it never seemed to occur to him to mend it.  Like all truly idle
+people, he had an artistic eye.  He chose the print stuff for his
+wife's dresses, and counselled her in the making of a patchwork
+quilt, always, as she thought, wrongly, but to the more educated
+eye, always with bizarre and admirable taste--the taste of an
+Indian.  With all this, he was a perfect, unoffending gentleman in
+word and act.  Take his clay pipe from him, and he was fit for any
+society but that of fools.  Quiet as he was, there burned a deep,
+permanent excitement in his dark blue eyes; and when this grave man
+smiled, it was like sunshine in a shady place.
+
+Mrs. Hanson (nee, if you please, Lovelands) was more commonplace
+than her lord.  She was a comely woman, too, plump, fair-coloured,
+with wonderful white teeth; and in her print dresses (chosen by
+Rufe) and with a large sun-bonnet shading her valued complexion,
+made, I assure you, a very agreeable figure.  But she was on the
+surface, what there was of her, out-spoken and loud-spoken.  Her
+noisy laughter had none of the charm of one of Hanson's rare, slow-
+spreading smiles; there was no reticence, no mystery, no manner
+about the woman:  she was a first-class dairymaid, but her husband
+was an unknown quantity between the savage and the nobleman.  She
+was often in and out with us, merry, and healthy, and fair; he came
+far seldomer--only, indeed, when there was business, or now and
+again, to pay a visit of ceremony, brushed up for the occasion,
+with his wife on his arm, and a clean clay pipe in his teeth.
+These visits, in our forest state, had quite the air of an event,
+and turned our red canyon into a salon.
+
+Such was the pair who ruled in the old Silverado Hotel, among the
+windy trees, on the mountain shoulder overlooking the whole length
+of Napa Valley, as the man aloft looks down on the ship's deck.
+There they kept house, with sundry horses and fowls, and a family
+of sons, Daniel Webster, and I think George Washington, among the
+number.  Nor did they want visitors.  An old gentleman, of singular
+stolidity, and called Breedlove--I think he had crossed the plains
+in the same caravan with Rufe--housed with them for awhile during
+our stay; and they had besides a permanent lodger, in the form of
+Mrs. Hanson's brother, Irvine Lovelands.  I spell Irvine by guess;
+for I could get no information on the subject, just as I could
+never find out, in spite of many inquiries, whether or not Rufe was
+a contraction for Rufus.  They were all cheerfully at sea about
+their names in that generation.  And this is surely the more
+notable where the names are all so strange, and even the family
+names appear to have been coined.  At one time, at least, the
+ancestors of all these Alvins and Alvas, Loveinas, Lovelands, and
+Breedloves, must have taken serious council and found a certain
+poetry in these denominations; that must have been, then, their
+form of literature.  But still times change; and their next
+descendants, the George Washingtons and Daniel Websters, will at
+least be clear upon the point.  And anyway, and however his name
+should be spelt, this Irvine Lovelands was the most unmitigated
+Caliban I ever knew.
+
+Our very first morning at Silverado, when we were full of business,
+patching up doors and windows, making beds and seats, and getting
+our rough lodging into shape, Irvine and his sister made their
+appearance together, she for neighbourliness and general curiosity;
+he, because he was working for me, to my sorrow, cutting firewood
+at I forget how much a day.  The way that he set about cutting wood
+was characteristic.  We were at that moment patching up and
+unpacking in the kitchen.  Down he sat on one side, and down sat
+his sister on the other.  Both were chewing pine-tree gum, and he,
+to my annoyance, accompanied that simple pleasure with profuse
+expectoration.  She rattled away, talking up hill and down dale,
+laughing, tossing her head, showing her brilliant teeth.  He looked
+on in silence, now spitting heavily on the floor, now putting his
+head back and uttering a loud, discordant, joyless laugh.  He had a
+tangle of shock hair, the colour of wool; his mouth was a grin;
+although as strong as a horse, he looked neither heavy nor yet
+adroit, only leggy, coltish, and in the road.  But it was plain he
+was in high spirits, thoroughly enjoying his visit; and he laughed
+frankly whenever we failed to accomplish what we were about.  This
+was scarcely helpful:  it was even, to amateur carpenters,
+embarrassing; but it lasted until we knocked off work and began to
+get dinner.  Then Mrs. Hanson remembered she should have been gone
+an hour ago; and the pair retired, and the lady's laughter died
+away among the nutmegs down the path.  That was Irvine's first
+day's work in my employment--the devil take him!
+
+The next morning he returned and, as he was this time alone, he
+bestowed his conversation upon us with great liberality.  He prided
+himself on his intelligence; asked us if we knew the school ma'am.
+HE didn't think much of her, anyway.  He had tried her, he had.  He
+had put a question to her.  If a tree a hundred feet high were to
+fall a foot a day, how long would it take to fall right down?  She
+had not been able to solve the problem.  "She don't know nothing,"
+he opined.  He told us how a friend of his kept a school with a
+revolver, and chuckled mightily over that; his friend could teach
+school, he could.  All the time he kept chewing gum and spitting.
+He would stand a while looking down; and then he would toss back
+his shock of hair, and laugh hoarsely, and spit, and bring forward
+a new subject.  A man, he told us, who bore a grudge against him,
+had poisoned his dog.  "That was a low thing for a man to do now,
+wasn't it?  It wasn't like a man, that, nohow.  But I got even with
+him:  I pisoned HIS dog."  His clumsy utterance, his rude
+embarrassed manner, set a fresh value on the stupidity of his
+remarks.  I do not think I ever appreciated the meaning of two
+words until I knew Irvine--the verb, loaf, and the noun, oaf;
+between them, they complete his portrait.  He could lounge, and
+wriggle, and rub himself against the wall, and grin, and be more in
+everybody's way than any other two people that I ever set my eyes
+on.  Nothing that he did became him; and yet you were conscious
+that he was one of your own race, that his mind was cumbrously at
+work, revolving the problem of existence like a quid of gum, and in
+his own cloudy manner enjoying life, and passing judgment on his
+fellows.  Above all things, he was delighted with himself.  You
+would not have thought it, from his uneasy manners and troubled,
+struggling utterance; but he loved himself to the marrow, and was
+happy and proud like a peacock on a rail.
+
+His self-esteem was, indeed, the one joint in his harness.  He
+could be got to work, and even kept at work, by flattery.  As long
+as my wife stood over him, crying out how strong he was, so long
+exactly he would stick to the matter in hand; and the moment she
+turned her back, or ceased to praise him, he would stop.  His
+physical strength was wonderful; and to have a woman stand by and
+admire his achievements, warmed his heart like sunshine.  Yet he
+was as cowardly as he was powerful, and felt no shame in owning to
+the weakness.  Something was once wanted from the crazy platform
+over the shaft, and he at once refused to venture there--"did not
+like," as he said, "foolen' round them kind o' places," and let my
+wife go instead of him, looking on with a grin.  Vanity, where it
+rules, is usually more heroic:  but Irvine steadily approved
+himself, and expected others to approve him; rather looked down
+upon my wife, and decidedly expected her to look up to him, on the
+strength of his superior prudence.
+
+Yet the strangest part of the whole matter was perhaps this, that
+Irvine was as beautiful as a statue.  His features were, in
+themselves, perfect; it was only his cloudy, uncouth, and coarse
+expression that disfigured them.  So much strength residing in so
+spare a frame was proof sufficient of the accuracy of his shape.
+He must have been built somewhat after the pattern of Jack
+Sheppard; but the famous housebreaker, we may be certain, was no
+lout.  It was by the extraordinary powers of his mind no less than
+by the vigour of his body, that he broke his strong prison with
+such imperfect implements, turning the very obstacles to service.
+Irvine, in the same case, would have sat down and spat, and
+grumbled curses.  He had the soul of a fat sheep, but, regarded as
+an artist's model, the exterior of a Greek God.  It was a cruel
+thought to persons less favoured in their birth, that this
+creature, endowed--to use the language of theatres--with
+extraordinary "means," should so manage to misemploy them that he
+looked ugly and almost deformed.  It was only by an effort of
+abstraction, and after many days, that you discovered what he was.
+
+By playing on the oaf's conceit, and standing closely over him, we
+got a path made round the corner of the dump to our door, so that
+we could come and go with decent ease; and he even enjoyed the
+work, for in that there were boulders to be plucked up bodily,
+bushes to be uprooted, and other occasions for athletic display:
+but cutting wood was a different matter.  Anybody could cut wood;
+and, besides, my wife was tired of supervising him, and had other
+things to attend to.  And, in short, days went by, and Irvine came
+daily, and talked and lounged and spat; but the firewood remained
+intact as sleepers on the platform or growing trees upon the
+mountainside.  Irvine, as a woodcutter, we could tolerate; but
+Irvine as a friend of the family, at so much a day, was too bald an
+imposition, and at length, on the afternoon of the fourth or fifth
+day of our connection, I explained to him, as clearly as I could,
+the light in which I had grown to regard his presence.  I pointed
+out to him that I could not continue to give him a salary for
+spitting on the floor; and this expression, which came after a good
+many others, at last penetrated his obdurate wits.  He rose at
+once, and said if that was the way he was going to be spoke to, he
+reckoned he would quit.  And, no one interposing, he departed.
+
+So far, so good.  But we had no firewood.  The next afternoon, I
+strolled down to Rufe's and consulted him on the subject.  It was a
+very droll interview, in the large, bare north room of the
+Silverado Hotel, Mrs. Hanson's patchwork on a frame, and Rufe, and
+his wife, and I, and the oaf himself, all more or less embarrassed.
+Rufe announced there was nobody in the neighbourhood but Irvine who
+could do a day's work for anybody.  Irvine, thereupon, refused to
+have any more to do with my service; he "wouldn't work no more for
+a man as had spoke to him's I had done."  I found myself on the
+point of the last humiliation--driven to beseech the creature whom
+I had just dismissed with insult:  but I took the high hand in
+despair, said there must be no talk of Irvine coming back unless
+matters were to be differently managed; that I would rather chop
+firewood for myself than be fooled; and, in short, the Hansons
+being eager for the lad's hire, I so imposed upon them with merely
+affected resolution, that they ended by begging me to re-employ him
+again, on a solemn promise that he should be more industrious.  The
+promise, I am bound to say, was kept.  We soon had a fine pile of
+firewood at our door; and if Caliban gave me the cold shoulder and
+spared me his conversation, I thought none the worse of him for
+that, nor did I find my days much longer for the deprivation.
+
+The leading spirit of the family was, I am inclined to fancy, Mrs.
+Hanson.  Her social brilliancy somewhat dazzled the others, and she
+had more of the small change of sense.  It was she who faced
+Kelmar, for instance; and perhaps, if she had been alone, Kelmar
+would have had no rule within her doors.  Rufe, to be sure, had a
+fine, sober, open-air attitude of mind, seeing the world without
+exaggeration--perhaps, we may even say, without enough; for he
+lacked, along with the others, that commercial idealism which puts
+so high a value on time and money.  Sanity itself is a kind of
+convention.  Perhaps Rufe was wrong; but, looking on life plainly,
+he was unable to perceive that croquet or poker were in any way
+less important than, for instance, mending his waggon.  Even his
+own profession, hunting, was dear to him mainly as a sort of play;
+even that he would have neglected, had it not appealed to his
+imagination.  His hunting-suit, for instance, had cost I should be
+afraid to say how many bucks--the currency in which he paid his
+way:  it was all befringed, after the Indian fashion, and it was
+dear to his heart.  The pictorial side of his daily business was
+never forgotten.  He was even anxious to stand for his picture in
+those buckskin hunting clothes; and I remember how he once warmed
+almost into enthusiasm, his dark blue eyes growing perceptibly
+larger, as he planned the composition in which he should appear,
+"with the horns of some real big bucks, and dogs, and a camp on a
+crick" (creek, stream).
+
+There was no trace in Irvine of this woodland poetry.  He did not
+care for hunting, nor yet for buckskin suits.  He had never
+observed scenery.  The world, as it appeared to him, was almost
+obliterated by his own great grinning figure in the foreground:
+Caliban Malvolio.  And it seems to me as if, in the persons of
+these brothers-in-law, we had the two sides of rusticity fairly
+well represented:  the hunter living really in nature; the
+clodhopper living merely out of society:  the one bent up in every
+corporal agent to capacity in one pursuit, doing at least one thing
+keenly and thoughtfully, and thoroughly alive to all that touches
+it; the other in the inert and bestial state, walking in a faint
+dream, and taking so dim an impression of the myriad sides of life
+that he is truly conscious of nothing but himself.  It is only in
+the fastnesses of nature, forests, mountains, and the back of man's
+beyond, that a creature endowed with five senses can grow up into
+the perfection of this crass and earthy vanity.  In towns or the
+busier country sides, he is roughly reminded of other men's
+existence; and if he learns no more, he learns at least to fear
+contempt.  But Irvine had come scatheless through life, conscious
+only of himself, of his great strength and intelligence; and in the
+silence of the universe, to which he did not listen, dwelling with
+delight on the sound of his own thoughts.
+
+
+
+THE SEA FOGS
+
+
+
+A change in the colour of the light usually called me in the
+morning.  By a certain hour, the long, vertical chinks in our
+western gable, where the boards had shrunk and separated, flashed
+suddenly into my eyes as stripes of dazzling blue, at once so dark
+and splendid that I used to marvel how the qualities could be
+combined.  At an earlier hour, the heavens in that quarter were
+still quietly coloured, but the shoulder of the mountain which
+shuts in the canyon already glowed with sunlight in a wonderful
+compound of gold and rose and green; and this too would kindle,
+although more mildly and with rainbow tints, the fissures of our
+crazy gable.  If I were sleeping heavily, it was the bold blue that
+struck me awake; if more lightly, then I would come to myself in
+that earlier and fairier fight.
+
+One Sunday morning, about five, the first brightness called me.  I
+rose and turned to the east, not for my devotions, but for air.
+The night had been very still.  The little private gale that blew
+every evening in our canyon, for ten minutes or perhaps a quarter
+of an hour, had swiftly blown itself out; in the hours that
+followed not a sigh of wind had shaken the treetops; and our
+barrack, for all its breaches, was less fresh that morning than of
+wont.  But I had no sooner reached the window than I forgot all
+else in the sight that met my eyes, and I made but two bounds into
+my clothes, and down the crazy plank to the platform.
+
+The sun was still concealed below the opposite hilltops, though it
+was shining already, not twenty feet above my head, on our own
+mountain slope.  But the scene, beyond a few near features, was
+entirely changed.  Napa valley was gone; gone were all the lower
+slopes and woody foothills of the range; and in their place, not a
+thousand feet below me, rolled a great level ocean.  It was as
+though I had gone to bed the night before, safe in a nook of inland
+mountains, and had awakened in a bay upon the coast.  I had seen
+these inundations from below; at Calistoga I had risen and gone
+abroad in the early morning, coughing and sneezing, under fathoms
+on fathoms of gray sea vapour, like a cloudy sky--a dull sight for
+the artist, and a painful experience for the invalid.  But to sit
+aloft one's self in the pure air and under the unclouded dome of
+heaven, and thus look down on the submergence of the valley, was
+strangely different and even delightful to the eyes.  Far away were
+hilltops like little islands.  Nearer, a smoky surf beat about the
+foot of precipices and poured into all the coves of these rough
+mountains.  The colour of that fog ocean was a thing never to be
+forgotten.  For an instant, among the Hebrides and just about
+sundown, I have seen something like it on the sea itself.  But the
+white was not so opaline; nor was there, what surprisingly
+increased the effect, that breathless, crystal stillness over all.
+Even in its gentlest moods the salt sea travails, moaning among the
+weeds or lisping on the sand; but that vast fog ocean lay in a
+trance of silence, nor did the sweet air of the morning tremble
+with a sound.
+
+As I continued to sit upon the dump, I began to observe that this
+sea was not so level as at first sight it appeared to be.  Away in
+the extreme south, a little hill of fog arose against the sky above
+the general surface, and as it had already caught the sun, it shone
+on the horizon like the topsails of some giant ship.  There were
+huge waves, stationary, as it seemed, like waves in a frozen sea;
+and yet, as I looked again, I was not sure but they were moving
+after all, with a slow and august advance.  And while I was yet
+doubting, a promontory of the some four or five miles away,
+conspicuous by a bouquet of tall pines, was in a single instant
+overtaken and swallowed up.  It reappeared in a little, with its
+pines, but this time as an islet, and only to be swallowed up once
+more and then for good.  This set me looking nearer, and I saw that
+in every cove along the line of mountains the fog was being piled
+in higher and higher, as though by some wind that was inaudible to
+me.  I could trace its progress, one pine tree first growing hazy
+and then disappearing after another; although sometimes there was
+none of this fore-running haze, but the whole opaque white ocean
+gave a start and swallowed a piece of mountain at a gulp.  It was
+to flee these poisonous fogs that I had left the seaboard, and
+climbed so high among the mountains.  And now, behold, here came
+the fog to besiege me in my chosen altitudes, and yet came so
+beautifully that my first thought was of welcome.
+
+The sun had now gotten much higher, and through all the gaps of the
+hills it cast long bars of gold across that white ocean.  An eagle,
+or some other very great bird of the mountain, came wheeling over
+the nearer pine-tops, and hung, poised and something sideways, as
+if to look abroad on that unwonted desolation, spying, perhaps with
+terror, for the eyries of her comrades.  Then, with a long cry, she
+disappeared again towards Lake County and the clearer air.  At
+length it seemed to me as if the flood were beginning to subside.
+The old landmarks, by whose disappearance I had measured its
+advance, here a crag, there a brave pine tree, now began, in the
+inverse order, to make their reappearance into daylight.  I judged
+all danger of the fog was over.  This was not Noah's flood; it was
+but a morning spring, and would now drift out seaward whence it
+came.  So, mightily relieved, and a good deal exhilarated by the
+sight, I went into the house to light the fire.
+
+I suppose it was nearly seven when I once more mounted the platform
+to look abroad.  The fog ocean had swelled up enormously since last
+I saw it; and a few hundred feet below me, in the deep gap where
+the Toll House stands and the road runs through into Lake County,
+it had already topped the slope, and was pouring over and down the
+other side like driving smoke.  The wind had climbed along with it;
+and though I was still in calm air, I could see the trees tossing
+below me, and their long, strident sighing mounted to me where I
+stood.
+
+Half an hour later, the fog had surmounted all the ridge on the
+opposite side of the gap, though a shoulder of the mountain still
+warded it out of our canyon.  Napa valley and its bounding hills
+were now utterly blotted out.  The fog, sunny white in the
+sunshine, was pouring over into Lake County in a huge, ragged
+cataract, tossing treetops appearing and disappearing in the spray.
+The air struck with a little chill, and set me coughing.  It smelt
+strong of the fog, like the smell of a washing-house, but with a
+shrewd tang of the sea salt.
+
+Had it not been for two things--the sheltering spur which answered
+as a dyke, and the great valley on the other side which rapidly
+engulfed whatever mounted--our own little platform in the canyon
+must have been already buried a hundred feet in salt and poisonous
+air.  As it was, the interest of the scene entirely occupied our
+minds.  We were set just out of the wind, and but just above the
+fog; we could listen to the voice of the one as to music on the
+stage; we could plunge our eyes down into the other, as into some
+flowing stream from over the parapet of a bridge; thus we looked on
+upon a strange, impetuous, silent, shifting exhibition of the
+powers of nature, and saw the familiar landscape changing from
+moment to moment like figures in a dream.
+
+The imagination loves to trifle with what is not.  Had this been
+indeed the deluge, I should have felt more strongly, but the
+emotion would have been similar in kind.  I played with the idea,
+as the child flees in delighted terror from the creations of his
+fancy.  The look of the thing helped me.  And when at last I began
+to flee up the mountain, it was indeed partly to escape from the
+raw air that kept me coughing, but it was also part in play.
+
+As I ascended the mountain-side, I came once more to overlook the
+upper surface of the fog; but it wore a different appearance from
+what I had beheld at daybreak.  For, first, the sun now fell on it
+from high overhead, and its surface shone and undulated like a
+great nor'land moor country, sheeted with untrodden morning snow.
+And next the new level must have been a thousand or fifteen hundred
+feet higher than the old, so that only five or six points of all
+the broken country below me, still stood out.  Napa valley was now
+one with Sonoma on the west.  On the hither side, only a thin
+scattered fringe of bluffs was unsubmerged; and through all the
+gaps the fog was pouring over, like an ocean, into the blue clear
+sunny country on the east.  There it was soon lost; for it fell
+instantly into the bottom of the valleys, following the water-shed;
+and the hilltops in that quarter were still clear cut upon the
+eastern sky.
+
+Through the Toll House gap and over the near ridges on the other
+side, the deluge was immense.  A spray of thin vapour was thrown
+high above it, rising and falling, and blown into fantastic shapes.
+The speed of its course was like a mountain torrent.  Here and
+there a few treetops were discovered and then whelmed again; and
+for one second, the bough of a dead pine beckoned out of the spray
+like the arm of a drowning man.  But still the imagination was
+dissatisfied, still the ear waited for something more.  Had this
+indeed been water (as it seemed so, to the eye), with what a plunge
+of reverberating thunder would it have rolled upon its course,
+disembowelling mountains and deracinating pines!  And yet water it
+was, and sea-water at that--true Pacific billows, only somewhat
+rarefied, rolling in mid air among the hilltops.
+
+I climbed still higher, among the red rattling gravel and dwarf
+underwood of Mount Saint Helena, until I could look right down upon
+Silverado, and admire the favoured nook in which it lay.  The sunny
+plain of fog was several hundred feet higher; behind the protecting
+spur a gigantic accumulation of cottony vapour threatened, with
+every second, to blow over and submerge our homestead; but the
+vortex setting past the Toll House was too strong; and there lay
+our little platform, in the arms of the deluge, but still enjoying
+its unbroken sunshine.  About eleven, however, thin spray came
+flying over the friendly buttress, and I began to think the fog had
+hunted out its Jonah after all.  But it was the last effort.  The
+wind veered while we were at dinner, and began to blow squally from
+the mountain summit; and by half-past one, all that world of sea-
+fogs was utterly routed and flying here and there into the south in
+little rags of cloud.  And instead of a lone sea-beach, we found
+ourselves once more inhabiting a high mountainside, with the clear
+green country far below us, and the light smoke of Calistoga
+blowing in the air.
+
+This was the great Russian campaign for that season.  Now and then,
+in the early morning, a little white lakelet of fog would be seen
+far down in Napa Valley; but the heights were not again assailed,
+nor was the surrounding world again shut off from Silverado.
+
+
+
+THE TOLL HOUSE
+
+
+
+The Toll House, standing alone by the wayside under nodding pines,
+with its streamlet and water-tank; its backwoods, toll-bar, and
+well trodden croquet ground; the ostler standing by the stable
+door, chewing a straw; a glimpse of the Chinese cook in the back
+parts; and Mr. Hoddy in the bar, gravely alert and serviceable, and
+equally anxious to lend or borrow books;--dozed all day in the
+dusty sunshine, more than half asleep.  There were no neighbours,
+except the Hansons up the hill.  The traffic on the road was
+infinitesimal; only, at rare intervals, a couple in a waggon, or a
+dusty farmer on a springboard, toiling over "the grade" to that
+metropolitan hamlet, Calistoga; and, at the fixed hours, the
+passage of the stages.
+
+The nearest building was the school-house, down the road; and the
+school-ma'am boarded at the Toll House, walking thence in the
+morning to the little brown shanty, where she taught the young ones
+of the district, and returning thither pretty weary in the
+afternoon.  She had chosen this outlying situation, I understood,
+for her health.  Mr. Corwin was consumptive; so was Rufe; so was
+Mr. Jennings, the engineer.  In short, the place was a kind of
+small Davos:  consumptive folk consorting on a hilltop in the most
+unbroken idleness.  Jennings never did anything that I could see,
+except now and then to fish, and generally to sit about in the bar
+and the verandah, waiting for something to happen.  Corwin and Rufe
+did as little as possible; and if the school-ma'am, poor lady, had
+to work pretty hard all morning, she subsided when it was over into
+much the same dazed beatitude as all the rest.
+
+Her special corner was the parlour--a very genteel room, with Bible
+prints, a crayon portrait of Mrs. Corwin in the height of fashion,
+a few years ago, another of her son (Mr. Corwin was not
+represented), a mirror, and a selection of dried grasses.  A large
+book was laid religiously on the table--"From Palace to Hovel," I
+believe, its name--full of the raciest experiences in England.  The
+author had mingled freely with all classes, the nobility
+particularly meeting him with open arms; and I must say that
+traveller had ill requited his reception.  His book, in short, was
+a capital instance of the Penny Messalina school of literature; and
+there arose from it, in that cool parlour, in that silent, wayside,
+mountain inn, a rank atmosphere of gold and blood and "Jenkins,"
+and the "Mysteries of London," and sickening, inverted snobbery,
+fit to knock you down.  The mention of this book reminds me of
+another and far racier picture of our island life.  The latter
+parts of Rocambole are surely too sparingly consulted in the
+country which they celebrate.  No man's education can be said to be
+complete, nor can he pronounce the world yet emptied of enjoyment,
+till he has made the acquaintance of "the Reverend Patterson,
+director of the Evangelical Society."  To follow the evolutions of
+that reverend gentleman, who goes through scenes in which even Mr.
+Duffield would hesitate to place a bishop, is to rise to new ideas.
+But, alas! there was no Patterson about the Toll House.  Only,
+alongside of "From Palace to Hovel," a sixpenny "Ouida" figured.
+So literature, you see, was not unrepresented.
+
+The school-ma'am had friends to stay with her, other school-ma'ams
+enjoying their holidays, quite a bevy of damsels.  They seemed
+never to go out, or not beyond the verandah, but sat close in the
+little parlour, quietly talking or listening to the wind among the
+trees.  Sleep dwelt in the Toll House, like a fixture:  summer
+sleep, shallow, soft, and dreamless.  A cuckoo-clock, a great
+rarity in such a place, hooted at intervals about the echoing
+house; and Mr. Jenning would open his eyes for a moment in the bar,
+and turn the leaf of a newspaper, and the resting school-ma'ams in
+the parlour would be recalled to the consciousness of their
+inaction.  Busy Mrs. Corwin and her busy Chinaman might be heard
+indeed, in the penetralia, pounding dough or rattling dishes; or
+perhaps Rufe had called up some of the sleepers for a game of
+croquet, and the hollow strokes of the mallet sounded far away
+among the woods:  but with these exceptions, it was sleep and
+sunshine and dust, and the wind in the pine trees, all day long.
+
+A little before stage time, that castle of indolence awoke.  The
+ostler threw his straw away and set to his preparations.  Mr.
+Jennings rubbed his eyes; happy Mr. Jennings, the something he had
+been waiting for all day about to happen at last!  The boarders
+gathered in the verandah, silently giving ear, and gazing down the
+road with shaded eyes.  And as yet there was no sign for the
+senses, not a sound, not a tremor of the mountain road.  The birds,
+to whom the secret of the hooting cuckoo is unknown, must have set
+down to instinct this premonitory bustle.
+
+And then the first of the two stages swooped upon the Toll House
+with a roar and in a cloud of dust; and the shock had not yet time
+to subside, before the second was abreast of it.  Huge concerns
+they were, well-horsed and loaded, the men in their shirt-sleeves,
+the women swathed in veils, the long whip cracking like a pistol;
+and as they charged upon that slumbering hostelry, each shepherding
+a dust storm, the dead place blossomed into life and talk and
+clatter.  This the Toll House?--with its city throng, its jostling
+shoulders, its infinity of instant business in the bar?  The mind
+would not receive it!  The heartfelt bustle of that hour is hardly
+credible; the thrill of the great shower of letters from the post-
+bag, the childish hope and interest with which one gazed in all
+these strangers' eyes.  They paused there but to pass:  the blue-
+clad China-boy, the San Francisco magnate, the mystery in the dust
+coat, the secret memoirs in tweed, the ogling, well-shod lady with
+her troop of girls; they did but flash and go; they were hull-down
+for us behind life's ocean, and we but hailed their topsails on the
+line.  Yet, out of our great solitude of four and twenty mountain
+hours, we thrilled to their momentary presence gauged and divined
+them, loved and hated; and stood light-headed in that storm of
+human electricity.  Yes, like Piccadilly circus, this is also one
+of life's crossing-places.  Here I beheld one man, already famous
+or infamous, a centre of pistol-shots:  and another who, if not yet
+known to rumour, will fill a column of the Sunday paper when he
+comes to hang--a burly, thick-set, powerful Chinese desperado, six
+long bristles upon either lip; redolent of whiskey, playing cards,
+and pistols; swaggering in the bar with the lowest assumption of
+the lowest European manners; rapping out blackguard English oaths
+in his canorous oriental voice; and combining in one person the
+depravities of two races and two civilizations.  For all his lust
+and vigour, he seemed to look cold upon me from the valley of the
+shadow of the gallows.  He imagined a vain thing; and while he
+drained his cock-tail, Holbein's death was at his elbow.  Once,
+too, I fell in talk with another of these flitting strangers--like
+the rest, in his shirt-sleeves and all begrimed with dust--and the
+next minute we were discussing Paris and London, theatres and
+wines.  To him, journeying from one human place to another, this
+was a trifle; but to me!  No, Mr. Lillie, I have not forgotten it.
+
+And presently the city-tide was at its flood and began to ebb.
+Life runs in Piccadilly Circus, say, from nine to one, and then,
+there also, ebbs into the small hours of the echoing policeman and
+the lamps and stars.  But the Toll House is far up stream, and near
+its rural springs; the bubble of the tide but touches it.  Before
+you had yet grasped your pleasure, the horses were put to, the loud
+whips volleyed, and the tide was gone.  North and south had the two
+stages vanished, the towering dust subsided in the woods; but there
+was still an interval before the flush had fallen on your cheeks,
+before the ear became once more contented with the silence, or the
+seven sleepers of the Toll House dozed back to their accustomed
+corners.  Yet a little, and the ostler would swing round the great
+barrier across the road; and in the golden evening, that dreamy inn
+begin to trim its lamps and spread the board for supper.
+
+As I recall the place--the green dell below; the spires of pine;
+the sun-warm, scented air; that gray, gabled inn, with its faint
+stirrings of life amid the slumber of the mountains--I slowly awake
+to a sense of admiration, gratitude, and almost love.  A fine
+place, after all, for a wasted life to doze away in--the cuckoo
+clock hooting of its far home country; the croquet mallets,
+eloquent of English lawns; the stages daily bringing news of--the
+turbulent world away below there; and perhaps once in the summer, a
+salt fog pouring overhead with its tale of the Pacific.
+
+
+
+A STARRY DRIVE
+
+
+
+In our rule at Silverado, there was a melancholy interregnum.  The
+queen and the crown prince with one accord fell sick; and, as I was
+sick to begin with, our lone position on Mount Saint Helena was no
+longer tenable, and we had to hurry back to Calistoga and a cottage
+on the green.  By that time we had begun to realize the
+difficulties of our position.  We had found what an amount of
+labour it cost to support life in our red canyon; and it was the
+dearest desire of our hearts to get a China-boy to go along with us
+when we returned.  We could have given him a whole house to
+himself, self-contained, as they say in the advertisements; and on
+the money question we were prepared to go far.  Kong Sam Kee, the
+Calistoga washerman, was entrusted with the affair; and from day to
+day it languished on, with protestations on our part and
+mellifluous excuses on the part of Kong Sam Kee.
+
+At length, about half-past eight of our last evening, with the
+waggon ready harnessed to convey us up the grade, the washerman,
+with a somewhat sneering air, produced the boy.  He was a handsome,
+gentlemanly lad, attired in rich dark blue, and shod with snowy
+white; but, alas! he had heard rumours of Silverado.  He know it
+for a lone place on the mountain-side, with no friendly wash-house
+near by, where he might smoke a pipe of opium o' nights with other
+China-boys, and lose his little earnings at the game of tan; and he
+first backed out for more money; and then, when that demand was
+satisfied, refused to come point-blank.  He was wedded to his wash-
+houses; he had no taste for the rural life; and we must go to our
+mountain servantless.  It must have been near half an hour before
+we reached that conclusion, standing in the midst of Calistoga high
+street under the stars, and the China-boy and Kong Sam Kee singing
+their pigeon English in the sweetest voices and with the most
+musical inflections.
+
+We were not, however, to return alone; for we brought with us Joe
+Strong, the painter, a most good-natured comrade and a capital hand
+at an omelette.  I do not know in which capacity he was most
+valued--as a cook or a companion; and he did excellently well in
+both.
+
+The Kong Sam Kee negotiation had delayed us unduly; it must have
+been half-past nine before we left Calistoga, and night came fully
+ere we struck the bottom of the grade.  I have never seen such a
+night.  It seemed to throw calumny in the teeth of all the painters
+that ever dabbled in starlight.  The sky itself was of a ruddy,
+powerful, nameless, changing colour, dark and glossy like a
+serpent's back.  The stars, by innumerable millions, stuck boldly
+forth like lamps.  The milky way was bright, like a moonlit cloud;
+half heaven seemed milky way.  The greater luminaries shone each
+more clearly than a winter's moon.  Their light was dyed in every
+sort of colour--red, like fire; blue, like steel; green, like the
+tracks of sunset; and so sharply did each stand forth in its own
+lustre that there was no appearance of that flat, star-spangled
+arch we know so well in pictures, but all the hollow of heaven was
+one chaos of contesting luminaries--a hurry-burly of stars.
+Against this the hills and rugged treetops stood out redly dark.
+
+As we continued to advance, the lesser lights and milky ways first
+grew pale, and then vanished; the countless hosts of heaven
+dwindled in number by successive millions; those that still shone
+had tempered their exceeding brightness and fallen back into their
+customary wistful distance; and the sky declined from its first
+bewildering splendour into the appearance of a common night.
+Slowly this change proceeded, and still there was no sign of any
+cause.  Then a whiteness like mist was thrown over the spurs of the
+mountain.  Yet a while, and, as we turned a corner, a great leap of
+silver light and net of forest shadows fell across the road and
+upon our wondering waggonful; and, swimming low among the trees, we
+beheld a strange, misshapen, waning moon, half-tilted on her back.
+
+"Where are ye when the moon appears?" so the old poet sang, half-
+taunting, to the stars, bent upon a courtly purpose.
+
+
+"As the sunlight round the dim earth's midnight tower of shadow
+pours,
+Streaming past the dim, wide portals,
+Viewless to the eyes of mortals,
+Till it floods the moon's pale islet or the morning's golden
+shores."
+
+
+So sings Mr. Trowbridge, with a noble inspiration.  And so had the
+sunlight flooded that pale islet of the moon, and her lit face put
+out, one after another, that galaxy of stars.  The wonder of the
+drive was over; but, by some nice conjunction of clearness in the
+air and fit shadow in the valley where we travelled, we had seen
+for a little while that brave display of the midnight heavens.  It
+was gone, but it had been; nor shall I ever again behold the stars
+with the same mind.  He who has seen the sea commoved with a great
+hurricane, thinks of it very differently from him who has seen it
+only in a calm.  And the difference between a calm and a hurricane
+is not greatly more striking than that between the ordinary face of
+night and the splendour that shone upon us in that drive.  Two in
+our waggon knew night as she shines upon the tropics, but even that
+bore no comparison.  The nameless colour of the sky, the hues of
+the star-fire, and the incredible projection of the stars
+themselves, starting from their orbits, so that the eye seemed to
+distinguish their positions in the hollow of space--these were
+things that we had never seen before and shall never see again.
+
+Meanwhile, in this altered night, we proceeded on our way among the
+scents and silence of the forest, reached the top of the grade,
+wound up by Hanson's, and came at last to a stand under the flying
+gargoyle of the chute.  Sam, who had been lying back, fast asleep,
+with the moon on his face, got down, with the remark that it was
+pleasant "to be home."  The waggon turned and drove away, the noise
+gently dying in the woods, and we clambered up the rough path,
+Caliban's great feat of engineering, and came home to Silverado.
+
+The moon shone in at the eastern doors and windows, and over the
+lumber on the platform.  The one tall pine beside. the ledge was
+steeped in silver.  Away up the canyon, a wild cat welcomed us with
+three discordant squalls.  But once we had lit a candle, and began
+to review our improvements, homely in either sense, and count our
+stores, it was wonderful what a feeling of possession and
+permanence grow up in the hearts of the lords of Silverado.  A bed
+had still to be made up for Strong, and the morning's water to be
+fetched, with clinking pail; and as we set about these household
+duties, and showed off our wealth and conveniences before the
+stranger, and had a glass of wine, I think, in honour of our
+return, and trooped at length one after another up the flying
+bridge of plank, and lay down to sleep in our shattered, moon-
+pierced barrack, we were among the happiest sovereigns in the
+world, and certainly ruled over the most contented people.  Yet, in
+our absence, the palace had been sacked.  Wild cats, so the Hansons
+said, had broken in and carried off a side of bacon, a hatchet, and
+two knives.
+
+
+
+EPISODES IN THE STORY OF A MINE
+
+
+
+No one could live at Silverado and not be curious about the story
+of the mine.  We were surrounded by so many evidences of expense
+and toil, we lived so entirely in the wreck of that great
+enterprise, like mites in the ruins of a cheese, that the idea of
+the old din and bustle haunted our repose.  Our own house, the
+forge, the dump, the chutes, the rails, the windlass, the mass of
+broken plant; the two tunnels, one far below in the green dell, the
+other on the platform where we kept our wine; the deep shaft, with
+the sun-glints and the water-drops; above all, the ledge, that
+great gaping slice out of the mountain shoulder, propped apart by
+wooden wedges, on whose immediate margin, high above our heads, the
+one tall pine precariously nodded--these stood for its greatness;
+while, the dog-hutch, boot-jacks, old boots, old tavern bills, and
+the very beds that we inherited from bygone miners, put in human
+touches and realized for us the story of the past.
+
+I have sat on an old sleeper, under the thick madronas near the
+forge, with just a look over the dump on the green world below, and
+seen the sun lying broad among the wreck, and heard the silence
+broken only by the tinkling water in the shaft, or a stir of the
+royal family about the battered palace, and my mind has gone back
+to the epoch of the Stanleys and the Chapmans, with a grand tutti
+of pick and drill, hammer and anvil, echoing about the canyon; the
+assayer hard at it in our dining-room; the carts below on the road,
+and their cargo of red mineral bounding and thundering down the
+iron chute.  And now all gone--all fallen away into this sunny
+silence and desertion:  a family of squatters dining in the
+assayer's office, making their beds in the big sleeping room
+erstwhile so crowded, keeping their wine in the tunnel that once
+rang with picks.
+
+But Silverado itself, although now fallen in its turn into decay,
+was once but a mushroom, and had succeeded to other mines and other
+flitting cities.  Twenty years ago, away down the glen on the Lake
+County side there was a place, Jonestown by name, with two thousand
+inhabitants dwelling under canvas, and one roofed house for the
+sale of whiskey.  Round on the western side of Mount Saint Helena,
+there was at the same date, a second large encampment, its name, if
+it ever had one, lost for me.  Both of these have perished, leaving
+not a stick and scarce a memory behind them.  Tide after tide of
+hopeful miners have thus flowed and ebbed about the mountain,
+coming and going, now by lone prospectors, now with a rush.  Last,
+in order of time came Silverado, reared the big mill, in the
+valley, founded the town which is now represented, monumentally, by
+Hanson's, pierced all these slaps and shafts and tunnels, and in
+turn declined and died away.
+
+
+"Our noisy years seem moments in the wake
+Of the eternal silence."
+
+
+As to the success of Silverado in its time of being, two reports
+were current.  According to the first, six hundred thousand dollars
+were taken out of that great upright seam, that still hung open
+above us on crazy wedges.  Then the ledge pinched out, and there
+followed, in quest of the remainder, a great drifting and
+tunnelling in all directions, and a great consequent effusion of
+dollars, until, all parties being sick of the expense, the mine was
+deserted, and the town decamped.  According to the second version,
+told me with much secrecy of manner, the whole affair, mine, mill,
+and town, were parts of one majestic swindle.  There had never come
+any silver out of any portion of the mine; there was no silver to
+come.  At midnight trains of packhorses might have been observed
+winding by devious tracks about the shoulder of the mountain.  They
+came from far away, from Amador or Placer, laden with silver in
+"old cigar boxes."  They discharged their load at Silverado, in the
+hour of sleep; and before the morning they were gone again with
+their mysterious drivers to their unknown source.  In this way,
+twenty thousand pounds' worth of silver was smuggled in under cover
+of night, in these old cigar boxes; mixed with Silverado mineral;
+carted down to the mill; crushed, amalgated, and refined, and
+despatched to the city as the proper product of the mine.  Stock-
+jobbing, if it can cover such expenses, must be a profitable
+business in San Francisco.
+
+I give these two versions as I got them.  But I place little
+reliance on either, my belief in history having been greatly
+shaken.  For it chanced that I had come to dwell in Silverado at a
+critical hour; great events in its history were about to happen--
+did happen, as I am led to believe; nay, and it will be seen that I
+played a part in that revolution myself.  And yet from first to
+last I never had a glimmer of an idea what was going on; and even
+now, after full reflection, profess myself at sea.  That there was
+some obscure intrigue of the cigar-box order, and that I, in the
+character of a wooden puppet, set pen to paper in the interest of
+somebody, so much, and no more, is certain.
+
+Silverado, then under my immediate sway, belonged to one whom I
+will call a Mr. Ronalds.  I only knew him through the
+extraordinarily distorting medium of local gossip, now as a
+momentous jobber; now as a dupe to point an adage; and again, and
+much more probably, as an ordinary Christian gentleman like you or
+me, who had opened a mine and worked it for a while with better and
+worse fortune.  So, through a defective window-pane, you may see
+the passer-by shoot up into a hunchbacked giant or dwindle into a
+potbellied dwarf.
+
+To Ronalds, at least, the mine belonged; but the notice by which he
+held it would ran out upon the 30th of June--or rather, as I
+suppose, it had run out already, and the month of grace would
+expire upon that day, after which any American citizen might post a
+notice of his own, and make Silverado his.  This, with a sort of
+quiet slyness, Rufe told me at an early period of our acquaintance.
+There was no silver, of course; the mine "wasn't worth nothing, Mr.
+Stevens," but there was a deal of old iron and wood around, and to
+gain possession of this old wood and iron, and get a right to the
+water, Rufe proposed, if I had no objections, to "jump the claim."
+
+Of course, I had no objection.  But I was filled with wonder.  If
+all he wanted was the wood and iron, what, in the name of fortune,
+was to prevent him taking them?  "His right there was none to
+dispute."  He might lay hands on all to-morrow, as the wild cats
+had laid hands upon our knives and hatchet.  Besides, was this mass
+of heavy mining plant worth transportation?  If it was, why had not
+the rightful owners carted it away?  If it was, would they not
+preserve their title to these movables, even after they had lost
+their title to the mine?  And if it were not, what the better was
+Rufe?  Nothing would grow at Silverado; there was even no wood to
+cut; beyond a sense of property, there was nothing to be gained.
+Lastly, was it at all credible that Ronalds would forget what Rufe
+remembered?  The days of grace were not yet over:  any fine morning
+he might appear, paper in hand, and enter for another year on his
+inheritance.  However, it was none of my business; all seemed
+legal; Rufe or Ronalds, all was one to me.
+
+On the morning of the 27th, Mrs. Hanson appeared with the milk as
+usual, in her sun-bonnet.  The time would be out on Tuesday, she
+reminded us, and bade me be in readiness to play my part, though I
+had no idea what it was to be.  And suppose Ronalds came? we asked.
+She received the idea with derision, laughing aloud with all her
+fine teeth.  He could not find the mine to save his life, it
+appeared, without Rufe to guide him.  Last year, when he came, they
+heard him "up and down the road a hollerin' and a raisin' Cain."
+And at last he had to come to the Hansons in despair, and bid Rufe,
+"Jump into your pants and shoes, and show me where this old mine
+is, anyway!"  Seeing that Ronalds had laid out so much money in the
+spot, and that a beaten road led right up to the bottom of the
+clump, I thought this a remarkable example.  The sense of locality
+must be singularly in abeyance in the case of Ronalds.
+
+That same evening, supper comfortably over, Joe Strong busy at work
+on a drawing of the dump and the opposite hills, we were all out on
+the platform together, sitting there, under the tented heavens,
+with the same sense of privacy as if we had been cabined in a
+parlour, when the sound of brisk footsteps came mounting up the
+path.  We pricked our ears at this, for the tread seemed lighter
+and firmer than was usual with our country neighbours.  And
+presently, sure enough, two town gentlemen, with cigars and kid
+gloves, came debauching past the house.  They looked in that place
+like a blasphemy.
+
+"Good evening," they said.  For none of us had stirred; we all sat
+stiff with wonder.
+
+"Good evening," I returned; and then, to put them at their ease, "A
+stiff climb," I added.
+
+"Yes," replied the leader; "but we have to thank you for this
+path."
+
+I did not like the man's tone.  None of us liked it.  He did not
+seem embarrassed by the meeting, but threw us his remarks like
+favours, and strode magisterially by us towards the shaft and
+tunnel.
+
+Presently we heard his voice raised to his companion.  "We drifted
+every sort of way, but couldn't strike the ledge."  Then again:
+"It pinched out here."  And once more:  "Every minor that ever
+worked upon it says there's bound to be a ledge somewhere."
+
+These were the snatches of his talk that reached us, and they had a
+damning significance.  We, the lords of Silverado, had come face to
+face with our superior.  It is the worst of all quaint and of all
+cheap ways of life that they bring us at last to the pinch of some
+humiliation.  I liked well enough to be a squatter when there was
+none but Hanson by; before Ronalds, I will own, I somewhat quailed.
+I hastened to do him fealty, said I gathered he was the Squattee,
+and apologized.  He threatened me with ejection, in a manner grimly
+pleasant--more pleasant to him, I fancy, than to me; and then he
+passed off into praises of the former state of Silverado.  "It was
+the busiest little mining town you ever saw:" a population of
+between a thousand and fifteen hundred souls, the engine in full
+blast, the mill newly erected; nothing going but champagne, and
+hope the order of the day.  Ninety thousand dollars came out; a
+hundred and forty thousand were put in, making a net loss of fifty
+thousand.  The last days, I gathered, the days of John Stanley,
+were not so bright; the champagne had ceased to flow, the
+population was already moving elsewhere, and Silverado had begun to
+wither in the branch before it was cut at the root.  The last shot
+that was fired knocked over the stove chimney, and made that hole
+in the roof of our barrack, through which the sun was wont to visit
+slug-a-beds towards afternoon.  A noisy, last shot, to inaugurate
+the days of silence.
+
+Throughout this interview, my conscience was a good deal exercised;
+and I was moved to throw myself on my knees and own the intended
+treachery.  But then I had Hanson to consider.  I was in much the
+same position as Old Rowley, that royal humourist, whom "the rogue
+had taken into his confidence."  And again, here was Ronalds on the
+spot.  He must know the day of the month as well as Hanson and I.
+If a broad hint were necessary, he had the broadest in the world.
+For a large board had been nailed by the crown prince on the very
+front of our house, between the door and window, painted in
+cinnabar--the pigment of the country--with doggrel rhymes and
+contumelious pictures, and announcing, in terms unnecessarily
+figurative, that the trick was already played, the claim already
+jumped, and Master Sam the legitimate successor of Mr. Ronalds.
+But no, nothing could save that man; quem deus vult perdere, prius
+dementat.  As he came so he went, and left his rights depending.
+
+Late at night, by Silverado reckoning, and after we were all abed,
+Mrs. Hanson returned to give us the newest of her news.  It was
+like a scene in a ship's steerage:  all of us abed in our different
+tiers, the single candle struggling with the darkness, and this
+plump, handsome woman, seated on an upturned valise beside the
+bunks, talking and showing her fine teeth, and laughing till the
+rafters rang.  Any ship, to be sure, with a hundredth part as many
+holes in it as our barrack, must long ago have gone to her last
+port.  Up to that time I had always imagined Mrs. Hanson's
+loquacity to be mere incontinence, that she said what was uppermost
+for the pleasure of speaking, and laughed and laughed again as a
+kind of musical accompaniment.  But I now found there was an art in
+it, I found it less communicative than silence itself.  I wished to
+know why Ronalds had come; how he had found his way without Rufe;
+and why, being on the spot, he had not refreshed his title.  She
+talked interminably on, but her replies were never answers.  She
+fled under a cloud of words; and when I had made sure that she was
+purposely eluding me, I dropped the subject in my turn, and let her
+rattle where she would.
+
+She had come to tell us that, instead of waiting for Tuesday, the
+claim was to be jumped on the morrow.  How?  If the time were not
+out, it was impossible.  Why?  If Ronalds had come and gone, and
+done nothing, there was the less cause for hurry.  But again I
+could reach no satisfaction.  The claim was to be jumped next
+morning, that was all that she would condescend upon.
+
+And yet it was not jumped the next morning, nor yet the next, and a
+whole week had come and gone before we heard more of this exploit.
+That day week, however, a day of great heat, Hanson, with a little
+roll of paper in his hand, and the eternal pipe alight; Breedlove,
+his large, dull friend, to act, I suppose, as witness; Mrs. Hanson,
+in her Sunday best; and all the children, from the oldest to the
+youngest;--arrived in a procession, tailing one behind another up
+the path.  Caliban was absent, but he had been chary of his
+friendly visits since the row; and with that exception, the whole
+family was gathered together as for a marriage or a christening.
+Strong was sitting at work, in the shade of the dwarf madronas near
+the forge; and they planted themselves about him in a circle, one
+on a stone, another on the waggon rails, a third on a piece of
+plank.  Gradually the children stole away up the canyon to where
+there was another chute, somewhat smaller than the one across the
+dump; and down this chute, for the rest of the afternoon, they
+poured one avalanche of stones after another, waking the echoes of
+the glen.  Meantime we elders sat together on the platform, Hanson
+and his friend smoking in silence like Indian sachems, Mrs. Hanson
+rattling on as usual with an adroit volubility, saying nothing, but
+keeping the party at their ease like a courtly hostess.
+
+Not a word occurred about the business of the day.  Once, twice,
+and thrice I tried to slide the subject in, but was discouraged by
+the stoic apathy of Rufe, and beaten down before the pouring
+verbiage of his wife.  There is nothing of the Indian brave about
+me, and I began to grill with impatience.  At last, like a highway
+robber, I cornered Hanson, and bade him stand and deliver his
+business.  Thereupon he gravely rose, as though to hint that this
+was not a proper place, nor the subject one suitable for squaws,
+and I, following his example, led him up the plank into our
+barrack.  There he bestowed himself on a box, and unrolled his
+papers with fastidious deliberation.  There were two sheets of
+note-paper, and an old mining notice, dated May 30th, 1879, part
+print, part manuscript, and the latter much obliterated by the
+rains.  It was by this identical piece of paper that the mine had
+been held last year.  For thirteen months it had endured the
+weather and the change of seasons on a cairn behind the shoulder of
+the canyon; and it was now my business, spreading it before me on
+the table, and sitting on a valise, to copy its terms, with some
+necessary changes, twice over on the two sheets of note-paper.  One
+was then to be placed on the same cairn--a "mound of rocks" the
+notice put it; and the other to be lodged for registration.
+
+Rufe watched me, silently smoking, till I came to the place for the
+locator's name at the end of the first copy; and when I proposed
+that he should sign, I thought I saw a scare in his eye.  "I don't
+think that'll be necessary," he said slowly; "just you write it
+down."  Perhaps this mighty hunter, who was the most active member
+of the local school board, could not write.  There would be nothing
+strange in that.  The constable of Calistoga is, and has been for
+years, a bed-ridden man, and, if I remember rightly, blind.  He had
+more need of the emoluments than another, it was explained; and it
+was easy for him to "depytize," with a strong accent on the last.
+So friendly and so free are popular institutions.
+
+When I had done my scrivening, Hanson strolled out, and addressed
+Breedlove, "Will you step up here a bit?" and after they had
+disappeared a little while into the chaparral and madrona thicket,
+they came back again, minus a notice, and the deed was done.  The
+claim was jumped; a tract of mountain-side, fifteen hundred feet
+long by six hundred wide, with all the earth's precious bowels, had
+passed from Ronalds to Hanson, and, in the passage, changed its
+name from the "Mammoth" to the "Calistoga."  I had tried to get
+Rufe to call it after his wife, after himself, and after Garfield,
+the Republican Presidential candidate of the hour--since then
+elected, and, alas! dead--but all was in vain.  The claim had once
+been called the Calistoga before, and he seemed to feel safety in
+returning to that.
+
+And so the history of that mine became once more plunged in
+darkness, lit only by some monster pyrotechnical displays of
+gossip.  And perhaps the most curious feature of the whole matter
+is this:  that we should have dwelt in this quiet corner of the
+mountains, with not a dozen neighbours, and yet struggled all the
+while, like desperate swimmers, in this sea of falsities and
+contradictions.  Wherever a man is, there will be a lie.
+
+
+
+TOILS AND PLEASURES
+
+
+
+I must try to convey some notion of our life, of how the days
+passed and what pleasure we took in them, of what there was to do
+and how we set about doing it, in our mountain hermitage.  The
+house, after we had repaired the worst of the damages, and filled
+in some of the doors and windows with white cotton cloth, became a
+healthy and a pleasant dwelling-place, always airy and dry, and
+haunted by the outdoor perfumes of the glen.  Within, it had the
+look of habitation, the human look.  You had only to go into the
+third room, which we did not use, and see its stones, its sifting
+earth, its tumbled litter; and then return to our lodging, with the
+beds made, the plates on the rack, the pail of bright water behind
+the door, the stove crackling in a corner, and perhaps the table
+roughly laid against a meal,--and man's order, the little clean
+spots that he creates to dwell in, were at once contrasted with the
+rich passivity of nature.  And yet our house was everywhere so
+wrecked and shattered, the air came and went so freely, the sun
+found so many portholes, the golden outdoor glow shone in so many
+open chinks, that we enjoyed, at the same time, some of the
+comforts of a roof and much of the gaiety and brightness of al
+fresco life.  A single shower of rain, to be sure, and we should
+have been drowned out like mice.  But ours was a Californian
+summer, and an earthquake was a far likelier accident than a shower
+of rain.
+
+Trustful in this fine weather, we kept the house for kitchen and
+bedroom, and used the platform as our summer parlour.  The sense of
+privacy, as I have said already, was complete.  We could look over
+the clump on miles of forest and rough hilltop; our eyes commanded
+some of Napa Valley, where the train ran, and the little country
+townships sat so close together along the line of the rail.  But
+here there was no man to intrude.  None but the Hansons were our
+visitors.  Even they came but at long intervals, or twice daily, at
+a stated hour, with milk.  So our days, as they were never
+interrupted, drew out to the greater length; hour melted insensibly
+into hour; the household duties, though they were many, and some of
+them laborious, dwindled into mere islets of business in a sea of
+sunny day-time; and it appears to me, looking back, as though the
+far greater part of our life at Silverado had been passed, propped
+upon an elbow, or seated on a plank, listening to the silence that
+there is among the hills.
+
+My work, it is true, was over early in the morning.  I rose before
+any one else, lit the stove, put on the water to boil, and strolled
+forth upon the platform to wait till it was ready.  Silverado would
+then be still in shadow, the sun shining on the mountain higher up.
+A clean smell of trees, a smell of the earth at morning, hung in
+the air.  Regularly, every day, there was a single bird, not
+singing, but awkwardly chirruping among the green madronas, and the
+sound was cheerful, natural, and stirring.  It did not hold the
+attention, nor interrupt the thread of meditation, like a blackbird
+or a nightingale; it was mere woodland prattle, of which the mind
+was conscious like a perfume.  The freshness of these morning
+seasons remained with me far on into the day.
+
+As soon as the kettle boiled, I made porridge and coffee; and that,
+beyond the literal drawing of water, and the preparation of
+kindling, which it would be hyperbolical to call the hewing of
+wood, ended my domestic duties for the day.  Thenceforth my wife
+laboured single-handed in the palace, and I lay or wandered on the
+platform at my own sweet will.  The little corner near the forge,
+where we found a refuge under the madronas from the unsparing early
+sun, is indeed connected in my mind with some nightmare encounters
+over Euclid, and the Latin Grammar.  These were known as Sam's
+lessons.  He was supposed to be the victim and the sufferer; but
+here there must have been some misconception, for whereas I
+generally retired to bed after one of these engagements, he was no
+sooner set free than he dashed up to the Chinaman's house, where he
+had installed a printing press, that great element of civilization,
+and the sound of his labours would be faintly audible about the
+canyon half the day.
+
+To walk at all was a laborious business; the foot sank and slid,
+the boots were cut to pieces, among sharp, uneven, rolling stones.
+When we crossed the platform in any direction, it was usual to lay
+a course, following as much as possible the line of waggon rails.
+Thus, if water were to be drawn, the water-carrier left the house
+along some tilting planks that we had laid down, and not laid down
+very well.  These carried him to that great highroad, the railway;
+and the railway served him as far as to the head of the shaft.  But
+from thence to the spring and back again he made the best of his
+unaided way, staggering among the stones, and wading in low growth
+of the calcanthus, where the rattlesnakes lay hissing at his
+passage.  Yet I liked to draw water.  It was pleasant to dip the
+gray metal pail into the clean, colourless, cool water; pleasant to
+carry it back, with the water ripping at the edge, and a broken
+sunbeam quivering in the midst.
+
+But the extreme roughness of the walking confined us in common
+practice to the platform, and indeed to those parts of it that were
+most easily accessible along the line of rails.  The rails came
+straight forward from the shaft, here and there overgrown with
+little green bushes, but still entire, and still carrying a truck,
+which it was Sam's delight to trundle to and fro by the hour with
+various ladings.  About midway down the platform, the railroad
+trended to the right, leaving our house and coasting along the far
+side within a few yards of the madronas and the forge, and not far
+of the latter, ended in a sort of platform on the edge of the dump.
+There, in old days, the trucks were tipped, and their load sent
+thundering down the chute.  There, besides, was the only spot where
+we could approach the margin of the dump.  Anywhere else, you took
+your life in your right hand when you came within a yard and a half
+to peer over.  For at any moment the dump might begin to slide and
+carry you down and bury you below its ruins.  Indeed, the
+neighbourhood of an old mine is a place beset with dangers.  For as
+still as Silverado was, at any moment the report of rotten wood
+might tell us that the platform had fallen into the shaft; the dump
+might begin to pour into the road below; or a wedge slip in the
+great upright seam, and hundreds of tons of mountain bury the scene
+of our encampment.
+
+I have already compared the dump to a rampart, built certainly by
+some rude people, and for prehistoric wars.  It was likewise a
+frontier.  All below was green and woodland, the tall pines soaring
+one above another, each with a firm outline and full spread of
+bough.  All above was arid, rocky, and bald.  The great spout of
+broken mineral, that had dammed the canyon up, was a creature of
+man's handiwork, its material dug out with a pick and powder, and
+spread by the service of the tracks.  But nature herself, in that
+upper district, seemed to have had an eye to nothing besides
+mining; and even the natural hill-side was all sliding gravel and
+precarious boulder.  Close at the margin of the well leaves would
+decay to skeletons and mummies, which at length some stronger gust
+would carry clear of the canyon and scatter in the subjacent woods.
+Even moisture and decaying vegetable matter could not, with all
+nature's alchemy, concoct enough soil to nourish a few poor
+grasses.  It is the same, they say, in the neighbourhood of all
+silver mines; the nature of that precious rock being stubborn with
+quartz and poisonous with cinnabar.  Both were plenty in our
+Silverado.  The stones sparkled white in the sunshine with quartz;
+they were all stained red with cinnabar.  Here, doubtless, came the
+Indians of yore to paint their faces for the war-path; and
+cinnabar, if I remember rightly, was one of the few articles of
+Indian commerce.  Now, Sam had it in his undisturbed possession, to
+pound down and slake, and paint his rude designs with.  But to me
+it had always a fine flavour of poetry, compounded out of Indian
+story and Hawthornden's allusion:
+
+
+"Desire, alas! I desire a Zeuxis new,
+From Indies borrowing gold, from Eastern skies
+Most bright cinoper . . ."
+
+
+Yet this is but half the picture; our Silverado platform has
+another side to it.  Though there was no soil, and scarce a blade
+of grass, yet out of these tumbled gravel-heaps and broken
+boulders, a flower garden bloomed as at home in a conservatory.
+Calcanthus crept, like a hardy weed, all over our rough parlour,
+choking the railway, and pushing forth its rusty, aromatic cones
+from between two blocks of shattered mineral.  Azaleas made a big
+snow-bed just above the well.  The shoulder of the hill waved white
+with Mediterranean heath.  In the crannies of the ledge and about
+the spurs of the tall pine, a red flowering stone-plant hung in
+clusters.  Even the low, thorny chaparral was thick with pea-like
+blossom.  Close at the foot of our path nutmegs prospered,
+delightful to the sight and smell.  At sunrise, and again late at
+night, the scent of the sweet bay trees filled the canyon, and the
+down-blowing night wind must have borne it hundreds of feet into
+the outer air.
+
+All this vegetation, to be sure, was stunted.  The madrona was here
+no bigger than the manzanita; the bay was but a stripling shrub;
+the very pines, with four or five exceptions in all our upper
+canyon, were not so tall as myself, or but a little taller, and the
+most of them came lower than my waist.  For a prosperous forest
+tree, we must look below, where the glen was crowded with green
+spires.  But for flowers and ravishing perfume, we had none to
+envy:  our heap of road-metal was thick with bloom, like a hawthorn
+in the front of June; our red, baking angle in the mountain, a
+laboratory of poignant scents.  It was an endless wonder to my
+mind, as I dreamed about the platform, following the progress of
+the shadows, where the madrona with its leaves, the azalea and
+calcanthus with their blossoms, could find moisture to support such
+thick, wet, waxy growths, or the bay tree collect the ingredients
+of its perfume.  But there they all grew together, healthy, happy,
+and happy-making, as though rooted in a fathom of black soil.
+
+Nor was it only vegetable life that prospered.  We had, indeed, few
+birds, and none that had much of a voice or anything worthy to be
+called a song.  My morning comrade had a thin chirp, unmusical and
+monotonous, but friendly and pleasant to hear.  He had but one
+rival:  a fellow with an ostentatious cry of near an octave
+descending, not one note of which properly followed another.  This
+is the only bird I ever knew with a wrong ear; but there was
+something enthralling about his performance.  You listened and
+listened, thinking each time he must surely get it right; but no,
+it was always wrong, and always wrong the same way.  Yet he seemed
+proud of his song, delivered it with execution and a manner of his
+own, and was charming to his mate.  A very incorrect, incessant
+human whistler had thus a chance of knowing how his own music
+pleased the world.  Two great birds--eagles, we thought--dwelt at
+the top of the canyon, among the crags that were printed on the
+sky.  Now and again, but very rarely, they wheeled high over our
+heads in silence, or with a distant, dying scream; and then, with a
+fresh impulse, winged fleetly forward, dipped over a hilltop, and
+were gone.  They seemed solemn and ancient things, sailing the blue
+air:  perhaps co-oeval with the mountain where they haunted,
+perhaps emigrants from Rome, where the glad legions may have
+shouted to behold them on the morn of battle.
+
+But if birds were rare, the place abounded with rattlesnakes--the
+rattlesnake's nest, it might have been named.  Wherever we brushed
+among the bushes, our passage woke their angry buzz.  One dwelt
+habitually in the wood-pile, and sometimes, when we came for
+firewood, thrust up his small head between two logs, and hissed at
+the intrusion.  The rattle has a legendary credit; it is said to be
+awe-inspiring, and, once heard, to stamp itself for ever in the
+memory.  But the sound is not at all alarming; the hum of many
+insects, and the buzz of the wasp convince the ear of danger quite
+as readily.  As a matter of fact, we lived for weeks in Silverado,
+coming and going, with rattles sprung on every side, and it never
+occurred to us to be afraid.  I used to take sun-baths and do
+calisthenics in a certain pleasant nook among azalea and
+calcanthus, the rattles whizzing on every side like spinning-
+wheels, and the combined hiss or buzz rising louder and angrier at
+any sudden movement; but I was never in the least impressed, nor
+ever attacked.  It was only towards the end of our stay, that a man
+down at Calistoga, who was expatiating on the terrifying nature of
+the sound, gave me at last a very good imitation; and it burst on
+me at once that we dwelt in the very metropolis of deadly snakes,
+and that the rattle was simply the commonest noise in Silverado.
+Immediately on our return, we attacked the Hansons on the subject.
+They had formerly assured us that our canyon was favoured, like
+Ireland, with an entire immunity from poisonous reptiles; but, with
+the perfect inconsequence of the natural man, they were no sooner
+found out than they went off at score in the contrary direction,
+and we were told that in no part of the world did rattlesnakes
+attain to such a monstrous bigness as among the warm, flower-dotted
+rocks of Silverado.  This is a contribution rather to the natural
+history of the Hansons, than to that of snakes.
+
+One person, however, better served by his instinct, had known the
+rattle from the first; and that was Chuchu, the dog.  No rational
+creature has ever led an existence more poisoned by terror than
+that dog's at Silverado.  Every whiz of the rattle made him bound.
+His eyes rolled; he trembled; he would be often wet with sweat.
+One of our great mysteries was his terror of the mountain.  A
+little away above our nook, the azaleas and almost all the
+vegetation ceased.  Dwarf pines not big enough to be Christmas
+trees, grew thinly among loose stone and gravel scaurs.  Here and
+there a big boulder sat quiescent on a knoll, having paused there
+till the next rain in his long slide down the mountain.  There was
+here no ambuscade for the snakes, you could see clearly where you
+trod; and yet the higher I went, the more abject and appealing
+became Chuchu's terror.  He was an excellent master of that
+composite language in which dogs communicate with men, and he would
+assure me, on his honour, that there was some peril on the
+mountain; appeal to me, by all that I held holy, to turn back; and
+at length, finding all was in vain, and that I still persisted,
+ignorantly foolhardy, he would suddenly whip round and make a bee-
+line down the slope for Silverado, the gravel showering after him.
+What was he afraid of?  There were admittedly brown bears and
+California lions on the mountain; and a grizzly visited Rufe's
+poultry yard not long before, to the unspeakable alarm of Caliban,
+who dashed out to chastise the intruder, and found himself, by
+moonlight, face to face with such a tartar.  Something at least
+there must have been:  some hairy, dangerous brute lodged
+permanently among the rocks a little to the north-west of
+Silverado, spending his summer thereabout, with wife and family.
+
+And there was, or there had been, another animal.  Once, under the
+broad daylight, on that open stony hillside, where the baby pines
+were growing, scarcely tall enough to be a badge for a MacGregor's
+bonnet, I came suddenly upon his innocent body, lying mummified by
+the dry air and sun:  a pigmy kangaroo.  I am ingloriously ignorant
+of these subjects; had never heard of such a beast; thought myself
+face to face with some incomparable sport of nature; and began to
+cherish hopes of immortality in science.  Rarely have I been
+conscious of a stranger thrill than when I raised that singular
+creature from the stones, dry as a board, his innocent heart long
+quiet, and all warm with sunshine.  His long hind legs were stiff,
+his tiny forepaws clutched upon his breast, as if to leap; his poor
+life cut short upon that mountain by some unknown accident.  But
+the kangaroo rat, it proved, was no such unknown animal; and my
+discovery was nothing.
+
+Crickets were not wanting.  I thought I could make out exactly four
+of them, each with a corner of his own, who used to make night
+musical at Silverado.  In the matter of voice, they far excelled
+the birds, and their ringing whistle sounded from rock to rock,
+calling and replying the same thing, as in a meaningless opera.
+Thus, children in full health and spirits shout together, to the
+dismay of neighbours; and their idle, happy, deafening
+vociferations rise and fall, like the song of the crickets.  I used
+to sit at night on the platform, and wonder why these creatures
+were so happy; and what was wrong with man that he also did not
+wind up his days with an hour or two of shouting; but I suspect
+that all long-lived animals are solemn.  The dogs alone are hardly
+used by nature; and it seems a manifest injustice for poor Chuchu
+to die in his teens, after a life so shadowed and troubled,
+continually shaken with alarm, and the tear of elegant sentiment
+permanently in his eye.
+
+There was another neighbour of ours at Silverado, small but very
+active, a destructive fellow.  This was a black, ugly fly--a bore,
+the Hansons called him--who lived by hundreds in the boarding of
+our house.  He entered by a round hole, more neatly pierced than a
+man could do it with a gimlet, and he seems to have spent his life
+in cutting out the interior of the plank, but whether as a dwelling
+or a store-house, I could never find.  When I used to lie in bed in
+the morning for a rest--we had no easy-chairs in Silverado--I would
+hear, hour after hour, the sharp cutting sound of his labours, and
+from time to time a dainty shower of sawdust would fall upon the
+blankets.  There lives no more industrious creature than a bore.
+
+And now that I have named to the reader all our animals and insects
+without exception--only I find I have forgotten the flies--he will
+be able to appreciate the singular privacy and silence of our days.
+It was not only man who was excluded:  animals, the song of birds,
+the lowing of cattle, the bleating of sheep, clouds even, and the
+variations of the weather, were here also wanting; and as, day
+after day, the sky was one dome of blue, and the pines below us
+stood motionless in the still air, so the hours themselves were
+marked out from each other only by the series of our own affairs,
+and the sun's great period as he ranged westward through the
+heavens.  The two birds cackled a while in the early morning; all
+day the water tinkled in the shaft, the bores ground sawdust in the
+planking of our crazy palace--infinitesimal sounds; and it was only
+with the return of night that any change would fall on our
+surroundings, or the four crickets begin to flute together in the
+dark.
+
+Indeed, it would be hard to exaggerate the pleasure that we took in
+the approach of evening.  Our day was not very long, but it was
+very tiring.  To trip along unsteady planks or wade among shifting
+stones, to go to and fro for water, to clamber down the glen to the
+Toll House after meat and letters, to cook, to make fires and beds,
+were all exhausting to the body.  Life out of doors, besides, under
+the fierce eye of day, draws largely on the animal spirits.  There
+are certain hours in the afternoon when a man, unless he is in
+strong health or enjoys a vacant mind, would rather creep into a
+cool corner of a house and sit upon the chairs of civilization.
+About that time, the sharp stones, the planks, the upturned boxes
+of Silverado, began to grow irksome to my body; I set out on that
+hopeless, never-ending quest for a more comfortable posture; I
+would be fevered and weary of the staring sun; and just then he
+would begin courteously to withdraw his countenance, the shadows
+lengthened, the aromatic airs awoke, and an indescribable but happy
+change announced the coming of the night.
+
+The hours of evening, when we were once curtained in the friendly
+dark, sped lightly.  Even as with the crickets, night brought to us
+a certain spirit of rejoicing.  It was good to taste the air; good
+to mark the dawning of the stars, as they increased their
+glittering company; good, too, to gather stones, and send them
+crashing down the chute, a wave of light.  It seemed, in some way,
+the reward and the fulfilment of the day.  So it is when men dwell
+in the open air; it is one of the simple pleasures that we lose by
+living cribbed and covered in a house, that, though the coming of
+the day is still the most inspiriting, yet day's departure, also,
+and the return of night refresh, renew, and quiet us; and in the
+pastures of the dusk we stand, like cattle, exulting in the absence
+of the load.
+
+Our nights wore never cold, and they were always still, but for one
+remarkable exception.  Regularly, about nine o'clock, a warm wind
+sprang up, and blew for ten minutes, or maybe a quarter of an hour,
+right down the canyon, fanning it well out, airing it as a mother
+airs the night nursery before the children sleep.  As far as I
+could judge, in the clear darkness of the night, this wind was
+purely local:  perhaps dependant on the configuration of the glen.
+At least, it was very welcome to the hot and weary squatters; and
+if we were not abed already, the springing up of this lilliputian
+valley-wind would often be our signal to retire.
+
+I was the last to go to bed, as I was still the first to rise.
+Many a night I have strolled about the platform, taking a bath of
+darkness before I slept.  The rest would be in bed, and even from
+the forge I could hear them talking together from bunk to bunk.  A
+single candle in the neck of a pint bottle was their only
+illumination; and yet the old cracked house seemed literally
+bursting with the light.  It shone keen as a knife through all the
+vertical chinks; it struck upward through the broken shingles; and
+through the eastern door and window, it fell in a great splash upon
+the thicket and the overhanging rock.  You would have said a
+conflagration, or at the least a roaring forge; and behold, it was
+but a candle.  Or perhaps it was yet more strange to see the
+procession moving bedwards round the corner of the house, and up
+the plank that brought us to the bedroom door; under the immense
+spread of the starry heavens, down in a crevice of the giant
+mountain these few human shapes, with their unshielded taper, made
+so disproportionate a figure in the eye and mind.  But the more he
+is alone with nature, the greater man and his doings bulk in the
+consideration of his fellow-men.  Miles and miles away upon the
+opposite hill-tops, if there were any hunter belated or any
+traveller who had lost his way, he must have stood, and watched and
+wondered, from the time the candle issued from the door of the
+assayer's office till it had mounted the plank and disappeared
+again into the miners' dormitory.
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS ***
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+<title>The Silverado Squatters</title>
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+<h2>
+<a href="#startoftext">The Silverado Squatters, by Robert Louis Stevenson</a>
+</h2>
+<pre>
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Silverado Squatters, by Robert Louis Stevenson
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+
+
+Title: The Silverado Squatters
+
+Author: Robert Louis Stevenson
+
+Release Date: May, 1996  [EBook #516]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on March 12, 1996]
+[Most recently updated: August 27, 2002]
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+Edition: 10
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+Language: English
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+Character set encoding: ASCII
+</pre>
+<p>
+<a name="startoftext"></a>
+Transcribed from the 1906 Chatto &amp; Windus edition by David Price,
+email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+The scene of this little book is on a high mountain.&nbsp; There are,
+indeed, many higher; there are many of a nobler outline.&nbsp; It is
+no place of pilgrimage for the summary globe-trotter; but to one who
+lives upon its sides, Mount Saint Helena soon becomes a centre of interest.&nbsp;
+It is the Mont Blanc of one section of the Californian Coast Range,
+none of its near neighbours rising to one-half its altitude.&nbsp; It
+looks down on much green, intricate country.&nbsp; It feeds in the spring-time
+many splashing brooks.&nbsp; From its summit you must have an excellent
+lesson of geography: seeing, to the south, San Francisco Bay, with Tamalpais
+on the one hand and Monte Diablo on the other; to the west and thirty
+miles away, the open ocean; eastward, across the corn-lands and thick
+tule swamps of Sacramento Valley, to where the Central Pacific railroad
+begins to climb the sides of the Sierras; and northward, for what I
+know, the white head of Shasta looking down on Oregon.&nbsp; Three counties,
+Napa County, Lake County, and Sonoma County, march across its cliffy
+shoulders.&nbsp; Its naked peak stands nearly four thousand five hundred
+feet above the sea; its sides are fringed with forest; and the soil,
+where it is bare, glows warm with cinnabar.<br>
+<br>
+Life in its shadow goes rustically forward.&nbsp; Bucks, and bears,
+and rattle-snakes, and former mining operations, are the staple of men&rsquo;s
+talk.&nbsp; Agriculture has only begun to mount above the valley.&nbsp;
+And though in a few years from now the whole district may be smiling
+with farms, passing trains shaking the mountain to the heart, many-windowed
+hotels lighting up the night like factories, and a prosperous city occupying
+the site of sleepy Calistoga; yet in the mean time, around the foot
+of that mountain the silence of nature reigns in a great measure unbroken,
+and the people of hill and valley go sauntering about their business
+as in the days before the flood.<br>
+<br>
+To reach Mount Saint Helena from San Francisco, the traveller has twice
+to cross the bay: once by the busy Oakland Ferry, and again, after an
+hour or so of the railway, from Vallejo junction to Vallejo.&nbsp; Thence
+he takes rail once more to mount the long green strath of Napa Valley.<br>
+<br>
+In all the contractions and expansions of that inland sea, the Bay of
+San Francisco, there can be few drearier scenes than the Vallejo Ferry.&nbsp;
+Bald shores and a low, bald islet inclose the sea; through the narrows
+the tide bubbles, muddy like a river.&nbsp; When we made the passage
+(bound, although yet we knew it not, for Silverado) the steamer jumped,
+and the black buoys were dancing in the jabble; the ocean breeze blew
+killing chill; and, although the upper sky was still unflecked with
+vapour, the sea fogs were pouring in from seaward, over the hilltops
+of Marin county, in one great, shapeless, silver cloud.<br>
+<br>
+South Vallejo is typical of many Californian towns.&nbsp; It was a blunder;
+the site has proved untenable; and, although it is still such a young
+place by the scale of Europe, it has already begun to be deserted for
+its neighbour and namesake, North Vallejo.&nbsp; A long pier, a number
+of drinking saloons, a hotel of a great size, marshy pools where the
+frogs keep up their croaking, and even at high noon the entire absence
+of any human face or voice - these are the marks of South Vallejo.&nbsp;
+Yet there was a tall building beside the pier, labelled the <i>Star</i>
+<i>Flour</i> <i>Mills</i>; and sea-going, full-rigged ships lay close
+along shore, waiting for their cargo.&nbsp; Soon these would be plunging
+round the Horn, soon the flour from the <i>Star Flour Mills</i> would
+be landed on the wharves of Liverpool.&nbsp; For that, too, is one of
+England&rsquo;s outposts; thither, to this gaunt mill, across the Atlantic
+and Pacific deeps and round about the icy Horn, this crowd of great,
+three-masted, deep-sea ships come, bringing nothing, and return with
+bread.<br>
+<br>
+The Frisby House, for that was the name of the hotel, was a place of
+fallen fortunes, like the town.&nbsp; It was now given up to labourers,
+and partly ruinous.&nbsp; At dinner there was the ordinary display of
+what is called in the west a <i>two-bit house</i>: the tablecloth checked
+red and white, the plague of flies, the wire hencoops over the dishes,
+the great variety and invariable vileness of the food and the rough
+coatless men devoting it in silence.&nbsp; In our bedroom, the stove
+would not burn, though it would smoke; and while one window would not
+open, the other would not shut.&nbsp; There was a view on a bit of empty
+road, a few dark houses, a donkey wandering with its shadow on a slope,
+and a blink of sea, with a tall ship lying anchored in the moonlight.&nbsp;
+All about that dreary inn frogs sang their ungainly chorus.<br>
+<br>
+Early the next morning we mounted the hill along a wooden footway, bridging
+one marish spot after another.&nbsp; Here and there, as we ascended,
+we passed a house embowered in white roses.&nbsp; More of the bay became
+apparent, and soon the blue peak of Tamalpais rose above the green level
+of the island opposite.&nbsp; It told us we were still but a little
+way from the city of the Golden Gates, already, at that hour, beginning
+to awake among the sand-hills.&nbsp; It called to us over the waters
+as with the voice of a bird.&nbsp; Its stately head, blue as a sapphire
+on the paler azure of the sky, spoke to us of wider outlooks and the
+bright Pacific.&nbsp; For Tamalpais stands sentry, like a lighthouse,
+over the Golden Gates, between the bay and the open ocean, and looks
+down indifferently on both.&nbsp; Even as we saw and hailed it from
+Vallejo, seamen, far out at sea, were scanning it with shaded eyes;
+and, as if to answer to the thought, one of the great ships below began
+silently to clothe herself with white sails, homeward bound for England.<br>
+<br>
+For some way beyond Vallejo the railway led us through bald green pastures.&nbsp;
+On the west the rough highlands of Marin shut off the ocean; in the
+midst, in long, straggling, gleaming arms, the bay died out among the
+grass; there were few trees and few enclosures; the sun shone wide over
+open uplands, the displumed hills stood clear against the sky.&nbsp;
+But by-and-by these hills began to draw nearer on either hand, and first
+thicket and then wood began to clothe their sides; and soon we were
+away from all signs of the sea&rsquo;s neighbourhood, mounting an inland,
+irrigated valley.&nbsp; A great variety of oaks stood, now severally,
+now in a becoming grove, among the fields and vineyards.&nbsp; The towns
+were compact, in about equal proportions, of bright, new wooden houses
+and great and growing forest trees; and the chapel bell on the engine
+sounded most festally that sunny Sunday, as we drew up at one green
+town after another, with the townsfolk trooping in their Sunday&rsquo;s
+best to see the strangers, with the sun sparkling on the clean houses,
+and great domes of foliage humming overhead in the breeze.<br>
+<br>
+This pleasant Napa Valley is, at its north end, blockaded by our mountain.&nbsp;
+There, at Calistoga, the railroad ceases, and the traveller who intends
+faring farther, to the Geysers or to the springs in Lake County, must
+cross the spurs of the mountain by stage.&nbsp; Thus, Mount Saint Helena
+is not only a summit, but a frontier; and, up to the time of writing,
+it has stayed the progress of the iron horse.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+PART I - IN THE VALLEY<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER I - CALISTOGA<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+It is difficult for a European to imagine Calistoga, the whole place
+is so new, and of such an accidental pattern; the very name, I hear,
+was invented at a supper-party by the man who found the springs.<br>
+<br>
+The railroad and the highway come up the valley about parallel to one
+another.&nbsp; The street of Calistoga joins the perpendicular to both
+- a wide street, with bright, clean, low houses, here and there a verandah
+over the sidewalk, here and there a horse-post, here and there lounging
+townsfolk.&nbsp; Other streets are marked out, and most likely named;
+for these towns in the New World begin with a firm resolve to grow larger,
+Washington and Broadway, and then First and Second, and so forth, being
+boldly plotted out as soon as the community indulges in a plan.&nbsp;
+But, in the meanwhile, all the life and most of the houses of Calistoga
+are concentrated upon that street between the railway station and the
+road.&nbsp; I never heard it called by any name, but I will hazard a
+guess that it is either Washington or Broadway.&nbsp; Here are the blacksmith&rsquo;s,
+the chemist&rsquo;s, the general merchant&rsquo;s, and Kong Sam Kee,
+the Chinese laundryman&rsquo;s; here, probably, is the office of the
+local paper (for the place has a paper - they all have papers); and
+here certainly is one of the hotels, Cheeseborough&rsquo;s, whence the
+daring Foss, a man dear to legend, starts his horses for the Geysers.<br>
+<br>
+It must be remembered that we are here in a land of stage-drivers and
+highwaymen: a land, in that sense, like England a hundred years ago.&nbsp;
+The highway robber - road-agent, he is quaintly called - is still busy
+in these parts.&nbsp; The fame of Vasquez is still young.&nbsp; Only
+a few years go, the Lakeport stage was robbed a mile or two from Calistoga.&nbsp;
+In 1879, the dentist of Mendocino City, fifty miles away upon the coast,
+suddenly threw off the garments of his trade, like Grindoff, in <i>The
+Miller and his Men</i>, and flamed forth in his second dress as a captain
+of banditti.&nbsp; A great robbery was followed by a long chase, a chase
+of days if not of weeks, among the intricate hill-country; and the chase
+was followed by much desultory fighting, in which several - and the
+dentist, I believe, amongst the number - bit the dust.&nbsp; The grass
+was springing for the first time, nourished upon their blood, when I
+arrived in Calistoga.&nbsp; I am reminded of another highwayman of that
+same year.&nbsp; &ldquo;He had been unwell,&rdquo; so ran his humorous
+defence, &ldquo;and the doctor told him to take something, so he took
+the express-box.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+The cultus of the stage-coachman always flourishes highest where there
+are thieves on the road, and where the guard travels armed, and the
+stage is not only a link between country and city, and the vehicle of
+news, but has a faint warfaring aroma, like a man who should be brother
+to a soldier.&nbsp; California boasts her famous stage-drivers, and
+among the famous Foss is not forgotten.&nbsp; Along the unfenced, abominable
+mountain roads, he launches his team with small regard to human life
+or the doctrine of probabilities.&nbsp; Flinching travellers, who behold
+themselves coasting eternity at every corner, look with natural admiration
+at their driver&rsquo;s huge, impassive, fleshy countenance.&nbsp; He
+has the very face for the driver in Sam Weller&rsquo;s anecdote, who
+upset the election party at the required point.&nbsp; Wonderful tales
+are current of his readiness and skill.&nbsp; One in particular, of
+how one of his horses fell at a ticklish passage of the road, and how
+Foss let slip the reins, and, driving over the fallen animal, arrived
+at the next stage with only three.&nbsp; This I relate as I heard it,
+without guarantee.<br>
+<br>
+I only saw Foss once, though, strange as it may sound, I have twice
+talked with him.&nbsp; He lives out of Calistoga, at a ranche called
+Fossville.&nbsp; One evening, after he was long gone home, I dropped
+into Cheeseborough&rsquo;s, and was asked if I should like to speak
+with Mr. Foss.&nbsp; Supposing that the interview was impossible, and
+that I was merely called upon to subscribe the general sentiment, I
+boldly answered &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;&nbsp; Next moment, I had one instrument
+at my ear, another at my mouth and found myself, with nothing in the
+world to say, conversing with a man several miles off among desolate
+hills.&nbsp; Foss rapidly and somewhat plaintively brought the conversation
+to an end; and he returned to his night&rsquo;s grog at Fossville, while
+I strolled forth again on Calistoga high street.&nbsp; But it was an
+odd thing that here, on what we are accustomed to consider the very
+skirts of civilization, I should have used the telephone for the first
+time in my civilized career.&nbsp; So it goes in these young countries;
+telephones, and telegraphs, and newspapers, and advertisements running
+far ahead among the Indians and the grizzly bears.<br>
+<br>
+Alone, on the other side of the railway, stands the Springs Hotel, with
+its attendant cottages.&nbsp; The floor of the valley is extremely level
+to the very roots of the hills; only here and there a hillock, crowned
+with pines, rises like the barrow of some chieftain famed in war; and
+right against one of these hillocks is the Springs Hotel - is or was;
+for since I was there the place has been destroyed by fire, and has
+risen again from its ashes.&nbsp; A lawn runs about the house, and the
+lawn is in its turn surrounded by a system of little five-roomed cottages,
+each with a verandah and a weedy palm before the door.&nbsp; Some of
+the cottages are let to residents, and these are wreathed in flowers.&nbsp;
+The rest are occupied by ordinary visitors to the Hotel; and a very
+pleasant way this is, by which you have a little country cottage of
+your own, without domestic burthens, and by the day or week.<br>
+<br>
+The whole neighbourhood of Mount Saint Helena is full of sulphur and
+of boiling springs.&nbsp; The Geysers are famous; they were the great
+health resort of the Indians before the coming of the whites.&nbsp;
+Lake County is dotted with spas; Hot Springs and White Sulphur Springs
+are the names of two stations on the Napa Valley railroad; and Calistoga
+itself seems to repose on a mere film above a boiling, subterranean
+lake.&nbsp; At one end of the hotel enclosure are the springs from which
+it takes its name, hot enough to scald a child seriously while I was
+there.&nbsp; At the other end, the tenant of a cottage sank a well,
+and there also the water came up boiling.&nbsp; It keeps this end of
+the valley as warm as a toast.&nbsp; I have gone across to the hotel
+a little after five in the morning, when a sea fog from the Pacific
+was hanging thick and gray, and dark and dirty overhead, and found the
+thermometer had been up before me, and had already climbed among the
+nineties; and in the stress of the day it was sometimes too hot to move
+about.<br>
+<br>
+But in spite of this heat from above and below, doing one on both sides,
+Calistoga was a pleasant place to dwell in; beautifully green, for it
+was then that favoured moment in the Californian year, when the rains
+are over and the dusty summer has not yet set in; often visited by fresh
+airs, now from the mountain, now across Sonoma from the sea; very quiet,
+very idle, very silent but for the breezes and the cattle bells afield.&nbsp;
+And there was something satisfactory in the sight of that great mountain
+that enclosed us to the north: whether it stood, robed in sunshine,
+quaking to its topmost pinnacle with the heat and brightness of the
+day; or whether it set itself to weaving vapours, wisp after wisp growing,
+trembling, fleeting, and fading in the blue.<br>
+<br>
+The tangled, woody, and almost trackless foot-hills that enclose the
+valley, shutting it off from Sonoma on the west, and from Yolo on the
+east - rough as they were in outline, dug out by winter streams, crowned
+by cliffy bluffs and nodding pine trees - wore dwarfed into satellites
+by the bulk and bearing of Mount Saint Helena.&nbsp; She over-towered
+them by two-thirds of her own stature.&nbsp; She excelled them by the
+boldness of her profile.&nbsp; Her great bald summit, clear of trees
+and pasture, a cairn of quartz and cinnabar, rejected kinship with the
+dark and shaggy wilderness of lesser hill-tops.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER II - THE PETRIFIED FOREST<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+We drove off from the Springs Hotel about three in the afternoon.&nbsp;
+The sun warmed me to the heart.&nbsp; A broad, cool wind streamed pauselessly
+down the valley, laden with perfume.&nbsp; Up at the top stood Mount
+Saint Helena, a bulk of mountain, bare atop, with tree-fringed spurs,
+and radiating warmth.&nbsp; Once we saw it framed in a grove of tall
+and exquisitely graceful white oaks, in line and colour a finished composition.&nbsp;
+We passed a cow stretched by the roadside, her bell slowly beating time
+to the movement of her ruminating jaws, her big red face crawled over
+by half a dozen flies, a monument of content.<br>
+<br>
+A little farther, and we struck to the left up a mountain road, and
+for two hours threaded one valley after another, green, tangled, full
+of noble timber, giving us every now and again a sight of Mount Saint
+Helena and the blue hilly distance, and crossed by many streams, through
+which we splashed to the carriage-step.&nbsp; To the right or the left,
+there was scarce any trace of man but the road we followed; I think
+we passed but one ranchero&rsquo;s house in the whole distance, and
+that was closed and smokeless.&nbsp; But we had the society of these
+bright streams - dazzlingly clear, as is their wont, splashing from
+the wheels in diamonds, and striking a lively coolness through the sunshine.&nbsp;
+And what with the innumerable variety of greens, the masses of foliage
+tossing in the breeze, the glimpses of distance, the descents into seemingly
+impenetrable thickets, the continual dodging of the road which made
+haste to plunge again into the covert, we had a fine sense of woods,
+and spring-time, and the open air.<br>
+<br>
+Our driver gave me a lecture by the way on Californian trees - a thing
+I was much in need of, having fallen among painters who know the name
+of nothing, and Mexicans who know the name of nothing in English.&nbsp;
+He taught me the madrona, the manzanita, the buck-eye, the maple; he
+showed me the crested mountain quail; he showed me where some young
+redwoods were already spiring heavenwards from the ruins of the old;
+for in this district all had already perished: redwoods and redskins,
+the two noblest indigenous living things, alike condemned.<br>
+<br>
+At length, in a lonely dell, we came on a huge wooden gate with a sign
+upon it like an inn.&nbsp; &ldquo;The Petrified Forest.&nbsp; Proprietor:
+C. Evans,&rdquo; ran the legend.&nbsp; Within, on a knoll of sward,
+was the house of the proprietor, and another smaller house hard by to
+serve as a museum, where photographs and petrifactions were retailed.&nbsp;
+It was a pure little isle of touristry among these solitary hills.<br>
+<br>
+The proprietor was a brave old white-faced Swede.&nbsp; He had wandered
+this way, Heaven knows how, and taken up his acres - I forget how many
+years ago - all alone, bent double with sciatica, and with six bits
+in his pocket and an axe upon his shoulder.&nbsp; Long, useless years
+of seafaring had thus discharged him at the end, penniless and sick.&nbsp;
+Without doubt he had tried his luck at the diggings, and got no good
+from that; without doubt he had loved the bottle, and lived the life
+of Jack ashore.&nbsp; But at the end of these adventures, here he came;
+and, the place hitting his fancy, down he sat to make a new life of
+it, far from crimps and the salt sea.&nbsp; And the very sight of his
+ranche had done him good.&nbsp; It was &ldquo;the handsomest spot in
+the Californy mountains.&rdquo;&nbsp; &ldquo;Isn&rsquo;t it handsome,
+now?&rdquo; he said.&nbsp; Every penny he makes goes into that ranche
+to make it handsomer.&nbsp; Then the climate, with the sea-breeze every
+afternoon in the hottest summer weather, had gradually cured the sciatica;
+and his sister and niece were now domesticated with him for company
+- or, rather, the niece came only once in the two days, teaching music
+the meanwhile in the valley.&nbsp; And then, for a last piece of luck,
+&ldquo;the handsomest spot in the Californy mountains&rdquo; had produced
+a petrified forest, which Mr. Evans now shows at the modest figure of
+half a dollar a head, or two-thirds of his capital when he first came
+there with an axe and a sciatica.<br>
+<br>
+This tardy favourite of fortune - hobbling a little, I think, as if
+in memory of the sciatica, but with not a trace that I can remember
+of the sea - thoroughly ruralized from head to foot, proceeded to escort
+us up the hill behind his house.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Who first found the forest?&rdquo; asked my wife.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;The first?&nbsp; I was that man,&rdquo; said he.&nbsp; &ldquo;I
+was cleaning up the pasture for my beasts, when I found <i>this</i>&rdquo;
+- kicking a great redwood seven feet in diameter, that lay there on
+its side, hollow heart, clinging lumps of bark, all changed into gray
+stone, with veins of quartz between what had been the layers of the
+wood.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Were you surprised?&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Surprised?&nbsp; No!&nbsp; What would I be surprised about?&nbsp;
+What did I know about petrifactions - following the sea?&nbsp; Petrifaction!&nbsp;
+There was no such word in my language!&nbsp; I knew about putrifaction,
+though!&nbsp; I thought it was a stone; so would you, if you was cleaning
+up pasture.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+And now he had a theory of his own, which I did not quite grasp, except
+that the trees had not &ldquo;grewed&rdquo; there.&nbsp; But he mentioned,
+with evident pride, that he differed from all the scientific people
+who had visited the spot; and he flung about such words as &ldquo;tufa&rdquo;
+and &ldquo;scilica&rdquo; with careless freedom.<br>
+<br>
+When I mentioned I was from Scotland, &ldquo;My old country,&rdquo;
+he said; &ldquo;my old country&rdquo; - with a smiling look and a tone
+of real affection in his voice.&nbsp; I was mightily surprised, for
+he was obviously Scandinavian, and begged him to explain.&nbsp; It seemed
+he had learned his English and done nearly all his sailing in Scotch
+ships.&nbsp; &ldquo;Out of Glasgow,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;or Greenock;
+but that&rsquo;s all the same - they all hail from Glasgow.&rdquo; And
+he was so pleased with me for being a Scotsman, and his adopted compatriot,
+that he made me a present of a very beautiful piece of petrifaction
+- I believe the most beautiful and portable he had.<br>
+<br>
+Here was a man, at least, who was a Swede, a Scot, and an American,
+acknowledging some kind allegiance to three lands.&nbsp; Mr. Wallace&rsquo;s
+Scoto-Circassian will not fail to come before the reader.&nbsp; I have
+myself met and spoken with a Fifeshire German, whose combination of
+abominable accents struck me dumb.&nbsp; But, indeed, I think we all
+belong to many countries.&nbsp; And perhaps this habit of much travel,
+and the engendering of scattered friendships, may prepare the euthanasia
+of ancient nations.<br>
+<br>
+And the forest itself?&nbsp; Well, on a tangled, briery hillside - for
+the pasture would bear a little further cleaning up, to my eyes - there
+lie scattered thickly various lengths of petrified trunk, such as the
+one already mentioned.&nbsp; It is very curious, of course, and ancient
+enough, if that were all.&nbsp; Doubtless, the heart of the geologist
+beats quicker at the sight; but, for my part, I was mightily unmoved.&nbsp;
+Sight-seeing is the art of disappointment.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;There&rsquo;s nothing under heaven so blue,<br>
+That&rsquo;s fairly worth the travelling to.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+But, fortunately, Heaven rewards us with many agreeable prospects and
+adventures by the way; and sometimes, when we go out to see a petrified
+forest, prepares a far more delightful curiosity, in the form of Mr.
+Evans, whom may all prosperity attend throughout a long and green old
+age.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER III - NAPA WINE<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+I was interested in Californian wine.&nbsp; Indeed, I am interested
+in all wines, and have been all my life, from the raisin wine that a
+schoolfellow kept secreted in his play-box up to my last discovery,
+those notable Valtellines, that once shone upon the board of Caesar.<br>
+<br>
+Some of us, kind old Pagans, watch with dread the shadows falling on
+the age: how the unconquerable worm invades the sunny terraces of France,
+and Bordeaux is no more, and the Rhone a mere Arabia Petraea.&nbsp;
+Ch&acirc;teau Neuf is dead, and I have never tasted it; Hermitage -
+a hermitage indeed from all life&rsquo;s sorrows - lies expiring by
+the river.&nbsp; And in the place of these imperial elixirs, beautiful
+to every sense, gem-hued, flower-scented, dream-compellers:- behold
+upon the quays at Cette the chemicals arrayed; behold the analyst at
+Marseilles, raising hands in obsecration, attesting god Lyoeus, and
+the vats staved in, and the dishonest wines poured forth among the sea.&nbsp;
+It is not Pan only; Bacchus, too, is dead.<br>
+<br>
+If wine is to withdraw its most poetic countenance, the sun of the white
+dinner-cloth, a deity to be invoked by two or three, all fervent, hushing
+their talk, degusting tenderly, and storing reminiscences - for a bottle
+of good wine, like a good act, shines ever in the retrospect - if wine
+is to desert us, go thy ways, old Jack!&nbsp; Now we begin to have compunctions,
+and look back at the brave bottles squandered upon dinner-parties, where
+the guests drank grossly, discussing politics the while, and even the
+schoolboy &ldquo;took his whack,&rdquo; like liquorice water.&nbsp;
+And at the same time, we look timidly forward, with a spark of hope,
+to where the new lands, already weary of producing gold, begin to green
+with vineyards.&nbsp; A nice point in human history falls to be decided
+by Californian and Australian wines.<br>
+<br>
+Wine in California is still in the experimental stage; and when you
+taste a vintage, grave economical questions are involved.&nbsp; The
+beginning of vine-planting is like the beginning of mining for the precious
+metals: the wine-grower also &ldquo;Prospects.&rdquo; One corner of
+land after another is tried with one kind of grape after another.&nbsp;
+This is a failure; that is better; a third best.&nbsp; So, bit by bit,
+they grope about for their Clos Vougeot and Lafite.&nbsp; Those lodes
+and pockets of earth, more precious than the precious ores, that yield
+inimitable fragrance and soft fire; those virtuous Bonanzas, where the
+soil has sublimated under sun and stars to something finer, and the
+wine is bottled poetry: these still lie undiscovered; chaparral conceals,
+thicket embowers them; the miner chips the rock and wanders farther,
+and the grizzly muses undisturbed.&nbsp; But there they bide their hour,
+awaiting their Columbus; and nature nurses and prepares them.&nbsp;
+The smack of Californian earth shall linger on the palate of your grandson.<br>
+<br>
+Meanwhile the wine is merely a good wine; the best that I have tasted
+better than a Beaujolais, and not unlike.&nbsp; But the trade is poor;
+it lives from hand to mouth, putting its all into experiments, and forced
+to sell its vintages.&nbsp; To find one properly matured, and bearing
+its own name, is to be fortune&rsquo;s favourite.<br>
+<br>
+Bearing its own name, I say, and dwell upon the innuendo.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;You want to know why California wine is not drunk in the States?&rdquo;
+a San Francisco wine merchant said to me, after he had shown me through
+his premises.&nbsp; &ldquo;Well, here&rsquo;s the reason.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+And opening a large cupboard, fitted with many little drawers, he proceeded
+to shower me all over with a great variety of gorgeously tinted labels,
+blue, red, or yellow, stamped with crown or coronet, and hailing from
+such a profusion of <i>clos</i> and <i>chateaux</i>, that a single department
+could scarce have furnished forth the names.&nbsp; But it was strange
+that all looked unfamiliar.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Chateau X-?&rdquo; said I.&nbsp; &ldquo;I never heard of that.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;I dare say not,&rdquo; said he.&nbsp; &ldquo;I had been reading
+one of X-&lsquo;s novels.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+They were all castles in Spain!&nbsp; But that sure enough is the reason
+why California wine is not drunk in the States.<br>
+<br>
+Napa valley has been long a seat of the wine-growing industry.&nbsp;
+It did not here begin, as it does too often, in the low valley lands
+along the river, but took at once to the rough foot-hills, where alone
+it can expect to prosper.&nbsp; A basking inclination, and stones, to
+be a reservoir of the day&rsquo;s heat, seem necessary to the soil for
+wine; the grossness of the earth must be evaporated, its marrow daily
+melted and refined for ages; until at length these clods that break
+below our footing, and to the eye appear but common earth, are truly
+and to the perceiving mind, a masterpiece of nature.&nbsp; The dust
+of Richebourg, which the wind carries away, what an apotheosis of the
+dust!&nbsp; Not man himself can seem a stranger child of that brown,
+friable powder, than the blood and sun in that old flask behind the
+faggots.<br>
+<br>
+A Californian vineyard, one of man&rsquo;s outposts in the wilderness,
+has features of its own.&nbsp; There is nothing here to remind you of
+the Rhine or Rhone, of the low <i>c&ocirc;te d&rsquo;or</i>, or the
+infamous and scabby deserts of Champagne; but all is green, solitary,
+covert.&nbsp; We visited two of them, Mr. Schram&rsquo;s and Mr. M&rsquo;Eckron&rsquo;s,
+sharing the same glen.<br>
+<br>
+Some way down the valley below Calistoga, we turned sharply to the south
+and plunged into the thick of the wood.&nbsp; A rude trail rapidly mounting;
+a little stream tinkling by on the one hand, big enough perhaps after
+the rains, but already yielding up its life; overhead and on all sides
+a bower of green and tangled thicket, still fragrant and still flower-bespangled
+by the early season, where thimble-berry played the part of our English
+hawthorn, and the buck-eyes were putting forth their twisted horns of
+blossom: through all this, we struggled toughly upwards, canted to and
+fro by the roughness of the trail, and continually switched across the
+face by sprays of leaf or blossom.&nbsp; The last is no great inconvenience
+at home; but here in California it is a matter of some moment.&nbsp;
+For in all woods and by every wayside there prospers an abominable shrub
+or weed, called poison-oak, whose very neighbourhood is venomous to
+some, and whose actual touch is avoided by the most impervious.<br>
+<br>
+The two houses, with their vineyards, stood each in a green niche of
+its own in this steep and narrow forest dell.&nbsp; Though they were
+so near, there was already a good difference in level; and Mr. M&rsquo;Eckron&rsquo;s
+head must be a long way under the feet of Mr. Schram.&nbsp; No more
+had been cleared than was necessary for cultivation; close around each
+oasis ran the tangled wood; the glen enfolds them; there they lie basking
+in sun and silence, concealed from all but the clouds and the mountain
+birds.<br>
+<br>
+Mr. M&rsquo;Eckron&rsquo;s is a bachelor establishment; a little bit
+of a wooden house, a small cellar hard by in the hillside, and a patch
+of vines planted and tended single-handed by himself.&nbsp; He had but
+recently began; his vines were young, his business young also; but I
+thought he had the look of the man who succeeds.&nbsp; He hailed from
+Greenock: he remembered his father putting him inside Mons Meg, and
+that touched me home; and we exchanged a word or two of Scotch, which
+pleased me more than you would fancy.<br>
+<br>
+Mr. Schram&rsquo;s, on the other hand, is the oldest vineyard in the
+valley, eighteen years old, I think; yet he began a penniless barber,
+and even after he had broken ground up here with his black malvoisies,
+continued for long to tramp the valley with his razor.&nbsp; Now, his
+place is the picture of prosperity: stuffed birds in the verandah, cellars
+far dug into the hillside, and resting on pillars like a bandit&rsquo;s
+cave:- all trimness, varnish, flowers, and sunshine, among the tangled
+wildwood.&nbsp; Stout, smiling Mrs. Schram, who has been to Europe and
+apparently all about the States for pleasure, entertained Fanny in the
+verandah, while I was tasting wines in the cellar.&nbsp; To Mr. Schram
+this was a solemn office; his serious gusto warmed my heart; prosperity
+had not yet wholly banished a certain neophite and girlish trepidation,
+and he followed every sip and read my face with proud anxiety.&nbsp;
+I tasted all.&nbsp; I tasted every variety and shade of Schramberger,
+red and white Schramberger, Burgundy Schramberger, Schramberger Hock,
+Schramberger Golden Chasselas, the latter with a notable bouquet, and
+I fear to think how many more.&nbsp; Much of it goes to London - most,
+I think; and Mr. Schram has a great notion of the English taste.<br>
+<br>
+In this wild spot, I did not feel the sacredness of ancient cultivation.&nbsp;
+It was still raw, it was no Marathon, and no Johannisberg; yet the stirring
+sunlight, and the growing vines, and the vats and bottles in the cavern,
+made a pleasant music for the mind.&nbsp; Here, also, earth&rsquo;s
+cream was being skimmed and garnered; and the London customers can taste,
+such as it is, the tang of the earth in this green valley.&nbsp; So
+local, so quintessential is a wine, that it seems the very birds in
+the verandah might communicate a flavour, and that romantic cellar influence
+the bottle next to be uncorked in Pimlico, and the smile of jolly Mr.
+Schram might mantle in the glass.<br>
+<br>
+But these are but experiments.&nbsp; All things in this new land are
+moving farther on: the wine-vats and the miner&rsquo;s blasting tools
+but picket for a night, like Bedouin pavillions; and to-morrow, to fresh
+woods!&nbsp; This stir of change and these perpetual echoes of the moving
+footfall, haunt the land.&nbsp; Men move eternally, still chasing Fortune;
+and, fortune found, still wander.&nbsp; As we drove back to Calistoga,
+the road lay empty of mere passengers, but its green side was dotted
+with the camps of travelling families: one cumbered with a great waggonful
+of household stuff, settlers going to occupy a ranche they had taken
+up in Mendocino, or perhaps Tehama County; another, a party in dust
+coats, men and women, whom we found camped in a grove on the roadside,
+all on pleasure bent, with a Chinaman to cook for them, and who waved
+their hands to us as we drove by.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER IV - THE SCOT ABROAD<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+A few pages back, I wrote that a man belonged, in these days, to a variety
+of countries; but the old land is still the true love, the others are
+but pleasant infidelities.&nbsp; Scotland is indefinable; it has no
+unity except upon the map.&nbsp; Two languages, many dialects, innumerable
+forms of piety, and countless local patriotisms and prejudices, part
+us among ourselves more widely than the extreme east and west of that
+great continent of America.&nbsp; When I am at home, I feel a man from
+Glasgow to be something like a rival, a man from Barra to be more than
+half a foreigner.&nbsp; Yet let us meet in some far country, and, whether
+we hail from the braes of Manor or the braes of Mar, some ready-made
+affection joins us on the instant.&nbsp; It is not race.&nbsp; Look
+at us.&nbsp; One is Norse, one Celtic, and another Saxon.&nbsp; It is
+not community of tongue.&nbsp; We have it not among ourselves; and we
+have it almost to perfection, with English, or Irish, or American.&nbsp;
+It is no tie of faith, for we detest each other&rsquo;s errors.&nbsp;
+And yet somewhere, deep down in the heart of each one of us, something
+yearns for the old land, and the old kindly people.<br>
+<br>
+Of all mysteries of the human heart, this is perhaps the most inscrutable.&nbsp;
+There is no special loveliness in that gray country, with its rainy,
+sea-beat archipelago; its fields of dark mountains; its unsightly places,
+black with coal; its treeless, sour, unfriendly looking corn-lands;
+its quaint, gray, castled city, where the bells clash of a Sunday, and
+the wind squalls, and the salt showers fly and beat.&nbsp; I do not
+even know if I desire to live there; but let me hear, in some far land,
+a kindred voice sing out, &ldquo;Oh, why left I my hame?&rdquo; and
+it seems at once as if no beauty under the kind heavens, and no society
+of the wise and good, can repay me for my absence from my country.&nbsp;
+And though I think I would rather die elsewhere, yet in my heart of
+hearts I long to be buried among good Scots clods.&nbsp; I will say
+it fairly, it grows on me with every year: there are no stars so lovely
+as Edinburgh street-lamps.&nbsp; When I forget thee, auld Reekie, may
+my right hand forget its cunning!<br>
+<br>
+The happiest lot on earth is to be born a Scotchman.&nbsp; You must
+pay for it in many ways, as for all other advantages on earth.&nbsp;
+You have to learn the paraphrases and the shorter catechism; you generally
+take to drink; your youth, as far as I can find out, is a time of louder
+war against society, of more outcry and tears and turmoil, than if you
+had been born, for instance, in England.&nbsp; But somehow life is warmer
+and closer; the hearth burns more redly; the lights of home shine softer
+on the rainy street; the very names, endeared in verse and music, cling
+nearer round our hearts.&nbsp; An Englishman may meet an Englishman
+to-morrow, upon Chimborazo, and neither of them care; but when the Scotch
+wine-grower told me of Mons Meg, it was like magic.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;From the dim shieling on the misty island<br>
+Mountains divide us, and a world of seas;<br>
+Yet still our hearts are true, our hearts are Highland,<br>
+And we, in dreams, behold the Hebrides.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+And, Highland and Lowland, all our hearts are Scotch.<br>
+<br>
+Only a few days after I had seen M&rsquo;Eckron, a message reached me
+in my cottage.&nbsp; It was a Scotchman who had come down a long way
+from the hills to market.&nbsp; He had heard there was a countryman
+in Calistoga, and came round to the hotel to see him.&nbsp; We said
+a few words to each other; we had not much to say - should never have
+seen each other had we stayed at home, separated alike in space and
+in society; and then we shook hands, and he went his way again to his
+ranche among the hills, and that was all.<br>
+<br>
+Another Scotchman there was, a resident, who for the more love of the
+common country, douce, serious, religious man, drove me all about the
+valley, and took as much interest in me as if I had been his son: more,
+perhaps; for the son has faults too keenly felt, while the abstract
+countryman is perfect - like a whiff of peats.<br>
+<br>
+And there was yet another.&nbsp; Upon him I came suddenly, as he was
+calmly entering my cottage, his mind quite evidently bent on plunder:
+a man of about fifty, filthy, ragged, roguish, with a chimney-pot hat
+and a tail coat, and a pursing of his mouth that might have been envied
+by an elder of the kirk.&nbsp; He had just such a face as I have seen
+a dozen times behind the plate.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Hullo, sir!&rdquo; I cried.&nbsp; &ldquo;Where are you going?&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+He turned round without a quiver.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;You&rsquo;re a Scotchman, sir?&rdquo; he said gravely.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;So am I; I come from Aberdeen.&nbsp; This is my card,&rdquo;
+presenting me with a piece of pasteboard which he had raked out of some
+gutter in the period of the rains.&nbsp; &ldquo;I was just examining
+this palm,&rdquo; he continued, indicating the misbegotten plant before
+our door, &ldquo;which is the largest sp<i>a</i>cimen I have yet observed
+in Califoarnia.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+There were four or five larger within sight.&nbsp; But where was the
+use of argument?&nbsp; He produced a tape-line, made me help him to
+measure the tree at the level of the ground, and entered the figures
+in a large and filthy pocket-book, all with the gravity of Solomon.&nbsp;
+He then thanked me profusely, remarking that such little services were
+due between countrymen; shook hands with me, &ldquo;for add lang syne,&rdquo;
+as he said; and took himself solemnly away, radiating dirt and humbug
+as he went.<br>
+<br>
+A month or two after this encounter of mine, there came a Scot to Sacramento
+- perhaps from Aberdeen.&nbsp; Anyway, there never was any one more
+Scotch in this wide world.&nbsp; He could sing and dance, and drink,
+I presume; and he played the pipes with vigour and success.&nbsp; All
+the Scotch in Sacramento became infatuated with him, and spent their
+spare time and money, driving him about in an open cab, between drinks,
+while he blew himself scarlet at the pipes.&nbsp; This is a very sad
+story.&nbsp; After he had borrowed money from every one, he and his
+pipes suddenly disappeared from Sacramento, and when I last heard, the
+police were looking for him.<br>
+<br>
+I cannot say how this story amused me, when I felt myself so thoroughly
+ripe on both sides to be duped in the same way.<br>
+<br>
+It is at least a curious thing, to conclude, that the races which wander
+widest, Jews and Scotch, should be the most clannish in the world.&nbsp;
+But perhaps these two are cause and effect: &ldquo;For ye were strangers
+in the land of Egypt.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+PART II - WITH THE CHILDREN OF ISRAEL<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER I. - TO INTRODUCE MR. KELMAR<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+One thing in this new country very particularly strikes a stranger,
+and that is the number of antiquities.&nbsp; Already there have been
+many cycles of population succeeding each other, and passing away and
+leaving behind them relics.&nbsp; These, standing on into changed times,
+strike the imagination as forcibly as any pyramid or feudal tower.&nbsp;
+The towns, like the vineyards, are experimentally founded: they grow
+great and prosper by passing occasions; and when the lode comes to an
+end, and the miners move elsewhere, the town remains behind them, like
+Palmyra in the desert.&nbsp; I suppose there are, in no country in the
+world, so many deserted towns as here in California.<br>
+<br>
+The whole neighbourhood of Mount Saint Helena, now so quiet and sylvan,
+was once alive with mining camps and villages.&nbsp; Here there would
+be two thousand souls under canvas; there one thousand or fifteen hundred
+ensconced, as if for ever, in a town of comfortable houses.&nbsp; But
+the luck had failed, the mines petered out; and the army of miners had
+departed, and left this quarter of the world to the rattlesnakes and
+deer and grizzlies, and to the slower but steadier advance of husbandry.<br>
+<br>
+It was with an eye on one of these deserted places, Pine Flat, on the
+Geysers road, that we had come first to Calistoga.&nbsp; There is something
+singularly enticing in the idea of going, rent-free, into a ready-made
+house.&nbsp; And to the British merchant, sitting at home at ease, it
+may appear that, with such a roof over your head and a spring of clear
+water hard by, the whole problem of the squatter&rsquo;s existence would
+be solved.&nbsp; Food, however, has yet to be considered, I will go
+as far as most people on tinned meats; some of the brightest moments
+of my life were passed over tinned mulli-gatawney in the cabin of a
+sixteen-ton schooner, storm-stayed in Portree Bay; but after suitable
+experiments, I pronounce authoritatively that man cannot live by tins
+alone.&nbsp; Fresh meat must be had on an occasion.&nbsp; It is true
+that the great Foss, driving by along the Geysers road, wooden-faced,
+but glorified with legend, might have been induced to bring us meat,
+but the great Foss could hardly bring us milk.&nbsp; To take a cow would
+have involved taking a field of grass and a milkmaid; after which it
+would have been hardly worth while to pause, and we might have added
+to our colony a flock of sheep and an experienced butcher.<br>
+<br>
+It is really very disheartening how we depend on other people in this
+life.&nbsp; &ldquo;Mihi est propositum,&rdquo; as you may see by the
+motto, &ldquo;id quod regibus;&rdquo; and behold it cannot be carried
+out, unless I find a neighbour rolling in cattle.<br>
+<br>
+Now, my principal adviser in this matter was one whom I will call Kelmar.&nbsp;
+That was not what he called himself, but as soon as I set eyes on him,
+I knew it was or ought to be his name; I am sure it will be his name
+among the angels.&nbsp; Kelmar was the store-keeper, a Russian Jew,
+good-natured, in a very thriving way of business, and, on equal terms,
+one of the most serviceable of men.&nbsp; He also had something of the
+expression of a Scotch country elder, who, by some peculiarity, should
+chance to be a Hebrew.&nbsp; He had a projecting under lip, with which
+he continually smiled, or rather smirked.&nbsp; Mrs. Kelmar was a singularly
+kind woman; and the oldest son had quite a dark and romantic bearing,
+and might be heard on summer evenings playing sentimental airs on the
+violin.<br>
+<br>
+I had no idea, at the time I made his acquaintance, what an important
+person Kelmar was.&nbsp; But the Jew store-keepers of California, profiting
+at once by the needs and habits of the people, have made themselves
+in too many cases the tyrants of the rural population.&nbsp; Credit
+is offered, is pressed on the new customer, and when once he is beyond
+his depth, the tune changes, and he is from thenceforth a white slave.&nbsp;
+I believe, even from the little I saw, that Kelmar, if he choose to
+put on the screw, could send half the settlers packing in a radius of
+seven or eight miles round Calistoga.&nbsp; These are continually paying
+him, but are never suffered to get out of debt.&nbsp; He palms dull
+goods upon them, for they dare not refuse to buy; he goes and dines
+with them when he is on an outing, and no man is loudlier welcomed;
+he is their family friend, the director of their business, and, to a
+degree elsewhere unknown in modern days, their king.<br>
+<br>
+For some reason, Kelmar always shook his head at the mention of Pine
+Flat, and for some days I thought he disapproved of the whole scheme
+and was proportionately sad.&nbsp; One fine morning, however, he met
+me, wreathed in smiles.&nbsp; He had found the very place for me - Silverado,
+another old mining town, right up the mountain.&nbsp; Rufe Hanson, the
+hunter, could take care of us - fine people the Hansons; we should be
+close to the Toll House, where the Lakeport stage called daily; it was
+the best place for my health, besides.&nbsp; Rufe had been consumptive,
+and was now quite a strong man, ain&rsquo;t it?&nbsp; In short, the
+place and all its accompaniments seemed made for us on purpose.<br>
+<br>
+He took me to his back door, whence, as from every point of Calistoga,
+Mount Saint Helena could be seen towering in the air.&nbsp; There, in
+the nick, just where the eastern foothills joined the mountain, and
+she herself began to rise above the zone of forest - there was Silverado.&nbsp;
+The name had already pleased me; the high station pleased me still more.&nbsp;
+I began to inquire with some eagerness.&nbsp; It was but a little while
+ago that Silverado was a great place.&nbsp; The mine - a silver mine,
+of course - had promised great things.&nbsp; There was quite a lively
+population, with several hotels and boarding-houses; and Kelmar himself
+had opened a branch store, and done extremely well - &ldquo;Ain&rsquo;t
+it?&rdquo; he said, appealing to his wife.&nbsp; And she said, &ldquo;Yes;
+extremely well.&rdquo; Now there was no one living in the town but Rufe
+the hunter; and once more I heard Rufe&rsquo;s praises by the yard,
+and this time sung in chorus.<br>
+<br>
+I could not help perceiving at the time that there was something underneath;
+that no unmixed desire to have us comfortably settled had inspired the
+Kelmars with this flow of words.&nbsp; But I was impatient to be gone,
+to be about my kingly project; and when we were offered seats in Kelmar&rsquo;s
+waggon, I accepted on the spot.&nbsp; The plan of their next Sunday&rsquo;s
+outing took them, by good fortune, over the border into Lake County.&nbsp;
+They would carry us so far, drop us at the Toll House, present us to
+the Hansons, and call for us again on Monday morning early.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER II - FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF SILVERADO<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+We were to leave by six precisely; that was solemnly pledged on both
+sides; and a messenger came to us the last thing at night, to remind
+us of the hour.&nbsp; But it was eight before we got clear of Calistoga:
+Kelmar, Mrs. Kelmar, a friend of theirs whom we named Abramina, her
+little daughter, my wife, myself, and, stowed away behind us, a cluster
+of ship&rsquo;s coffee-kettles.&nbsp; These last were highly ornamental
+in the sheen of their bright tin, but I could invent no reason for their
+presence.&nbsp; Our carriageful reckoned up, as near as we could get
+at it, some three hundred years to the six of us.&nbsp; Four of the
+six, besides, were Hebrews.&nbsp; But I never, in all my life, was conscious
+of so strong an atmosphere of holiday.&nbsp; No word was spoken but
+of pleasure; and even when we drove in silence, nods and smiles went
+round the party like refreshments.<br>
+<br>
+The sun shone out of a cloudless sky.&nbsp; Close at the zenith rode
+the belated moon, still clearly visible, and, along one margin, even
+bright.&nbsp; The wind blew a gale from the north; the trees roared;
+the corn and the deep grass in the valley fled in whitening surges;
+the dust towered into the air along the road and dispersed like the
+smoke of battle.&nbsp; It was clear in our teeth from the first, and
+for all the windings of the road it managed to keep clear in our teeth
+until the end.<br>
+<br>
+For some two miles we rattled through the valley, skirting the eastern
+foothills; then we struck off to the right, through haugh-land, and
+presently, crossing a dry water-course, entered the Toll road, or, to
+be more local, entered on &ldquo;the grade.&rdquo;&nbsp; The road mounts
+the near shoulder of Mount Saint Helena, bound northward into Lake County.&nbsp;
+In one place it skirts along the edge of a narrow and deep canyon, filled
+with trees, and I was glad, indeed, not to be driven at this point by
+the dashing Foss.&nbsp; Kelmar, with his unvarying smile, jogging to
+the motion of the trap, drove for all the world like a good, plain,
+country clergyman at home; and I profess I blessed him unawares for
+his timidity.<br>
+<br>
+Vineyards and deep meadows, islanded and framed with thicket, gave place
+more and more as we ascended to woods of oak and madrona, dotted with
+enormous pines.&nbsp; It was these pines, as they shot above the lower
+wood, that produced that pencilling of single trees I had so often remarked
+from the valley.&nbsp; Thence, looking up and from however far, each
+fir stands separate against the sky no bigger than an eyelash; and all
+together lend a quaint, fringed aspect to the hills.&nbsp; The oak is
+no baby; even the madrona, upon these spurs of Mount Saint Helena, comes
+to a fine bulk and ranks with forest trees - but the pines look down
+upon the rest for underwood.&nbsp; As Mount Saint Helena among her foothills,
+so these dark giants out-top their fellow-vegetables.&nbsp; Alas! if
+they had left the redwoods, the pines, in turn, would have been dwarfed.&nbsp;
+But the redwoods, fallen from their high estate, are serving as family
+bedsteads, or yet more humbly as field fences, along all Napa Valley.<br>
+<br>
+A rough smack of resin was in the air, and a crystal mountain purity.&nbsp;
+It came pouring over these green slopes by the oceanful.&nbsp; The woods
+sang aloud, and gave largely of their healthful breath.&nbsp; Gladness
+seemed to inhabit these upper zones, and we had left indifference behind
+us in the valley.&nbsp; &ldquo;I to the hills lift mine eyes!&rdquo;&nbsp;
+There are days in a life when thus to climb out of the lowlands, seems
+like scaling heaven.<br>
+<br>
+As we continued to ascend, the wind fell upon us with increasing strength.&nbsp;
+It was a wonder how the two stout horses managed to pull us up that
+steep incline and still face the athletic opposition of the wind, or
+how their great eyes were able to endure the dust.&nbsp; Ten minutes
+after we went by, a tree fell, blocking the road; and even before us
+leaves were thickly strewn, and boughs had fallen, large enough to make
+the passage difficult.&nbsp; But now we were hard by the summit.&nbsp;
+The road crosses the ridge, just in the nick that Kelmar showed me from
+below, and then, without pause, plunges down a deep, thickly wooded
+glen on the farther side.&nbsp; At the highest point a trail strikes
+up the main hill to the leftward; and that leads to Silverado.&nbsp;
+A hundred yards beyond, and in a kind of elbow of the glen, stands the
+Toll House Hotel.&nbsp; We came up the one side, were caught upon the
+summit by the whole weight of the wind as it poured over into Napa Valley,
+and a minute after had drawn up in shelter, but all buffetted and breathless,
+at the Toll House door.<br>
+<br>
+A water-tank, and stables, and a gray house of two stories, with gable
+ends and a verandah, are jammed hard against the hillside, just where
+a stream has cut for itself a narrow canyon, filled with pines.&nbsp;
+The pines go right up overhead; a little more and the stream might have
+played, like a fire-hose, on the Toll House roof.&nbsp; In front the
+ground drops as sharply as it rises behind.&nbsp; There is just room
+for the road and a sort of promontory of croquet ground, and then you
+can lean over the edge and look deep below you through the wood.&nbsp;
+I said croquet <i>ground</i>, not <i>green</i>; for the surface was
+of brown, beaten earth.&nbsp; The toll-bar itself was the only other
+note of originality: a long beam, turning on a post, and kept slightly
+horizontal by a counterweight of stones.&nbsp; Regularly about sundown
+this rude barrier was swung, like a derrick, across the road and made
+fast, I think, to a tree upon the farther side.<br>
+<br>
+On our arrival there followed a gay scene in the bar.&nbsp; I was presented
+to Mr. Corwin, the landlord; to Mr. Jennings, the engineer, who lives
+there for his health; to Mr. Hoddy, a most pleasant little gentleman,
+once a member of the Ohio legislature, again the editor of a local paper,
+and now, with undiminished dignity, keeping the Toll House bar.&nbsp;
+I had a number of drinks and cigars bestowed on me, and enjoyed a famous
+opportunity of seeing Kelmar in his glory, friendly, radiant, smiling,
+steadily edging one of the ship&rsquo;s kettles on the reluctant Corwin.<br>
+<br>
+Corwin, plainly aghast, resisted gallantly, and for that bout victory
+crowned his arms.<br>
+<br>
+At last we set forth for Silverado on foot.&nbsp; Kelmar and his jolly
+Jew girls were full of the sentiment of Sunday outings, breathed geniality
+and vagueness, and suffered a little vile boy from the hotel to lead
+them here and there about the woods.&nbsp; For three people all so old,
+so bulky in body, and belonging to a race so venerable, they could not
+but surprise us by their extreme and almost imbecile youthfulness of
+spirit.&nbsp; They were only going to stay ten minutes at the Toll House;
+had they not twenty long miles of road before them on the other side?&nbsp;
+Stay to dinner?&nbsp; Not they!&nbsp; Put up the horses? Never.&nbsp;
+Let us attach them to the verandah by a wisp of straw rope, such as
+would not have held a person&rsquo;s hat on that blustering day.&nbsp;
+And with all these protestations of hurry, they proved irresponsible
+like children.&nbsp; Kelmar himself, shrewd old Russian Jew, with a
+smirk that seemed just to have concluded a bargain to its satisfaction,
+intrusted himself and us devoutly to that boy.&nbsp; Yet the boy was
+patently fallacious; and for that matter a most unsympathetic urchin,
+raised apparently on gingerbread.&nbsp; He was bent on his own pleasure,
+nothing else; and Kelmar followed him to his ruin, with the same shrewd
+smirk.&nbsp; If the boy said there was &ldquo;a hole there in the hill&rdquo;
+- a hole, pure and simple, neither more nor less - Kelmar and his Jew
+girls would follow him a hundred yards to look complacently down that
+hole.&nbsp; For two hours we looked for houses; and for two hours they
+followed us, smelling trees, picking flowers, foisting false botany
+on the unwary.&nbsp; Had we taken five, with that vile lad to head them
+off on idle divagations, for five they would have smiled and stumbled
+through the woods.<br>
+<br>
+However, we came forth at length, and as by accident, upon a lawn, sparse
+planted like an orchard, but with forest instead of fruit trees.&nbsp;
+That was the site of Silverado mining town.&nbsp; A piece of ground
+was levelled up, where Kelmar&rsquo;s store had been; and facing that
+we saw Rufe Hanson&rsquo;s house, still bearing on its front the legend
+<i>Silverado Hotel</i>.&nbsp; Not another sign of habitation.&nbsp;
+Silverado town had all been carted from the scene; one of the houses
+was now the school-house far down the road; one was gone here, one there,
+but all were gone away.<br>
+<br>
+It was now a sylvan solitude, and the silence was unbroken but by the
+great, vague voice of the wind.&nbsp; Some days before our visit, a
+grizzly bear had been sporting round the Hansons&rsquo; chicken-house.<br>
+<br>
+Mrs. Hanson was at home alone, we found.&nbsp; Rufe had been out after
+a &ldquo;bar,&rdquo; had risen late, and was now gone, it did not clearly
+appear whither.&nbsp; Perhaps he had had wind of Kelmar&rsquo;s coming,
+and was now ensconced among the underwood, or watching us from the shoulder
+of the mountain.&nbsp; We, hearing there were no houses to be had, were
+for immediately giving up all hopes of Silverado.&nbsp; But this, somehow,
+was not to Kelmar&rsquo;s fancy.&nbsp; He first proposed that we should
+&ldquo;camp someveres around, ain&rsquo;t it?&rdquo; waving his hand
+cheerily as though to weave a spell; and when that was firmly rejected,
+he decided that we must take up house with the Hansons.&nbsp; Mrs. Hanson
+had been, from the first, flustered, subdued, and a little pale; but
+from this proposition she recoiled with haggard indignation.&nbsp; So
+did we, who would have preferred, in a manner of speaking, death.&nbsp;
+But Kelmar was not to be put by.&nbsp; He edged Mrs. Hanson into a corner,
+where for a long time he threatened her with his forefinger, like a
+character in Dickens; and the poor woman, driven to her entrenchments,
+at last remembered with a shriek that there were still some houses at
+the tunnel.<br>
+<br>
+Thither we went; the Jews, who should already have been miles into Lake
+County, still cheerily accompanying us.&nbsp; For about a furlong we
+followed a good road alone, the hillside through the forest, until suddenly
+that road widened out and came abruptly to an end.&nbsp; A canyon, woody
+below, red, rocky, and naked overhead, was here walled across by a dump
+of rolling stones, dangerously steep, and from twenty to thirty feet
+in height.&nbsp; A rusty iron chute on wooden legs came flying, like
+a monstrous gargoyle, across the parapet.&nbsp; It was down this that
+they poured the precious ore; and below here the carts stood to wait
+their lading, and carry it mill-ward down the mountain.<br>
+<br>
+The whole canyon was so entirely blocked, as if by some rude guerilla
+fortification, that we could only mount by lengths of wooden ladder,
+fixed in the hillside.&nbsp; These led us round the farther corner of
+the dump; and when they were at an end, we still persevered over loose
+rubble and wading deep in poison oak, till we struck a triangular platform,
+filling up the whole glen, and shut in on either hand by bold projections
+of the mountain.&nbsp; Only in front the place was open like the proscenium
+of a theatre, and we looked forth into a great realm of air, and down
+upon treetops and hilltops, and far and near on wild and varied country.&nbsp;
+The place still stood as on the day it was deserted: a line of iron
+rails with a bifurcation; a truck in working order; a world of lumber,
+old wood, old iron; a blacksmith&rsquo;s forge on one side, half buried
+in the leaves of dwarf madronas; and on the other, an old brown wooden
+house.<br>
+<br>
+Fanny and I dashed at the house.&nbsp; It consisted of three rooms,
+and was so plastered against the hill, that one room was right atop
+of another, that the upper floor was more than twice as large as the
+lower, and that all three apartments must be entered from a different
+side and level.&nbsp; Not a window-sash remained.<br>
+<br>
+The door of the lower room was smashed, and one panel hung in splinters.&nbsp;
+We entered that, and found a fair amount of rubbish: sand and gravel
+that had been sifted in there by the mountain winds; straw, sticks,
+and stones; a table, a barrel; a plate-rack on the wall; two home-made
+bootjacks, signs of miners and their boots; and a pair of papers pinned
+on the boarding, headed respectively &ldquo;Funnel No. 1,&rdquo; and
+&ldquo;Funnel No. 2,&rdquo; but with the tails torn away.&nbsp; The
+window, sashless of course, was choked with the green and sweetly smelling
+foliage of a bay; and through a chink in the floor, a spray of poison
+oak had shot up and was handsomely prospering in the interior.&nbsp;
+It was my first care to cut away that poison oak, Fanny standing by
+at a respectful distance.&nbsp; That was our first improvement by which
+we took possession.<br>
+<br>
+The room immediately above could only be entered by a plank propped
+against the threshold, along which the intruder must foot it gingerly,
+clutching for support to sprays of poison oak, the proper product of
+the country.&nbsp; Herein was, on either hand, a triple tier of beds,
+where miners had once lain; and the other gable was pierced by a sashless
+window and a doorless doorway opening on the air of heaven, five feet
+above the ground.&nbsp; As for the third room, which entered squarely
+from the ground level, but higher up the hill and farther up the canyon,
+it contained only rubbish and the uprights for another triple tier of
+beds.<br>
+<br>
+The whole building was overhung by a bold, lion-like, red rock. Poison
+oak, sweet bay trees, calcanthus, brush, and chaparral, grew freely
+but sparsely all about it. In front, in the strong sunshine, the platform
+lay overstrewn with busy litter, as though the labours of the mine might
+begin again to-morrow in the morning.<br>
+<br>
+Following back into the canyon, among the mass of rotting plant and
+through the flowering bushes, we came to a great crazy staging, with
+a wry windless on the top; and clambering up, we could look into an
+open shaft, leading edgeways down into the bowels of the mountain, trickling
+with water, and lit by some stray sun-gleams, whence I know not.&nbsp;
+In that quiet place the still, far-away tinkle of the water-drops was
+loudly audible.&nbsp; Close by, another shaft led edgeways up into the
+superincumbent shoulder of the hill.&nbsp; It lay partly open; and sixty
+or a hundred feet above our head, we could see the strata propped apart
+by solid wooden wedges, and a pine, half undermined, precariously nodding
+on the verge.&nbsp; Here also a rugged, horizontal tunnel ran straight
+into the unsunned bowels of the rock.&nbsp; This secure angle in the
+mountain&rsquo;s flank was, even on this wild day, as still as my lady&rsquo;s
+chamber.&nbsp; But in the tunnel a cold, wet draught tempestuously blew.&nbsp;
+Nor have I ever known that place otherwise than cold and windy.<br>
+<br>
+Such was our fist prospect of Juan Silverado.&nbsp; I own I had looked
+for something different: a clique of neighbourly houses on a village
+green, we shall say, all empty to be sure, but swept and varnished;
+a trout stream brawling by; great elms or chestnuts, humming with bees
+and nested in by song-birds; and the mountains standing round about,
+as at Jerusalem.&nbsp; Here, mountain and house and the old tools of
+industry were all alike rusty and downfalling.&nbsp; The hill was here
+wedged up, and there poured forth its bowels in a spout of broken mineral;
+man with his picks and powder, and nature with her own great blasting
+tools of sun and rain, labouring together at the ruin of that proud
+mountain.&nbsp; The view up the canyon was a glimpse of devastation;
+dry red minerals sliding together, here and there a crag, here and there
+dwarf thicket clinging in the general glissade, and over all a broken
+outline trenching on the blue of heaven.&nbsp; Downwards indeed, from
+our rock eyrie, we behold the greener side of nature; and the bearing
+of the pines and the sweet smell of bays and nutmegs commanded themselves
+gratefully to our senses.&nbsp; One way and another, now the die was
+cast.&nbsp; Silverado be it!<br>
+<br>
+After we had got back to the Toll House, the Jews were not long of striking
+forward.&nbsp; But I observed that one of the Hanson lads came down,
+before their departure, and returned with a ship&rsquo;s kettle.&nbsp;
+Happy Hansons!&nbsp; Nor was it until after Kelmar was gone, if I remember
+rightly, that Rufe put in an appearance to arrange the details of our
+installation.<br>
+<br>
+The latter part of the day, Fanny and I sat in the verandah of the Toll
+House, utterly stunned by the uproar of the wind among the trees on
+the other side of the valley.&nbsp; Sometimes, we would have it it was
+like a sea, but it was not various enough for that; and again, we thought
+it like the roar of a cataract, but it was too changeful for the cataract;
+and then we would decide, speaking in sleepy voices, that it could be
+compared with nothing but itself.&nbsp; My mind was entirely preoccupied
+by the noise.&nbsp; I hearkened to it by the hour, gapingly hearkened,
+and let my cigarette go out.&nbsp; Sometimes the wind would make a sally
+nearer hand, and send a shrill, whistling crash among the foliage on
+our side of the glen; and sometimes a back-draught would strike into
+the elbow where we sat, and cast the gravel and torn leaves into our
+faces.&nbsp; But for the most part, this great, streaming gale passed
+unweariedly by us into Napa Valley, not two hundred yards away, visible
+by the tossing boughs, stunningly audible, and yet not moving a hair
+upon our heads.&nbsp; So it blew all night long while I was writing
+up my journal, and after we were in bed, under a cloudless, starset
+heaven; and so it was blowing still next morning when we rose.<br>
+<br>
+It was a laughable thought to us, what had become of our cheerful, wandering
+Hebrews.&nbsp; We could not suppose they had reached a destination.&nbsp;
+The meanest boy could lead them miles out of their way to see a gopher-hole.&nbsp;
+Boys, we felt to be their special danger; none others were of that exact
+pitch of cheerful irrelevancy to exercise a kindred sway upon their
+minds: but before the attractions of a boy their most settled resolutions
+would be war.&nbsp; We thought we could follow in fancy these three
+aged Hebrew truants wandering in and out on hilltop and in thicket,
+a demon boy trotting far ahead, their will-o&rsquo;-the-wisp conductor;
+and at last about midnight, the wind still roaring in the darkness,
+we had a vision of all three on their knees upon a mountain-top around
+a glow-worm.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+CHAPTER III. THE RETURN<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+Next morning we were up by half-past five, according to agreement, and
+it was ten by the clock before our Jew boys returned to pick us up.&nbsp;
+Kelmar, Mrs. Kelmar, and Abramina, all smiling from ear to ear, and
+full of tales of the hospitality they had found on the other side.&nbsp;
+It had not gone unrewarded; for I observed with interest that the ship&rsquo;s
+kettles, all but one, had been &ldquo;placed.&rdquo;&nbsp; Three Lake
+County families, at least, endowed for life with a ship&rsquo;s kettle.&nbsp;
+Come, this was no misspent Sunday.&nbsp; The absence of the kettles
+told its own story: our Jews said nothing about them; but, on the other
+hand, they said many kind and comely things about the people they had
+met.&nbsp; The two women, in particular, had been charmed out of themselves
+by the sight of a young girl surrounded by her admirers; all evening,
+it appeared, they had been triumphing together in the girl&rsquo;s innocent
+successes, and to this natural and unselfish joy they gave expression
+in language that was beautiful by its simplicity and truth.<br>
+<br>
+Take them for all in all, few people have done my heart more good; they
+seemed so thoroughly entitled to happiness, and to enjoy it in so large
+a measure and so free from after-thought; almost they persuaded me to
+be a Jew.&nbsp; There was, indeed, a chink of money in their talk.&nbsp;
+They particularly commanded people who were well to do.&nbsp; &ldquo;<i>He</i>
+don&rsquo;t care - ain&rsquo;t it?&rdquo; was their highest word of
+commendation to an individual fate; and here I seem to grasp the root
+of their philosophy - it was to be free from care, to be free to make
+these Sunday wanderings, that they so eagerly pursued after wealth;
+and all this carefulness was to be careless.&nbsp; The fine, good humour
+of all three seemed to declare they had attained their end.&nbsp; Yet
+there was the other side to it; and the recipients of kettles perhaps
+cared greatly.<br>
+<br>
+No sooner had they returned, than the scene of yesterday began again.&nbsp;
+The horses were not even tied with a straw rope this time - it was not
+worth while; and Kelmar disappeared into the bar, leaving them under
+a tree on the other side of the road.&nbsp; I had to devote myself.&nbsp;
+I stood under the shadow of that tree for, I suppose, hard upon an hour,
+and had not the heart to be angry.&nbsp; Once some one remembered me,
+and brought me out half a tumblerful of the playful, innocuous American
+cocktail.&nbsp; I drank it, and lo! veins of living fire ran down my
+leg; and then a focus of conflagration remained seated in my stomach,
+not unpleasantly, for quarter of an hour.&nbsp; I love these sweet,
+fiery pangs, but I will not court them.&nbsp; The bulk of the time I
+spent in repeating as much French poetry as I could remember to the
+horses, who seemed to enjoy it hugely.&nbsp; And now it went -<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;O ma vieille Font-georges<br>
+O&ugrave; volent les rouges-gorges:&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+and again, to a more trampling measure -<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Et tout tremble, Irun, Co&iuml;mbre,<br>
+Sautander, Almodovar,<br>
+Sit&ocirc;t qu&rsquo;on entend le timbre<br>
+Des cymbales do Bivar.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+The redbreasts and the brooks of Europe, in that dry and songless land;
+brave old names and wars, strong cities, cymbals, and bright armour,
+in that nook of the mountain, sacred only to the Indian and the bear!&nbsp;
+This is still the strangest thing in all man&rsquo;s travelling, that
+he should carry about with him incongruous memories.&nbsp; There is
+no foreign land; it is the traveller only that is foreign, and now and
+again, by a flash of recollection, lights up the contrasts of the earth.<br>
+<br>
+But while I was thus wandering in my fancy, great feats had been transacted
+in the bar.&nbsp; Corwin the bold had fallen, Kelmar was again crowned
+with laurels, and the last of the ship&rsquo;s kettles had changed hands.&nbsp;
+If I had ever doubted the purity of Kelmar&rsquo;s motives, if I had
+ever suspected him of a single eye to business in his eternal dallyings,
+now at least, when the last kettle was disposed of, my suspicions must
+have been allayed.&nbsp; I dare not guess how much more time was wasted;
+nor how often we drove off, merely to drive back again and renew interrupted
+conversations about nothing, before the Toll House was fairly left behind.&nbsp;
+Alas! and not a mile down the grade there stands a ranche in a sunny
+vineyard, and here we must all dismount again and enter.<br>
+<br>
+Only the old lady was at home, Mrs. Guele, a brown old Swiss dame, the
+picture of honesty; and with her we drank a bottle of wine and had an
+age-long conversation, which would have been highly delightful if Fanny
+and I had not been faint with hunger.&nbsp; The ladies each narrated
+the story of her marriage, our two Hebrews with the prettiest combination
+of sentiment and financial bathos.&nbsp; Abramina, specially, endeared
+herself with every word.&nbsp; She was as simple, natural, and engaging
+as a kid that should have been brought up to the business of a money-changer.&nbsp;
+One touch was so resplendently Hebraic that I cannot pass it over.&nbsp;
+When her &ldquo;old man&rdquo; wrote home for her from America, her
+old man&rsquo;s family would not intrust her with the money for the
+passage, till she had bound herself by an oath - on her knees, I think
+she said - not to employ it otherwise.<br>
+<br>
+This had tickled Abramina hugely, but I think it tickled me fully more.<br>
+<br>
+Mrs. Guele told of her home-sickness up here in the long winters; of
+her honest, country-woman troubles and alarms upon the journey; how
+in the bank at Frankfort she had feared lest the banker, after having
+taken her cheque, should deny all knowledge of it - a fear I have myself
+every time I go to a bank; and how crossing the Luneburger Heath, an
+old lady, witnessing her trouble and finding whither she was bound,
+had given her &ldquo;the blessing of a person eighty years old, which
+would be sure to bring her safely to the States.&nbsp; And the first
+thing I did,&rdquo; added Mrs. Guele, &ldquo;was to fall downstairs.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+At length we got out of the house, and some of us into the trap, when
+- judgment of Heaven! - here came Mr. Guele from his vineyard.&nbsp;
+So another quarter of an hour went by; till at length, at our earnest
+pleading, we set forth again in earnest, Fanny and I white-faced and
+silent, but the Jews still smiling.&nbsp; The heart fails me.&nbsp;
+There was yet another stoppage!&nbsp; And we drove at last into Calistoga
+past two in the afternoon, Fanny and I having breakfasted at six in
+the morning, eight mortal hours before.&nbsp; We were a pallid couple;
+but still the Jews were smiling.<br>
+<br>
+So ended our excursion with the village usurers; and, now that it was
+done, we had no more idea of the nature of the business, nor of the
+part we had been playing in it, than the child unborn.&nbsp; That all
+the people we had met were the slaves of Kelmar, though in various degrees
+of servitude; that we ourselves had been sent up the mountain in the
+interests of none but Kelmar; that the money we laid out, dollar by
+dollar, cent by cent, and through the hands of various intermediaries,
+should all hop ultimately into Kelmar&rsquo;s till; - these were facts
+that we only grew to recognize in the course of time and by the accumulation
+of evidence.&nbsp; At length all doubt was quieted, when one of the
+kettle-holders confessed.&nbsp; Stopping his trap in the moonlight,
+a little way out of Calistoga, he told me, in so many words, that he
+dare not show face therewith an empty pocket.&nbsp; &ldquo;You see,
+I don&rsquo;t mind if it was only five dollars, Mr. Stevens,&rdquo;
+he said, &ldquo;but I must give Mr. Kelmar <i>something</i>.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Even now, when the whole tyranny is plain to me, I cannot find it in
+my heart to be as angry as perhaps I should be with the Hebrew tyrant.&nbsp;
+The whole game of business is beggar my neighbour; and though perhaps
+that game looks uglier when played at such close quarters and on so
+small a scale, it is none the more intrinsically inhumane for that.&nbsp;
+The village usurer is not so sad a feature of humanity and human progress
+as the millionaire manufacturer, fattening on the toil and loss of thousands,
+and yet declaiming from the platform against the greed and dishonesty
+of landlords.&nbsp; If it were fair for Cobden to buy up land from owners
+whom he thought unconscious of its proper value, it was fair enough
+for my Russian Jew to give credit to his farmers.&nbsp; Kelmar, if he
+was unconscious of the beam in his own eye, was at least silent in the
+matter of his brother&rsquo;s mote.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+THE ACT OF SQUATTING<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+There were four of us squatters - myself and my wife, the King and Queen
+of Silverado; Sam, the Crown Prince; and Chuchu, the Grand Duke.&nbsp;
+Chuchu, a setter crossed with spaniel, was the most unsuited for a rough
+life.&nbsp; He had been nurtured tenderly in the society of ladies;
+his heart was large and soft; he regarded the sofa-cushion as a bed-rook
+necessary of existence.&nbsp; Though about the size of a sheep, he loved
+to sit in ladies&rsquo; laps; he never said a bad word in all his blameless
+days; and if he had seen a flute, I am sure he could have played upon
+it by nature.&nbsp; It may seem hard to say it of a dog, but Chuchu
+was a tame cat.<br>
+<br>
+The king and queen, the grand duke, and a basket of cold provender for
+immediate use, set forth from Calistoga in a double buggy; the crown
+prince, on horseback, led the way like an outrider.&nbsp; Bags and boxes
+and a second-hand stove were to follow close upon our heels by Hanson&rsquo;s
+team.<br>
+<br>
+It was a beautiful still day; the sky was one field of azure.&nbsp;
+Not a leaf moved, not a speck appeared in heaven.&nbsp; Only from the
+summit of the mountain one little snowy wisp of cloud after another
+kept detaching itself, like smoke from a volcano, and blowing southward
+in some high stream of air: Mount Saint Helena still at her interminable
+task, making the weather, like a Lapland witch.<br>
+<br>
+By noon we had come in sight of the mill: a great brown building, half-way
+up the hill, big as a factory, two stories high, and with tanks and
+ladders along the roof; which, as a pendicle of Silverado mine, we held
+to be an outlying province of our own.&nbsp; Thither, then, we went,
+crossing the valley by a grassy trail; and there lunched out of the
+basket, sitting in a kind of portico, and wondering, while we ate, at
+this great bulk of useless building.&nbsp; Through a chink we could
+look far down into the interior, and see sunbeams floating in the dust
+and striking on tier after tier of silent, rusty machinery.&nbsp; It
+cost six thousand dollars, twelve hundred English sovereigns; and now,
+here it stands deserted, like the temple of a forgotten religion, the
+busy millers toiling somewhere else.&nbsp; All the time we were there,
+mill and mill town showed no sign of life; that part of the mountain-side,
+which is very open and green, was tenanted by no living creature but
+ourselves and the insects; and nothing stirred but the cloud manufactory
+upon the mountain summit.&nbsp; It was odd to compare this with the
+former days, when the engine was in fall blast, the mill palpitating
+to its strokes, and the carts came rattling down from Silverado, charged
+with ore.<br>
+<br>
+By two we had been landed at the mine, the buggy was gone again, and
+we were left to our own reflections and the basket of cold provender,
+until Hanson should arrive.&nbsp; Hot as it was by the sun, there was
+something chill in such a home-coming, in that world of wreck and rust,
+splinter and rolling gravel, where for so many years no fire had smoked.<br>
+<br>
+Silverado platform filled the whole width of the canyon.&nbsp; Above,
+as I have said, this was a wild, red, stony gully in the mountains;
+but below it was a wooded dingle.&nbsp; And through this, I was told,
+there had gone a path between the mine and the Toll House - our natural
+north-west passage to civilization.&nbsp; I found and followed it, clearing
+my way as I went through fallen branches and dead trees.&nbsp; It went
+straight down that steep canyon, till it brought you out abruptly over
+the roofs of the hotel.&nbsp; There was nowhere any break in the descent.&nbsp;
+It almost seemed as if, were you to drop a stone down the old iron chute
+at our platform, it would never rest until it hopped upon the Toll House
+shingles.&nbsp; Signs were not wanting of the ancient greatness of Silverado.&nbsp;
+The footpath was well marked, and had been well trodden in the old clays
+by thirsty miners.&nbsp; And far down, buried in foliage, deep out of
+sight of Silverado, I came on a last outpost of the mine - a mound of
+gravel, some wreck of wooden aqueduct, and the mouth of a tunnel, like
+a treasure grotto in a fairy story.&nbsp; A stream of water, fed by
+the invisible leakage from our shaft, and dyed red with cinnabar or
+iron, ran trippingly forth out of the bowels of the cave; and, looking
+far under the arch, I could see something like an iron lantern fastened
+on the rocky wall.&nbsp; It was a promising spot for the imagination.&nbsp;
+No boy could have left it unexplored.<br>
+<br>
+The stream thenceforward stole along the bottom of the dingle, and made,
+for that dry land, a pleasant warbling in the leaves.&nbsp; Once, I
+suppose, it ran splashing down the whole length of the canyon, but now
+its head waters had been tapped by the shaft at Silverado, and for a
+great part of its course it wandered sunless among the joints of the
+mountain.&nbsp; No wonder that it should better its pace when it sees,
+far before it, daylight whitening in the arch, or that it should come
+trotting forth into the sunlight with a song.<br>
+<br>
+The two stages had gone by when I got down, and the Toll House stood,
+dozing in sun and dust and silence, like a place enchanted.&nbsp; My
+mission was after hay for bedding, and that I was readily promised.&nbsp;
+But when I mentioned that we were waiting for Rufe, the people shook
+their heads.&nbsp; Rufe was not a regular man any way, it seemed; and
+if he got playing poker - Well, poker was too many for Rufe.&nbsp; I
+had not yet heard them bracketted together; but it seemed a natural
+conjunction, and commended itself swiftly to my fears; and as soon as
+I returned to Silverado and had told my story, we practically gave Hanson
+up, and set ourselves to do what we could find do-able in our desert-island
+state.<br>
+<br>
+The lower room had been the assayer&rsquo;s office.&nbsp; The floor
+was thick with <i>d&eacute;bris</i> - part human, from the former occupants;
+part natural, sifted in by mountain winds.&nbsp; In a sea of red dust
+there swam or floated sticks, boards, hay, straw, stones, and paper;
+ancient newspapers, above all - for the newspaper, especially when torn,
+soon becomes an antiquity - and bills of the Silverado boarding-house,
+some dated Silverado, some Calistoga Mine.&nbsp; Here is one, verbatim;
+and if any one can calculate the scale of charges, he has my envious
+admiration.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<pre>Calistoga Mine, May 3rd, 1875.
+John Stanley
+To S. Chapman, Cr.
+To board from April 1st, to April 30&nbsp; $25 75
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&ldquo;&nbsp; &nbsp; &ldquo;&nbsp; &nbsp;  &ldquo;&nbsp; May lst, to 3rd&nbsp; ...&nbsp; &nbsp; 2 00
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;27 75
+
+
+</pre><p>Where is John Stanley mining now?&nbsp; Where is S. Chapman, within
+whose hospitable walls we were to lodge?&nbsp; The date was but five
+years old, but in that time the world had changed for Silverado; like
+Palmyra in the desert, it had outlived its people and its purpose; we
+camped, like Layard, amid ruins, and these names spoke to us of prehistoric
+time.&nbsp; A boot-jack, a pair of boots, a dog-hutch, and these bills
+of Mr. Chapman&rsquo;s were the only speaking relics that we disinterred
+from all that vast Silverado rubbish-heap; but what would I not have
+given to unearth a letter, a pocket-book, a diary, only a ledger, or
+a roll of names, to take me back, in a more personal manner, to the
+past?&nbsp; It pleases me, besides, to fancy that Stanley or Chapman,
+or one of their companions, may light upon this chronicle, and be struck
+by the name, and read some news of their anterior home, coming, as it
+were, out of a subsequent epoch of history in that quarter of the world.<br>
+<br>
+As we were tumbling the mingled rubbish on the floor, kicking it with
+our feet, and groping for these written evidences of the past, Sam,
+with a somewhat whitened face, produced a paper bag.&nbsp; &ldquo;What&rsquo;s
+this?&rdquo; said he.&nbsp; It contained a granulated powder, something
+the colour of Gregory&rsquo;s Mixture, but rosier; and as there were
+several of the bags, and each more or less broken, the powder was spread
+widely on the floor.&nbsp; Had any of us ever seen giant powder?&nbsp;
+No, nobody had; and instantly there grew up in my mind a shadowy belief,
+verging with every moment nearer to certitude, that I had somewhere
+heard somebody describe it as just such a powder as the one around us.&nbsp;
+I have learnt since that it is a substance not unlike tallow, and is
+made up in rolls for all the world like tallow candles.<br>
+<br>
+Fanny, to add to our happiness, told us a story of a gentleman who had
+camped one night, like ourselves, by a deserted mine.&nbsp; He was a
+handy, thrifty fellow, and looked right and left for plunder, but all
+he could lay his hands on was a can of oil.&nbsp; After dark he had
+to see to the horses with a lantern; and not to miss an opportunity,
+filled up his lamp from the oil can.&nbsp; Thus equipped, he set forth
+into the forest.&nbsp; A little while after, his friends heard a loud
+explosion; the mountain echoes bellowed, and then all was still.&nbsp;
+On examination, the can proved to contain oil, with the trifling addition
+of nitro-glycerine; but no research disclosed a trace of either man
+or lantern.<br>
+<br>
+It was a pretty sight, after this anecdote, to see us sweeping out the
+giant powder.&nbsp; It seemed never to be far enough away.&nbsp; And,
+after all, it was only some rock pounded for assay.<br>
+<br>
+So much for the lower room.&nbsp; We scraped some of the rougher dirt
+off the floor, and left it.&nbsp; That was our sitting-room and kitchen,
+though there was nothing to sit upon but the table, and no provision
+for a fire except a hole in the roof of the room above, which had once
+contained the chimney of a stove.<br>
+<br>
+To that upper room we now proceeded.&nbsp; There were the eighteen bunks
+in a double tier, nine on either hand, where from eighteen to thirty-six
+miners had once snored together all night long, John Stanley, perhaps,
+snoring loudest.&nbsp; There was the roof, with a hole in it through
+which the sun now shot an arrow.&nbsp; There was the floor, in much
+the same state as the one below, though, perhaps, there was more hay,
+and certainly there was the added ingredient of broken glass, the man
+who stole the window-frames having apparently made a miscarriage with
+this one.&nbsp; Without a broom, without hay or bedding, we could but
+look about us with a beginning of despair.&nbsp; The one bright arrow
+of day, in that gaunt and shattered barrack, made the rest look dirtier
+and darker, and the sight drove us at last into the open.<br>
+<br>
+Here, also, the handiwork of man lay ruined: but the plants were all
+alive and thriving; the view below was fresh with the colours of nature;
+and we had exchanged a dim, human garret for a corner, even although
+it were untidy, of the blue hall of heaven.&nbsp; Not a bird, not a
+beast, not a reptile.&nbsp; There was no noise in that part of the world,
+save when we passed beside the staging, and heard the water musically
+falling in the shaft.<br>
+<br>
+We wandered to and fro.&nbsp; We searched among that drift of lumber-wood
+and iron, nails and rails, and sleepers and the wheels of tracks.&nbsp;
+We gazed up the cleft into the bosom of the mountain.&nbsp; We sat by
+the margin of the dump and saw, far below us, the green treetops standing
+still in the clear air.&nbsp; Beautiful perfumes, breaths of bay, resin,
+and nutmeg, came to us more often and grew sweeter and sharper as the
+afternoon declined.&nbsp; But still there was no word of Hanson.<br>
+<br>
+I set to with pick and shovel, and deepened the pool behind the shaft,
+till we were sure of sufficient water for the morning; and by the time
+I had finished, the sun had begun to go down behind the mountain shoulder,
+the platform was plunged in quiet shadow, and a chill descended from
+the sky.&nbsp; Night began early in our cleft.&nbsp; Before us, over
+the margin of the dump, we could see the sun still striking aslant into
+the wooded nick below, and on the battlemented, pine-bescattered ridges
+on the farther side.<br>
+<br>
+There was no stove, of course, and no hearth in our lodging, so we betook
+ourselves to the blacksmith&rsquo;s forge across the platform.&nbsp;
+If the platform be taken as a stage, and the out-curving margin of the
+dump to represent the line of the foot-lights, then our house would
+be the first wing on the actor&rsquo;s left, and this blacksmith&rsquo;s
+forge, although no match for it in size, the foremost on the right.&nbsp;
+It was a low, brown cottage, planted close against the hill, and overhung
+by the foliage and peeling boughs of a madrona thicket.&nbsp; Within
+it was full of dead leaves and mountain dust, and rubbish from the mine.&nbsp;
+But we soon had a good fire brightly blazing, and sat close about it
+on impromptu seats.&nbsp; Chuchu, the slave of sofa-cushions, whimpered
+for a softer bed; but the rest of us were greatly revived and comforted
+by that good creature-fire, which gives us warmth and light and companionable
+sounds, and colours up the emptiest building with better than frescoes.&nbsp;
+For a while it was even pleasant in the forge, with the blaze in the
+midst, and a look over our shoulders on the woods and mountains where
+the day was dying like a dolphin.<br>
+<br>
+It was between seven and eight before Hanson arrived, with a waggonful
+of our effects and two of his wife&rsquo;s relatives to lend him a hand.&nbsp;
+The elder showed surprising strength.&nbsp; He would pick up a huge
+packing-case, full of books of all things, swing it on his shoulder,
+and away up the two crazy ladders and the breakneck spout of rolling
+mineral, familiarly termed a path, that led from the cart-track to our
+house.&nbsp; Even for a man unburthened, the ascent was toilsome and
+precarious; but Irvine sealed it with a light foot, carrying box after
+box, as the hero whisks the stage child up the practicable footway beside
+the waterfall of the fifth act.&nbsp; With so strong a helper, the business
+was speedily transacted.&nbsp; Soon the assayer&rsquo;s office was thronged
+with our belongings, piled higgledy-piggledy, and upside down, about
+the floor.&nbsp; There were our boxes, indeed, but my wife had left
+her keys in Calistoga.&nbsp; There was the stove, but, alas! our carriers
+had forgot the chimney, and lost one of the plates along the road.&nbsp;
+The Silverado problem was scarce solved.<br>
+<br>
+Rufe himself was grave and good-natured over his share of blame; he
+even, if I remember right, expressed regret.&nbsp; But his crew, to
+my astonishment and anger, grinned from ear to ear, and laughed aloud
+at our distress.&nbsp; They thought it &ldquo;real funny&rdquo; about
+the stove-pipe they had forgotten; &ldquo;real funny&rdquo; that they
+should have lost a plate.&nbsp; As for hay, the whole party refused
+to bring us any till they should have supped.&nbsp; See how late they
+were!&nbsp; Never had there been such a job as coming up that grade!&nbsp;
+Nor often, I suspect, such a game of poker as that before they started.&nbsp;
+But about nine, as a particular favour, we should have some hay.<br>
+<br>
+So they took their departure, leaving me still staring, and we resigned
+ourselves to wait for their return.&nbsp; The fire in the forge had
+been suffered to go out, and we were one and all too weary to kindle
+another.&nbsp; We dined, or, not to take that word in vain, we ate after
+a fashion, in the nightmare disorder of the assayer&rsquo;s office,
+perched among boxes.&nbsp; A single candle lighted us.&nbsp; It could
+scarce be called a housewarming; for there was, of course, no fire,
+and with the two open doors and the open window gaping on the night,
+like breaches in a fortress, it began to grow rapidly chill.&nbsp; Talk
+ceased; nobody moved but the unhappy Chuchu, still in quest of sofa-cushions,
+who tumbled complainingly among the trunks.&nbsp; It required a certain
+happiness of disposition to look forward hopefully, from so dismal a
+beginning, across the brief hours of night, to the warm shining of to-morrow&rsquo;s
+sun.<br>
+<br>
+But the hay arrived at last, and we turned, with our last spark of courage,
+to the bedroom.&nbsp; We had improved the entrance, but it was still
+a kind of rope-walking; and it would have been droll to see us mounting,
+one after another, by candle-light, under the open stars.<br>
+<br>
+The western door - that which looked up the canyon, and through which
+we entered by our bridge of flying plank - was still entire, a handsome,
+panelled door, the most finished piece of carpentry in Silverado.&nbsp;
+And the two lowest bunks next to this we roughly filled with hay for
+that night&rsquo;s use.&nbsp; Through the opposite, or eastern-looking
+gable, with its open door and window, a faint, disused starshine came
+into the room like mist; and when we were once in bed, we lay, awaiting
+sleep, in a haunted, incomplete obscurity.&nbsp; At first the silence
+of the night was utter.&nbsp; Then a high wind began in the distance
+among the tree-tops, and for hours continued to grow higher.&nbsp; It
+seemed to me much such a wind as we had found on our visit; yet here
+in our open chamber we were fanned only by gentle and refreshing draughts,
+so deep was the canyon, so close our house was planted under the overhanging
+rock.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+THE HUNTER&rsquo;S FAMILY<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+There is quite a large race or class of people in America, for whom
+we scarcely seem to have a parallel in England.&nbsp; Of pure white
+blood, they are unknown or unrecognizable in towns; inhabit the fringe
+of settlements and the deep, quiet places of the country; rebellious
+to all labour, and pettily thievish, like the English gipsies; rustically
+ignorant, but with a touch of wood-lore and the dexterity of the savage.&nbsp;
+Whence they came is a moot point.&nbsp; At the time of the war, they
+poured north in crowds to escape the conscription; lived during summer
+on fruits, wild animals, and petty theft; and at the approach of winter,
+when these supplies failed, built great fires in the forest, and there
+died stoically by starvation.&nbsp; They are widely scattered, however,
+and easily recognized.&nbsp; Loutish, but not ill-looking, they will
+sit all day, swinging their legs on a field fence, the mind seemingly
+as devoid of all reflection as a Suffolk peasant&rsquo;s, careless of
+politics, for the most part incapable of reading, but with a rebellious
+vanity and a strong sense of independence.&nbsp; Hunting is their most
+congenial business, or, if the occasion offers, a little amateur detection.&nbsp;
+In tracking a criminal, following a particular horse along a beaten
+highway, and drawing inductions from a hair or a footprint, one of those
+somnolent, grinning Hodges will suddenly display activity of body and
+finesse of mind.&nbsp; By their names ye may know them, the women figuring
+as Loveina, Larsenia, Serena, Leanna, Orreana; the men answering to
+Alvin, Alva, or Orion, pronounced Orrion, with the accent on the first.&nbsp;
+Whether they are indeed a race, or whether this is the form of degeneracy
+common to all back-woodsmen, they are at least known by a generic byword,
+as Poor Whites or Low-downers.<br>
+<br>
+I will not say that the Hanson family was Poor White, because the name
+savours of offence; but I may go as far as this - they were, in many
+points, not unsimilar to the people usually so-cared.&nbsp; Rufe himself
+combined two of the qualifications, for he was both a hunter and an
+amateur detective.&nbsp; It was he who pursued Russel and Dollar, the
+robbers of the Lake Port stage, and captured them the very morning after
+the exploit, while they were still sleeping in a hayfield.&nbsp; Russel,
+a drunken Scotch carpenter, was even an acquaintance of his own, and
+he expressed much grave commiseration for his fate.&nbsp; In all that
+he said and did, Rufe was grave.&nbsp; I never saw him hurried.&nbsp;
+When he spoke, he took out his pipe with ceremonial deliberation, looked
+east and west, and then, in quiet tones and few words, stated his business
+or told his story.&nbsp; His gait was to match; it would never have
+surprised you if, at any step, he had turned round and walked away again,
+so warily and slowly, and with so much seeming hesitation did he go
+about.&nbsp; He lay long in bed in the morning - rarely indeed, rose
+before noon; he loved all games, from poker to clerical croquet; and
+in the Toll House croquet ground I have seen him toiling at the latter
+with the devotion of a curate.&nbsp; He took an interest in education,
+was an active member of the local school-board, and when I was there,
+he had recently lost the schoolhouse key.&nbsp; His waggon was broken,
+but it never seemed to occur to him to mend it.&nbsp; Like all truly
+idle people, he had an artistic eye.&nbsp; He chose the print stuff
+for his wife&rsquo;s dresses, and counselled her in the making of a
+patchwork quilt, always, as she thought, wrongly, but to the more educated
+eye, always with bizarre and admirable taste - the taste of an Indian.&nbsp;
+With all this, he was a perfect, unoffending gentleman in word and act.&nbsp;
+Take his clay pipe from him, and he was fit for any society but that
+of fools.&nbsp; Quiet as he was, there burned a deep, permanent excitement
+in his dark blue eyes; and when this grave man smiled, it was like sunshine
+in a shady place.<br>
+<br>
+Mrs. Hanson (<i>n&eacute;e</i>, if you please, Lovelands) was more commonplace
+than her lord.&nbsp; She was a comely woman, too, plump, fair-coloured,
+with wonderful white teeth; and in her print dresses (chosen by Rufe)
+and with a large sun-bonnet shading her valued complexion, made, I assure
+you, a very agreeable figure.&nbsp; But she was on the surface, what
+there was of her, out-spoken and loud-spoken.&nbsp; Her noisy laughter
+had none of the charm of one of Hanson&rsquo;s rare, slow-spreading
+smiles; there was no reticence, no mystery, no manner about the woman:
+she was a first-class dairymaid, but her husband was an unknown quantity
+between the savage and the nobleman.&nbsp; She was often in and out
+with us, merry, and healthy, and fair; he came far seldomer - only,
+indeed, when there was business, or now and again, to pay a visit of
+ceremony, brushed up for the occasion, with his wife on his arm, and
+a clean clay pipe in his teeth.&nbsp; These visits, in our forest state,
+had quite the air of an event, and turned our red canyon into a salon.<br>
+<br>
+Such was the pair who ruled in the old Silverado Hotel, among the windy
+trees, on the mountain shoulder overlooking the whole length of Napa
+Valley, as the man aloft looks down on the ship&rsquo;s deck.&nbsp;
+There they kept house, with sundry horses and fowls, and a family of
+sons, Daniel Webster, and I think George Washington, among the number.&nbsp;
+Nor did they want visitors.&nbsp; An old gentleman, of singular stolidity,
+and called Breedlove - I think he had crossed the plains in the same
+caravan with Rufe - housed with them for awhile during our stay; and
+they had besides a permanent lodger, in the form of Mrs. Hanson&rsquo;s
+brother, Irvine Lovelands.&nbsp; I spell Irvine by guess; for I could
+get no information on the subject, just as I could never find out, in
+spite of many inquiries, whether or not Rufe was a contraction for Rufus.&nbsp;
+They were all cheerfully at sea about their names in that generation.&nbsp;
+And this is surely the more notable where the names are all so strange,
+and even the family names appear to have been coined.&nbsp; At one time,
+at least, the ancestors of all these Alvins and Alvas, Loveinas, Lovelands,
+and Breedloves, must have taken serious council and found a certain
+poetry in these denominations; that must have been, then, their form
+of literature.&nbsp; But still times change; and their next descendants,
+the George Washingtons and Daniel Websters, will at least be clear upon
+the point.&nbsp; And anyway, and however his name should be spelt, this
+Irvine Lovelands was the most unmitigated Caliban I ever knew.<br>
+<br>
+Our very first morning at Silverado, when we were full of business,
+patching up doors and windows, making beds and seats, and getting our
+rough lodging into shape, Irvine and his sister made their appearance
+together, she for neighbourliness and general curiosity; he, because
+he was working for me, to my sorrow, cutting firewood at I forget how
+much a day.&nbsp; The way that he set about cutting wood was characteristic.&nbsp;
+We were at that moment patching up and unpacking in the kitchen.&nbsp;
+Down he sat on one side, and down sat his sister on the other.&nbsp;
+Both were chewing pine-tree gum, and he, to my annoyance, accompanied
+that simple pleasure with profuse expectoration.&nbsp; She rattled away,
+talking up hill and down dale, laughing, tossing her head, showing her
+brilliant teeth.&nbsp; He looked on in silence, now spitting heavily
+on the floor, now putting his head back and uttering a loud, discordant,
+joyless laugh.&nbsp; He had a tangle of shock hair, the colour of wool;
+his mouth was a grin; although as strong as a horse, he looked neither
+heavy nor yet adroit, only leggy, coltish, and in the road.&nbsp; But
+it was plain he was in high spirits, thoroughly enjoying his visit;
+and he laughed frankly whenever we failed to accomplish what we were
+about.&nbsp; This was scarcely helpful: it was even, to amateur carpenters,
+embarrassing; but it lasted until we knocked off work and began to get
+dinner.&nbsp; Then Mrs. Hanson remembered she should have been gone
+an hour ago; and the pair retired, and the lady&rsquo;s laughter died
+away among the nutmegs down the path.&nbsp; That was Irvine&rsquo;s
+first day&rsquo;s work in my employment - the devil take him!<br>
+<br>
+The next morning he returned and, as he was this time alone, he bestowed
+his conversation upon us with great liberality.&nbsp; He prided himself
+on his intelligence; asked us if we knew the school ma&rsquo;am.&nbsp;
+<i>He</i> didn&rsquo;t think much of her, anyway.&nbsp; He had tried
+her, he had.&nbsp; He had put a question to her.&nbsp; If a tree a hundred
+feet high were to fall a foot a day, how long would it take to fall
+right down?&nbsp; She had not been able to solve the problem.&nbsp;
+&ldquo;She don&rsquo;t know nothing,&rdquo; he opined.&nbsp; He told
+us how a friend of his kept a school with a revolver, and chuckled mightily
+over that; his friend could teach school, he could.&nbsp; All the time
+he kept chewing gum and spitting.&nbsp; He would stand a while looking
+down; and then he would toss back his shock of hair, and laugh hoarsely,
+and spit, and bring forward a new subject.&nbsp; A man, he told us,
+who bore a grudge against him, had poisoned his dog.&nbsp; &ldquo;That
+was a low thing for a man to do now, wasn&rsquo;t it?&nbsp; It wasn&rsquo;t
+like a man, that, nohow.&nbsp; But I got even with him: I pisoned <i>his</i>
+dog.&rdquo;&nbsp; His clumsy utterance, his rude embarrassed manner,
+set a fresh value on the stupidity of his remarks.&nbsp; I do not think
+I ever appreciated the meaning of two words until I knew Irvine - the
+verb, loaf, and the noun, oaf; between them, they complete his portrait.&nbsp;
+He could lounge, and wriggle, and rub himself against the wall, and
+grin, and be more in everybody&rsquo;s way than any other two people
+that I ever set my eyes on.&nbsp; Nothing that he did became him; and
+yet you were conscious that he was one of your own race, that his mind
+was cumbrously at work, revolving the problem of existence like a quid
+of gum, and in his own cloudy manner enjoying life, and passing judgment
+on his fellows.&nbsp; Above all things, he was delighted with himself.&nbsp;
+You would not have thought it, from his uneasy manners and troubled,
+struggling utterance; but he loved himself to the marrow, and was happy
+and proud like a peacock on a rail.<br>
+<br>
+His self-esteem was, indeed, the one joint in his harness.&nbsp; He
+could be got to work, and even kept at work, by flattery.&nbsp; As long
+as my wife stood over him, crying out how strong he was, so long exactly
+he would stick to the matter in hand; and the moment she turned her
+back, or ceased to praise him, he would stop.&nbsp; His physical strength
+was wonderful; and to have a woman stand by and admire his achievements,
+warmed his heart like sunshine.&nbsp; Yet he was as cowardly as he was
+powerful, and felt no shame in owning to the weakness.&nbsp; Something
+was once wanted from the crazy platform over the shaft, and he at once
+refused to venture there - &ldquo;did not like,&rdquo; as he said, &ldquo;foolen&rsquo;
+round them kind o&rsquo; places,&rdquo; and let my wife go instead of
+him, looking on with a grin.&nbsp; Vanity, where it rules, is usually
+more heroic: but Irvine steadily approved himself, and expected others
+to approve him; rather looked down upon my wife, and decidedly expected
+her to look up to him, on the strength of his superior prudence.<br>
+<br>
+Yet the strangest part of the whole matter was perhaps this, that Irvine
+was as beautiful as a statue.&nbsp; His features were, in themselves,
+perfect; it was only his cloudy, uncouth, and coarse expression that
+disfigured them.&nbsp; So much strength residing in so spare a frame
+was proof sufficient of the accuracy of his shape.&nbsp; He must have
+been built somewhat after the pattern of Jack Sheppard; but the famous
+housebreaker, we may be certain, was no lout.&nbsp; It was by the extraordinary
+powers of his mind no less than by the vigour of his body, that he broke
+his strong prison with such imperfect implements, turning the very obstacles
+to service.&nbsp; Irvine, in the same case, would have sat down and
+spat, and grumbled curses.&nbsp; He had the soul of a fat sheep, but,
+regarded as an artist&rsquo;s model, the exterior of a Greek God.&nbsp;
+It was a cruel thought to persons less favoured in their birth, that
+this creature, endowed - to use the language of theatres - with extraordinary
+&ldquo;means,&rdquo; should so manage to misemploy them that he looked
+ugly and almost deformed.&nbsp; It was only by an effort of abstraction,
+and after many days, that you discovered what he was.<br>
+<br>
+By playing on the oaf&rsquo;s conceit, and standing closely over him,
+we got a path made round the corner of the dump to our door, so that
+we could come and go with decent ease; and he even enjoyed the work,
+for in that there were boulders to be plucked up bodily, bushes to be
+uprooted, and other occasions for athletic display: but cutting wood
+was a different matter.&nbsp; Anybody could cut wood; and, besides,
+my wife was tired of supervising him, and had other things to attend
+to.&nbsp; And, in short, days went by, and Irvine came daily, and talked
+and lounged and spat; but the firewood remained intact as sleepers on
+the platform or growing trees upon the mountainside.&nbsp; Irvine, as
+a woodcutter, we could tolerate; but Irvine as a friend of the family,
+at so much a day, was too bald an imposition, and at length, on the
+afternoon of the fourth or fifth day of our connection, I explained
+to him, as clearly as I could, the light in which I had grown to regard
+his presence.&nbsp; I pointed out to him that I could not continue to
+give him a salary for spitting on the floor; and this expression, which
+came after a good many others, at last penetrated his obdurate wits.&nbsp;
+He rose at once, and said if that was the way he was going to be spoke
+to, he reckoned he would quit.&nbsp; And, no one interposing, he departed.<br>
+<br>
+So far, so good.&nbsp; But we had no firewood.&nbsp; The next afternoon,
+I strolled down to Rufe&rsquo;s and consulted him on the subject.&nbsp;
+It was a very droll interview, in the large, bare north room of the
+Silverado Hotel, Mrs. Hanson&rsquo;s patchwork on a frame, and Rufe,
+and his wife, and I, and the oaf himself, all more or less embarrassed.&nbsp;
+Rufe announced there was nobody in the neighbourhood but Irvine who
+could do a day&rsquo;s work for anybody.&nbsp; Irvine, thereupon, refused
+to have any more to do with my service; he &ldquo;wouldn&rsquo;t work
+no more for a man as had spoke to him&rsquo;s I had done.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+I found myself on the point of the last humiliation - driven to beseech
+the creature whom I had just dismissed with insult: but I took the high
+hand in despair, said there must be no talk of Irvine coming back unless
+matters were to be differently managed; that I would rather chop firewood
+for myself than be fooled; and, in short, the Hansons being eager for
+the lad&rsquo;s hire, I so imposed upon them with merely affected resolution,
+that they ended by begging me to re-employ him again, on a solemn promise
+that he should be more industrious.&nbsp; The promise, I am bound to
+say, was kept.&nbsp; We soon had a fine pile of firewood at our door;
+and if Caliban gave me the cold shoulder and spared me his conversation,
+I thought none the worse of him for that, nor did I find my days much
+longer for the deprivation.<br>
+<br>
+The leading spirit of the family was, I am inclined to fancy, Mrs. Hanson.&nbsp;
+Her social brilliancy somewhat dazzled the others, and she had more
+of the small change of sense.&nbsp; It was she who faced Kelmar, for
+instance; and perhaps, if she had been alone, Kelmar would have had
+no rule within her doors.&nbsp; Rufe, to be sure, had a fine, sober,
+open-air attitude of mind, seeing the world without exaggeration - perhaps,
+we may even say, without enough; for he lacked, along with the others,
+that commercial idealism which puts so high a value on time and money.&nbsp;
+Sanity itself is a kind of convention.&nbsp; Perhaps Rufe was wrong;
+but, looking on life plainly, he was unable to perceive that croquet
+or poker were in any way less important than, for instance, mending
+his waggon.&nbsp; Even his own profession, hunting, was dear to him
+mainly as a sort of play; even that he would have neglected, had it
+not appealed to his imagination.&nbsp; His hunting-suit, for instance,
+had cost I should be afraid to say how many bucks - the currency in
+which he paid his way: it was all befringed, after the Indian fashion,
+and it was dear to his heart.&nbsp; The pictorial side of his daily
+business was never forgotten.&nbsp; He was even anxious to stand for
+his picture in those buckskin hunting clothes; and I remember how he
+once warmed almost into enthusiasm, his dark blue eyes growing perceptibly
+larger, as he planned the composition in which he should appear, &ldquo;with
+the horns of some real big bucks, and dogs, and a camp on a crick&rdquo;
+(creek, stream).<br>
+<br>
+There was no trace in Irvine of this woodland poetry.&nbsp; He did not
+care for hunting, nor yet for buckskin suits.&nbsp; He had never observed
+scenery.&nbsp; The world, as it appeared to him, was almost obliterated
+by his own great grinning figure in the foreground: Caliban Malvolio.&nbsp;
+And it seems to me as if, in the persons of these brothers-in-law, we
+had the two sides of rusticity fairly well represented: the hunter living
+really in nature; the clodhopper living merely out of society: the one
+bent up in every corporal agent to capacity in one pursuit, doing at
+least one thing keenly and thoughtfully, and thoroughly alive to all
+that touches it; the other in the inert and bestial state, walking in
+a faint dream, and taking so dim an impression of the myriad sides of
+life that he is truly conscious of nothing but himself.&nbsp; It is
+only in the fastnesses of nature, forests, mountains, and the back of
+man&rsquo;s beyond, that a creature endowed with five senses can grow
+up into the perfection of this crass and earthy vanity.&nbsp; In towns
+or the busier country sides, he is roughly reminded of other men&rsquo;s
+existence; and if he learns no more, he learns at least to fear contempt.&nbsp;
+But Irvine had come scatheless through life, conscious only of himself,
+of his great strength and intelligence; and in the silence of the universe,
+to which he did not listen, dwelling with delight on the sound of his
+own thoughts.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+THE SEA FOGS<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+A change in the colour of the light usually called me in the morning.&nbsp;
+By a certain hour, the long, vertical chinks in our western gable, where
+the boards had shrunk and separated, flashed suddenly into my eyes as
+stripes of dazzling blue, at once so dark and splendid that I used to
+marvel how the qualities could be combined.&nbsp; At an earlier hour,
+the heavens in that quarter were still quietly coloured, but the shoulder
+of the mountain which shuts in the canyon already glowed with sunlight
+in a wonderful compound of gold and rose and green; and this too would
+kindle, although more mildly and with rainbow tints, the fissures of
+our crazy gable.&nbsp; If I were sleeping heavily, it was the bold blue
+that struck me awake; if more lightly, then I would come to myself in
+that earlier and fairier fight.<br>
+<br>
+One Sunday morning, about five, the first brightness called me.&nbsp;
+I rose and turned to the east, not for my devotions, but for air.&nbsp;
+The night had been very still.&nbsp; The little private gale that blew
+every evening in our canyon, for ten minutes or perhaps a quarter of
+an hour, had swiftly blown itself out; in the hours that followed not
+a sigh of wind had shaken the treetops; and our barrack, for all its
+breaches, was less fresh that morning than of wont.&nbsp; But I had
+no sooner reached the window than I forgot all else in the sight that
+met my eyes, and I made but two bounds into my clothes, and down the
+crazy plank to the platform.<br>
+<br>
+The sun was still concealed below the opposite hilltops, though it was
+shining already, not twenty feet above my head, on our own mountain
+slope.&nbsp; But the scene, beyond a few near features, was entirely
+changed.&nbsp; Napa valley was gone; gone were all the lower slopes
+and woody foothills of the range; and in their place, not a thousand
+feet below me, rolled a great level ocean.&nbsp; It was as though I
+had gone to bed the night before, safe in a nook of inland mountains,
+and had awakened in a bay upon the coast.&nbsp; I had seen these inundations
+from below; at Calistoga I had risen and gone abroad in the early morning,
+coughing and sneezing, under fathoms on fathoms of gray sea vapour,
+like a cloudy sky - a dull sight for the artist, and a painful experience
+for the invalid.&nbsp; But to sit aloft one&rsquo;s self in the pure
+air and under the unclouded dome of heaven, and thus look down on the
+submergence of the valley, was strangely different and even delightful
+to the eyes.&nbsp; Far away were hilltops like little islands.&nbsp;
+Nearer, a smoky surf beat about the foot of precipices and poured into
+all the coves of these rough mountains.&nbsp; The colour of that fog
+ocean was a thing never to be forgotten.&nbsp; For an instant, among
+the Hebrides and just about sundown, I have seen something like it on
+the sea itself.&nbsp; But the white was not so opaline; nor was there,
+what surprisingly increased the effect, that breathless, crystal stillness
+over all.&nbsp; Even in its gentlest moods the salt sea travails, moaning
+among the weeds or lisping on the sand; but that vast fog ocean lay
+in a trance of silence, nor did the sweet air of the morning tremble
+with a sound.<br>
+<br>
+As I continued to sit upon the dump, I began to observe that this sea
+was not so level as at first sight it appeared to be.&nbsp; Away in
+the extreme south, a little hill of fog arose against the sky above
+the general surface, and as it had already caught the sun, it shone
+on the horizon like the topsails of some giant ship.&nbsp; There were
+huge waves, stationary, as it seemed, like waves in a frozen sea; and
+yet, as I looked again, I was not sure but they were moving after all,
+with a slow and august advance.&nbsp; And while I was yet doubting,
+a promontory of the some four or five miles away, conspicuous by a bouquet
+of tall pines, was in a single instant overtaken and swallowed up.&nbsp;
+It reappeared in a little, with its pines, but this time as an islet,
+and only to be swallowed up once more and then for good.&nbsp; This
+set me looking nearer, and I saw that in every cove along the line of
+mountains the fog was being piled in higher and higher, as though by
+some wind that was inaudible to me.&nbsp; I could trace its progress,
+one pine tree first growing hazy and then disappearing after another;
+although sometimes there was none of this fore-running haze, but the
+whole opaque white ocean gave a start and swallowed a piece of mountain
+at a gulp.&nbsp; It was to flee these poisonous fogs that I had left
+the seaboard, and climbed so high among the mountains.&nbsp; And now,
+behold, here came the fog to besiege me in my chosen altitudes, and
+yet came so beautifully that my first thought was of welcome.<br>
+<br>
+The sun had now gotten much higher, and through all the gaps of the
+hills it cast long bars of gold across that white ocean.&nbsp; An eagle,
+or some other very great bird of the mountain, came wheeling over the
+nearer pine-tops, and hung, poised and something sideways, as if to
+look abroad on that unwonted desolation, spying, perhaps with terror,
+for the eyries of her comrades.&nbsp; Then, with a long cry, she disappeared
+again towards Lake County and the clearer air.&nbsp; At length it seemed
+to me as if the flood were beginning to subside.&nbsp; The old landmarks,
+by whose disappearance I had measured its advance, here a crag, there
+a brave pine tree, now began, in the inverse order, to make their reappearance
+into daylight.&nbsp; I judged all danger of the fog was over.&nbsp;
+This was not Noah&rsquo;s flood; it was but a morning spring, and would
+now drift out seaward whence it came.&nbsp; So, mightily relieved, and
+a good deal exhilarated by the sight, I went into the house to light
+the fire.<br>
+<br>
+I suppose it was nearly seven when I once more mounted the platform
+to look abroad.&nbsp; The fog ocean had swelled up enormously since
+last I saw it; and a few hundred feet below me, in the deep gap where
+the Toll House stands and the road runs through into Lake County, it
+had already topped the slope, and was pouring over and down the other
+side like driving smoke.&nbsp; The wind had climbed along with it; and
+though I was still in calm air, I could see the trees tossing below
+me, and their long, strident sighing mounted to me where I stood.<br>
+<br>
+Half an hour later, the fog had surmounted all the ridge on the opposite
+side of the gap, though a shoulder of the mountain still warded it out
+of our canyon.&nbsp; Napa valley and its bounding hills were now utterly
+blotted out.&nbsp; The fog, sunny white in the sunshine, was pouring
+over into Lake County in a huge, ragged cataract, tossing treetops appearing
+and disappearing in the spray.&nbsp; The air struck with a little chill,
+and set me coughing.&nbsp; It smelt strong of the fog, like the smell
+of a washing-house, but with a shrewd tang of the sea salt.<br>
+<br>
+Had it not been for two things - the sheltering spur which answered
+as a dyke, and the great valley on the other side which rapidly engulfed
+whatever mounted - our own little platform in the canyon must have been
+already buried a hundred feet in salt and poisonous air.&nbsp; As it
+was, the interest of the scene entirely occupied our minds.&nbsp; We
+were set just out of the wind, and but just above the fog; we could
+listen to the voice of the one as to music on the stage; we could plunge
+our eyes down into the other, as into some flowing stream from over
+the parapet of a bridge; thus we looked on upon a strange, impetuous,
+silent, shifting exhibition of the powers of nature, and saw the familiar
+landscape changing from moment to moment like figures in a dream.<br>
+<br>
+The imagination loves to trifle with what is not.&nbsp; Had this been
+indeed the deluge, I should have felt more strongly, but the emotion
+would have been similar in kind.&nbsp; I played with the idea, as the
+child flees in delighted terror from the creations of his fancy.&nbsp;
+The look of the thing helped me.&nbsp; And when at last I began to flee
+up the mountain, it was indeed partly to escape from the raw air that
+kept me coughing, but it was also part in play.<br>
+<br>
+As I ascended the mountain-side, I came once more to overlook the upper
+surface of the fog; but it wore a different appearance from what I had
+beheld at daybreak.&nbsp; For, first, the sun now fell on it from high
+overhead, and its surface shone and undulated like a great nor&rsquo;land
+moor country, sheeted with untrodden morning snow.&nbsp; And next the
+new level must have been a thousand or fifteen hundred feet higher than
+the old, so that only five or six points of all the broken country below
+me, still stood out.&nbsp; Napa valley was now one with Sonoma on the
+west.&nbsp; On the hither side, only a thin scattered fringe of bluffs
+was unsubmerged; and through all the gaps the fog was pouring over,
+like an ocean, into the blue clear sunny country on the east.&nbsp;
+There it was soon lost; for it fell instantly into the bottom of the
+valleys, following the water-shed; and the hilltops in that quarter
+were still clear cut upon the eastern sky.<br>
+<br>
+Through the Toll House gap and over the near ridges on the other side,
+the deluge was immense.&nbsp; A spray of thin vapour was thrown high
+above it, rising and falling, and blown into fantastic shapes.&nbsp;
+The speed of its course was like a mountain torrent.&nbsp; Here and
+there a few treetops were discovered and then whelmed again; and for
+one second, the bough of a dead pine beckoned out of the spray like
+the arm of a drowning man.&nbsp; But still the imagination was dissatisfied,
+still the ear waited for something more.&nbsp; Had this indeed been
+water (as it seemed so, to the eye), with what a plunge of reverberating
+thunder would it have rolled upon its course, disembowelling mountains
+and deracinating pines!&nbsp; And yet water it was, and sea-water at
+that - true Pacific billows, only somewhat rarefied, rolling in mid
+air among the hilltops.<br>
+<br>
+I climbed still higher, among the red rattling gravel and dwarf underwood
+of Mount Saint Helena, until I could look right down upon Silverado,
+and admire the favoured nook in which it lay.&nbsp; The sunny plain
+of fog was several hundred feet higher; behind the protecting spur a
+gigantic accumulation of cottony vapour threatened, with every second,
+to blow over and submerge our homestead; but the vortex setting past
+the Toll House was too strong; and there lay our little platform, in
+the arms of the deluge, but still enjoying its unbroken sunshine.&nbsp;
+About eleven, however, thin spray came flying over the friendly buttress,
+and I began to think the fog had hunted out its Jonah after all.&nbsp;
+But it was the last effort.&nbsp; The wind veered while we were at dinner,
+and began to blow squally from the mountain summit; and by half-past
+one, all that world of sea-fogs was utterly routed and flying here and
+there into the south in little rags of cloud.&nbsp; And instead of a
+lone sea-beach, we found ourselves once more inhabiting a high mountainside,
+with the clear green country far below us, and the light smoke of Calistoga
+blowing in the air.<br>
+<br>
+This was the great Russian campaign for that season.&nbsp; Now and then,
+in the early morning, a little white lakelet of fog would be seen far
+down in Napa Valley; but the heights were not again assailed, nor was
+the surrounding world again shut off from Silverado.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+THE TOLL HOUSE<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+The Toll House, standing alone by the wayside under nodding pines, with
+its streamlet and water-tank; its backwoods, toll-bar, and well trodden
+croquet ground; the ostler standing by the stable door, chewing a straw;
+a glimpse of the Chinese cook in the back parts; and Mr. Hoddy in the
+bar, gravely alert and serviceable, and equally anxious to lend or borrow
+books; - dozed all day in the dusty sunshine, more than half asleep.&nbsp;
+There were no neighbours, except the Hansons up the hill.&nbsp; The
+traffic on the road was infinitesimal; only, at rare intervals, a couple
+in a waggon, or a dusty farmer on a springboard, toiling over &ldquo;the
+grade&rdquo; to that metropolitan hamlet, Calistoga; and, at the fixed
+hours, the passage of the stages.<br>
+<br>
+The nearest building was the school-house, down the road; and the school-ma&rsquo;am
+boarded at the Toll House, walking thence in the morning to the little
+brown shanty, where she taught the young ones of the district, and returning
+thither pretty weary in the afternoon.&nbsp; She had chosen this outlying
+situation, I understood, for her health.&nbsp; Mr. Corwin was consumptive;
+so was Rufe; so was Mr. Jennings, the engineer.&nbsp; In short, the
+place was a kind of small Davos: consumptive folk consorting on a hilltop
+in the most unbroken idleness.&nbsp; Jennings never did anything that
+I could see, except now and then to fish, and generally to sit about
+in the bar and the verandah, waiting for something to happen.&nbsp;
+Corwin and Rufe did as little as possible; and if the school-ma&rsquo;am,
+poor lady, had to work pretty hard all morning, she subsided when it
+was over into much the same dazed beatitude as all the rest.<br>
+<br>
+Her special corner was the parlour - a very genteel room, with Bible
+prints, a crayon portrait of Mrs. Corwin in the height of fashion, a
+few years ago, another of her son (Mr. Corwin was not represented),
+a mirror, and a selection of dried grasses.&nbsp; A large book was laid
+religiously on the table - &ldquo;From Palace to Hovel,&rdquo; I believe,
+its name - full of the raciest experiences in England.&nbsp; The author
+had mingled freely with all classes, the nobility particularly meeting
+him with open arms; and I must say that traveller had ill requited his
+reception.&nbsp; His book, in short, was a capital instance of the Penny
+Messalina school of literature; and there arose from it, in that cool
+parlour, in that silent, wayside, mountain inn, a rank atmosphere of
+gold and blood and &ldquo;Jenkins,&rdquo; and the &ldquo;Mysteries of
+London,&rdquo; and sickening, inverted snobbery, fit to knock you down.&nbsp;
+The mention of this book reminds me of another and far racier picture
+of our island life.&nbsp; The latter parts of <i>Rocambole</i> are surely
+too sparingly consulted in the country which they celebrate.&nbsp; No
+man&rsquo;s education can be said to be complete, nor can he pronounce
+the world yet emptied of enjoyment, till he has made the acquaintance
+of &ldquo;the Reverend Patterson, director of the Evangelical Society.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+To follow the evolutions of that reverend gentleman, who goes through
+scenes in which even Mr. Duffield would hesitate to place a bishop,
+is to rise to new ideas.&nbsp; But, alas! there was no Patterson about
+the Toll House.&nbsp; Only, alongside of &ldquo;From Palace to Hovel,&rdquo;
+a sixpenny &ldquo;Ouida&rdquo; figured.&nbsp; So literature, you see,
+was not unrepresented.<br>
+<br>
+The school-ma&rsquo;am had friends to stay with her, other school-ma&rsquo;ams
+enjoying their holidays, quite a bevy of damsels.&nbsp; They seemed
+never to go out, or not beyond the verandah, but sat close in the little
+parlour, quietly talking or listening to the wind among the trees.&nbsp;
+Sleep dwelt in the Toll House, like a fixture: summer sleep, shallow,
+soft, and dreamless.&nbsp; A cuckoo-clock, a great rarity in such a
+place, hooted at intervals about the echoing house; and Mr. Jenning
+would open his eyes for a moment in the bar, and turn the leaf of a
+newspaper, and the resting school-ma&rsquo;ams in the parlour would
+be recalled to the consciousness of their inaction.&nbsp; Busy Mrs.
+Corwin and her busy Chinaman might be heard indeed, in the penetralia,
+pounding dough or rattling dishes; or perhaps Rufe had called up some
+of the sleepers for a game of croquet, and the hollow strokes of the
+mallet sounded far away among the woods: but with these exceptions,
+it was sleep and sunshine and dust, and the wind in the pine trees,
+all day long.<br>
+<br>
+A little before stage time, that castle of indolence awoke.&nbsp; The
+ostler threw his straw away and set to his preparations.&nbsp; Mr. Jennings
+rubbed his eyes; happy Mr. Jennings, the something he had been waiting
+for all day about to happen at last!&nbsp; The boarders gathered in
+the verandah, silently giving ear, and gazing down the road with shaded
+eyes.&nbsp; And as yet there was no sign for the senses, not a sound,
+not a tremor of the mountain road.&nbsp; The birds, to whom the secret
+of the hooting cuckoo is unknown, must have set down to instinct this
+premonitory bustle.<br>
+<br>
+And then the first of the two stages swooped upon the Toll House with
+a roar and in a cloud of dust; and the shock had not yet time to subside,
+before the second was abreast of it.&nbsp; Huge concerns they were,
+well-horsed and loaded, the men in their shirt-sleeves, the women swathed
+in veils, the long whip cracking like a pistol; and as they charged
+upon that slumbering hostelry, each shepherding a dust storm, the dead
+place blossomed into life and talk and clatter.&nbsp; This the Toll
+House? - with its city throng, its jostling shoulders, its infinity
+of instant business in the bar?&nbsp; The mind would not receive it!&nbsp;
+The heartfelt bustle of that hour is hardly credible; the thrill of
+the great shower of letters from the post-bag, the childish hope and
+interest with which one gazed in all these strangers&rsquo; eyes.&nbsp;
+They paused there but to pass: the blue-clad China-boy, the San Francisco
+magnate, the mystery in the dust coat, the secret memoirs in tweed,
+the ogling, well-shod lady with her troop of girls; they did but flash
+and go; they were hull-down for us behind life&rsquo;s ocean, and we
+but hailed their topsails on the line.&nbsp; Yet, out of our great solitude
+of four and twenty mountain hours, we thrilled to their momentary presence
+gauged and divined them, loved and hated; and stood light-headed in
+that storm of human electricity.&nbsp; Yes, like Piccadilly circus,
+this is also one of life&rsquo;s crossing-places.&nbsp; Here I beheld
+one man, already famous or infamous, a centre of pistol-shots: and another
+who, if not yet known to rumour, will fill a column of the Sunday paper
+when he comes to hang - a burly, thick-set, powerful Chinese desperado,
+six long bristles upon either lip; redolent of whiskey, playing cards,
+and pistols; swaggering in the bar with the lowest assumption of the
+lowest European manners; rapping out blackguard English oaths in his
+canorous oriental voice; and combining in one person the depravities
+of two races and two civilizations.&nbsp; For all his lust and vigour,
+he seemed to look cold upon me from the valley of the shadow of the
+gallows.&nbsp; He imagined a vain thing; and while he drained his cock-tail,
+Holbein&rsquo;s death was at his elbow.&nbsp; Once, too, I fell in talk
+with another of these flitting strangers - like the rest, in his shirt-sleeves
+and all begrimed with dust - and the next minute we were discussing
+Paris and London, theatres and wines.&nbsp; To him, journeying from
+one human place to another, this was a trifle; but to me!&nbsp; No,
+Mr. Lillie, I have not forgotten it.<br>
+<br>
+And presently the city-tide was at its flood and began to ebb.&nbsp;
+Life runs in Piccadilly Circus, say, from nine to one, and then, there
+also, ebbs into the small hours of the echoing policeman and the lamps
+and stars.&nbsp; But the Toll House is far up stream, and near its rural
+springs; the bubble of the tide but touches it.&nbsp; Before you had
+yet grasped your pleasure, the horses were put to, the loud whips volleyed,
+and the tide was gone.&nbsp; North and south had the two stages vanished,
+the towering dust subsided in the woods; but there was still an interval
+before the flush had fallen on your cheeks, before the ear became once
+more contented with the silence, or the seven sleepers of the Toll House
+dozed back to their accustomed corners.&nbsp; Yet a little, and the
+ostler would swing round the great barrier across the road; and in the
+golden evening, that dreamy inn begin to trim its lamps and spread the
+board for supper.<br>
+<br>
+As I recall the place - the green dell below; the spires of pine; the
+sun-warm, scented air; that gray, gabled inn, with its faint stirrings
+of life amid the slumber of the mountains - I slowly awake to a sense
+of admiration, gratitude, and almost love.&nbsp; A fine place, after
+all, for a wasted life to doze away in - the cuckoo clock hooting of
+its far home country; the croquet mallets, eloquent of English lawns;
+the stages daily bringing news of - the turbulent world away below there;
+and perhaps once in the summer, a salt fog pouring overhead with its
+tale of the Pacific.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+A STARRY DRIVE<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+In our rule at Silverado, there was a melancholy interregnum.&nbsp;
+The queen and the crown prince with one accord fell sick; and, as I
+was sick to begin with, our lone position on Mount Saint Helena was
+no longer tenable, and we had to hurry back to Calistoga and a cottage
+on the green.&nbsp; By that time we had begun to realize the difficulties
+of our position.&nbsp; We had found what an amount of labour it cost
+to support life in our red canyon; and it was the dearest desire of
+our hearts to get a China-boy to go along with us when we returned.&nbsp;
+We could have given him a whole house to himself, self-contained, as
+they say in the advertisements; and on the money question we were prepared
+to go far.&nbsp; Kong Sam Kee, the Calistoga washerman, was entrusted
+with the affair; and from day to day it languished on, with protestations
+on our part and mellifluous excuses on the part of Kong Sam Kee.<br>
+<br>
+At length, about half-past eight of our last evening, with the waggon
+ready harnessed to convey us up the grade, the washerman, with a somewhat
+sneering air, produced the boy.&nbsp; He was a handsome, gentlemanly
+lad, attired in rich dark blue, and shod with snowy white; but, alas!
+he had heard rumours of Silverado.&nbsp; He know it for a lone place
+on the mountain-side, with no friendly wash-house near by, where he
+might smoke a pipe of opium o&rsquo; nights with other China-boys, and
+lose his little earnings at the game of tan; and he first backed out
+for more money; and then, when that demand was satisfied, refused to
+come point-blank.&nbsp; He was wedded to his wash-houses; he had no
+taste for the rural life; and we must go to our mountain servantless.&nbsp;
+It must have been near half an hour before we reached that conclusion,
+standing in the midst of Calistoga high street under the stars, and
+the China-boy and Kong Sam Kee singing their pigeon English in the sweetest
+voices and with the most musical inflections.<br>
+<br>
+We were not, however, to return alone; for we brought with us Joe Strong,
+the painter, a most good-natured comrade and a capital hand at an omelette.&nbsp;
+I do not know in which capacity he was most valued - as a cook or a
+companion; and he did excellently well in both.<br>
+<br>
+The Kong Sam Kee negotiation had delayed us unduly; it must have been
+half-past nine before we left Calistoga, and night came fully ere we
+struck the bottom of the grade.&nbsp; I have never seen such a night.&nbsp;
+It seemed to throw calumny in the teeth of all the painters that ever
+dabbled in starlight.&nbsp; The sky itself was of a ruddy, powerful,
+nameless, changing colour, dark and glossy like a serpent&rsquo;s back.&nbsp;
+The stars, by innumerable millions, stuck boldly forth like lamps.&nbsp;
+The milky way was bright, like a moonlit cloud; half heaven seemed milky
+way.&nbsp; The greater luminaries shone each more clearly than a winter&rsquo;s
+moon.&nbsp; Their light was dyed in every sort of colour - red, like
+fire; blue, like steel; green, like the tracks of sunset; and so sharply
+did each stand forth in its own lustre that there was no appearance
+of that flat, star-spangled arch we know so well in pictures, but all
+the hollow of heaven was one chaos of contesting luminaries - a hurry-burly
+of stars.&nbsp; Against this the hills and rugged treetops stood out
+redly dark.<br>
+<br>
+As we continued to advance, the lesser lights and milky ways first grew
+pale, and then vanished; the countless hosts of heaven dwindled in number
+by successive millions; those that still shone had tempered their exceeding
+brightness and fallen back into their customary wistful distance; and
+the sky declined from its first bewildering splendour into the appearance
+of a common night.&nbsp; Slowly this change proceeded, and still there
+was no sign of any cause.&nbsp; Then a whiteness like mist was thrown
+over the spurs of the mountain.&nbsp; Yet a while, and, as we turned
+a corner, a great leap of silver light and net of forest shadows fell
+across the road and upon our wondering waggonful; and, swimming low
+among the trees, we beheld a strange, misshapen, waning moon, half-tilted
+on her back.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Where are ye when the moon appears?&rdquo; so the old poet sang,
+half-taunting, to the stars, bent upon a courtly purpose.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;As the sunlight round the dim earth&rsquo;s midnight tower of
+shadow pours,<br>
+Streaming past the dim, wide portals,<br>
+Viewless to the eyes of mortals,<br>
+Till it floods the moon&rsquo;s pale islet or the morning&rsquo;s golden
+shores.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+So sings Mr. Trowbridge, with a noble inspiration.&nbsp; And so had
+the sunlight flooded that pale islet of the moon, and her lit face put
+out, one after another, that galaxy of stars.&nbsp; The wonder of the
+drive was over; but, by some nice conjunction of clearness in the air
+and fit shadow in the valley where we travelled, we had seen for a little
+while that brave display of the midnight heavens.&nbsp; It was gone,
+but it had been; nor shall I ever again behold the stars with the same
+mind.&nbsp; He who has seen the sea commoved with a great hurricane,
+thinks of it very differently from him who has seen it only in a calm.&nbsp;
+And the difference between a calm and a hurricane is not greatly more
+striking than that between the ordinary face of night and the splendour
+that shone upon us in that drive.&nbsp; Two in our waggon knew night
+as she shines upon the tropics, but even that bore no comparison.&nbsp;
+The nameless colour of the sky, the hues of the star-fire, and the incredible
+projection of the stars themselves, starting from their orbits, so that
+the eye seemed to distinguish their positions in the hollow of space
+- these were things that we had never seen before and shall never see
+again.<br>
+<br>
+Meanwhile, in this altered night, we proceeded on our way among the
+scents and silence of the forest, reached the top of the grade, wound
+up by Hanson&rsquo;s, and came at last to a stand under the flying gargoyle
+of the chute.&nbsp; Sam, who had been lying back, fast asleep, with
+the moon on his face, got down, with the remark that it was pleasant
+&ldquo;to be home.&rdquo;&nbsp; The waggon turned and drove away, the
+noise gently dying in the woods, and we clambered up the rough path,
+Caliban&rsquo;s great feat of engineering, and came home to Silverado.<br>
+<br>
+The moon shone in at the eastern doors and windows, and over the lumber
+on the platform.&nbsp; The one tall pine beside. the ledge was steeped
+in silver.&nbsp; Away up the canyon, a wild cat welcomed us with three
+discordant squalls.&nbsp; But once we had lit a candle, and began to
+review our improvements, homely in either sense, and count our stores,
+it was wonderful what a feeling of possession and permanence grow up
+in the hearts of the lords of Silverado.&nbsp; A bed had still to be
+made up for Strong, and the morning&rsquo;s water to be fetched, with
+clinking pail; and as we set about these household duties, and showed
+off our wealth and conveniences before the stranger, and had a glass
+of wine, I think, in honour of our return, and trooped at length one
+after another up the flying bridge of plank, and lay down to sleep in
+our shattered, moon-pierced barrack, we were among the happiest sovereigns
+in the world, and certainly ruled over the most contented people.&nbsp;
+Yet, in our absence, the palace had been sacked.&nbsp; Wild cats, so
+the Hansons said, had broken in and carried off a side of bacon, a hatchet,
+and two knives.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+EPISODES IN THE STORY OF A MINE<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+No one could live at Silverado and not be curious about the story of
+the mine.&nbsp; We were surrounded by so many evidences of expense and
+toil, we lived so entirely in the wreck of that great enterprise, like
+mites in the ruins of a cheese, that the idea of the old din and bustle
+haunted our repose.&nbsp; Our own house, the forge, the dump, the chutes,
+the rails, the windlass, the mass of broken plant; the two tunnels,
+one far below in the green dell, the other on the platform where we
+kept our wine; the deep shaft, with the sun-glints and the water-drops;
+above all, the ledge, that great gaping slice out of the mountain shoulder,
+propped apart by wooden wedges, on whose immediate margin, high above
+our heads, the one tall pine precariously nodded - these stood for its
+greatness; while, the dog-hutch, boot-jacks, old boots, old tavern bills,
+and the very beds that we inherited from bygone miners, put in human
+touches and realized for us the story of the past.<br>
+<br>
+I have sat on an old sleeper, under the thick madronas near the forge,
+with just a look over the dump on the green world below, and seen the
+sun lying broad among the wreck, and heard the silence broken only by
+the tinkling water in the shaft, or a stir of the royal family about
+the battered palace, and my mind has gone back to the epoch of the Stanleys
+and the Chapmans, with a grand <i>tutti</i> of pick and drill, hammer
+and anvil, echoing about the canyon; the assayer hard at it in our dining-room;
+the carts below on the road, and their cargo of red mineral bounding
+and thundering down the iron chute.&nbsp; And now all gone - all fallen
+away into this sunny silence and desertion: a family of squatters dining
+in the assayer&rsquo;s office, making their beds in the big sleeping
+room erstwhile so crowded, keeping their wine in the tunnel that once
+rang with picks.<br>
+<br>
+But Silverado itself, although now fallen in its turn into decay, was
+once but a mushroom, and had succeeded to other mines and other flitting
+cities.&nbsp; Twenty years ago, away down the glen on the Lake County
+side there was a place, Jonestown by name, with two thousand inhabitants
+dwelling under canvas, and one roofed house for the sale of whiskey.&nbsp;
+Round on the western side of Mount Saint Helena, there was at the same
+date, a second large encampment, its name, if it ever had one, lost
+for me.&nbsp; Both of these have perished, leaving not a stick and scarce
+a memory behind them.&nbsp; Tide after tide of hopeful miners have thus
+flowed and ebbed about the mountain, coming and going, now by lone prospectors,
+now with a rush.&nbsp; Last, in order of time came Silverado, reared
+the big mill, in the valley, founded the town which is now represented,
+monumentally, by Hanson&rsquo;s, pierced all these slaps and shafts
+and tunnels, and in turn declined and died away.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Our noisy years seem moments in the wake<br>
+Of the eternal silence.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+As to the success of Silverado in its time of being, two reports were
+current.&nbsp; According to the first, six hundred thousand dollars
+were taken out of that great upright seam, that still hung open above
+us on crazy wedges.&nbsp; Then the ledge pinched out, and there followed,
+in quest of the remainder, a great drifting and tunnelling in all directions,
+and a great consequent effusion of dollars, until, all parties being
+sick of the expense, the mine was deserted, and the town decamped.&nbsp;
+According to the second version, told me with much secrecy of manner,
+the whole affair, mine, mill, and town, were parts of one majestic swindle.&nbsp;
+There had never come any silver out of any portion of the mine; there
+was no silver to come.&nbsp; At midnight trains of packhorses might
+have been observed winding by devious tracks about the shoulder of the
+mountain.&nbsp; They came from far away, from Amador or Placer, laden
+with silver in &ldquo;old cigar boxes.&rdquo;&nbsp; They discharged
+their load at Silverado, in the hour of sleep; and before the morning
+they were gone again with their mysterious drivers to their unknown
+source.&nbsp; In this way, twenty thousand pounds&rsquo; worth of silver
+was smuggled in under cover of night, in these old cigar boxes; mixed
+with Silverado mineral; carted down to the mill; crushed, amalgated,
+and refined, and despatched to the city as the proper product of the
+mine.&nbsp; Stock-jobbing, if it can cover such expenses, must be a
+profitable business in San Francisco.<br>
+<br>
+I give these two versions as I got them.&nbsp; But I place little reliance
+on either, my belief in history having been greatly shaken.&nbsp; For
+it chanced that I had come to dwell in Silverado at a critical hour;
+great events in its history were about to happen - did happen, as I
+am led to believe; nay, and it will be seen that I played a part in
+that revolution myself.&nbsp; And yet from first to last I never had
+a glimmer of an idea what was going on; and even now, after full reflection,
+profess myself at sea.&nbsp; That there was some obscure intrigue of
+the cigar-box order, and that I, in the character of a wooden puppet,
+set pen to paper in the interest of somebody, so much, and no more,
+is certain.<br>
+<br>
+Silverado, then under my immediate sway, belonged to one whom I will
+call a Mr. Ronalds.&nbsp; I only knew him through the extraordinarily
+distorting medium of local gossip, now as a momentous jobber; now as
+a dupe to point an adage; and again, and much more probably, as an ordinary
+Christian gentleman like you or me, who had opened a mine and worked
+it for a while with better and worse fortune.&nbsp; So, through a defective
+window-pane, you may see the passer-by shoot up into a hunchbacked giant
+or dwindle into a potbellied dwarf.<br>
+<br>
+To Ronalds, at least, the mine belonged; but the notice by which he
+held it would ran out upon the 30th of June - or rather, as I suppose,
+it had run out already, and the month of grace would expire upon that
+day, after which any American citizen might post a notice of his own,
+and make Silverado his.&nbsp; This, with a sort of quiet slyness, Rufe
+told me at an early period of our acquaintance.&nbsp; There was no silver,
+of course; the mine &ldquo;wasn&rsquo;t worth nothing, Mr. Stevens,&rdquo;
+but there was a deal of old iron and wood around, and to gain possession
+of this old wood and iron, and get a right to the water, Rufe proposed,
+if I had no objections, to &ldquo;jump the claim.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+Of course, I had no objection.&nbsp; But I was filled with wonder.&nbsp;
+If all he wanted was the wood and iron, what, in the name of fortune,
+was to prevent him taking them?&nbsp; &ldquo;His right there was none
+to dispute.&rdquo;&nbsp; He might lay hands on all to-morrow, as the
+wild cats had laid hands upon our knives and hatchet.&nbsp; Besides,
+was this mass of heavy mining plant worth transportation?&nbsp; If it
+was, why had not the rightful owners carted it away?&nbsp; If it was,
+would they not preserve their title to these movables, even after they
+had lost their title to the mine?&nbsp; And if it were not, what the
+better was Rufe?&nbsp; Nothing would grow at Silverado; there was even
+no wood to cut; beyond a sense of property, there was nothing to be
+gained.&nbsp; Lastly, was it at all credible that Ronalds would forget
+what Rufe remembered?&nbsp; The days of grace were not yet over: any
+fine morning he might appear, paper in hand, and enter for another year
+on his inheritance.&nbsp; However, it was none of my business; all seemed
+legal; Rufe or Ronalds, all was one to me.<br>
+<br>
+On the morning of the 27th, Mrs. Hanson appeared with the milk as usual,
+in her sun-bonnet.&nbsp; The time would be out on Tuesday, she reminded
+us, and bade me be in readiness to play my part, though I had no idea
+what it was to be.&nbsp; And suppose Ronalds came? we asked.&nbsp; She
+received the idea with derision, laughing aloud with all her fine teeth.&nbsp;
+He could not find the mine to save his life, it appeared, without Rufe
+to guide him.&nbsp; Last year, when he came, they heard him &ldquo;up
+and down the road a hollerin&rsquo; and a raisin&rsquo; Cain.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+And at last he had to come to the Hansons in despair, and bid Rufe,
+&ldquo;Jump into your pants and shoes, and show me where this old mine
+is, anyway!&rdquo;&nbsp; Seeing that Ronalds had laid out so much money
+in the spot, and that a beaten road led right up to the bottom of the
+clump, I thought this a remarkable example.&nbsp; The sense of locality
+must be singularly in abeyance in the case of Ronalds.<br>
+<br>
+That same evening, supper comfortably over, Joe Strong busy at work
+on a drawing of the dump and the opposite hills, we were all out on
+the platform together, sitting there, under the tented heavens, with
+the same sense of privacy as if we had been cabined in a parlour, when
+the sound of brisk footsteps came mounting up the path.&nbsp; We pricked
+our ears at this, for the tread seemed lighter and firmer than was usual
+with our country neighbours.&nbsp; And presently, sure enough, two town
+gentlemen, with cigars and kid gloves, came debauching past the house.&nbsp;
+They looked in that place like a blasphemy.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Good evening,&rdquo; they said.&nbsp; For none of us had stirred;
+we all sat stiff with wonder.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Good evening,&rdquo; I returned; and then, to put them at their
+ease, &ldquo;A stiff climb,&rdquo; I added.<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; replied the leader; &ldquo;but we have to thank you
+for this path.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+I did not like the man&rsquo;s tone.&nbsp; None of us liked it.&nbsp;
+He did not seem embarrassed by the meeting, but threw us his remarks
+like favours, and strode magisterially by us towards the shaft and tunnel.<br>
+<br>
+Presently we heard his voice raised to his companion.&nbsp; &ldquo;We
+drifted every sort of way, but couldn&rsquo;t strike the ledge.&rdquo;&nbsp;
+Then again: &ldquo;It pinched out here.&rdquo;&nbsp; And once more:
+&ldquo;Every minor that ever worked upon it says there&rsquo;s bound
+to be a ledge somewhere.&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+These were the snatches of his talk that reached us, and they had a
+damning significance.&nbsp; We, the lords of Silverado, had come face
+to face with our superior.&nbsp; It is the worst of all quaint and of
+all cheap ways of life that they bring us at last to the pinch of some
+humiliation.&nbsp; I liked well enough to be a squatter when there was
+none but Hanson by; before Ronalds, I will own, I somewhat quailed.&nbsp;
+I hastened to do him fealty, said I gathered he was the Squattee, and
+apologized.&nbsp; He threatened me with ejection, in a manner grimly
+pleasant - more pleasant to him, I fancy, than to me; and then he passed
+off into praises of the former state of Silverado.&nbsp; &ldquo;It was
+the busiest little mining town you ever saw:&rdquo; a population of
+between a thousand and fifteen hundred souls, the engine in full blast,
+the mill newly erected; nothing going but champagne, and hope the order
+of the day.&nbsp; Ninety thousand dollars came out; a hundred and forty
+thousand were put in, making a net loss of fifty thousand.&nbsp; The
+last days, I gathered, the days of John Stanley, were not so bright;
+the champagne had ceased to flow, the population was already moving
+elsewhere, and Silverado had begun to wither in the branch before it
+was cut at the root.&nbsp; The last shot that was fired knocked over
+the stove chimney, and made that hole in the roof of our barrack, through
+which the sun was wont to visit slug-a-beds towards afternoon.&nbsp;
+A noisy, last shot, to inaugurate the days of silence.<br>
+<br>
+Throughout this interview, my conscience was a good deal exercised;
+and I was moved to throw myself on my knees and own the intended treachery.&nbsp;
+But then I had Hanson to consider.&nbsp; I was in much the same position
+as Old Rowley, that royal humourist, whom &ldquo;the rogue had taken
+into his confidence.&rdquo;&nbsp; And again, here was Ronalds on the
+spot.&nbsp; He must know the day of the month as well as Hanson and
+I.&nbsp; If a broad hint were necessary, he had the broadest in the
+world.&nbsp; For a large board had been nailed by the crown prince on
+the very front of our house, between the door and window, painted in
+cinnabar - the pigment of the country - with doggrel rhymes and contumelious
+pictures, and announcing, in terms unnecessarily figurative, that the
+trick was already played, the claim already jumped, and Master Sam the
+legitimate successor of Mr. Ronalds.&nbsp; But no, nothing could save
+that man; <i>quem</i> <i>deus vult perdere, prius dementat</i>.&nbsp;
+As he came so he went, and left his rights depending.<br>
+<br>
+Late at night, by Silverado reckoning, and after we were all abed, Mrs.
+Hanson returned to give us the newest of her news.&nbsp; It was like
+a scene in a ship&rsquo;s steerage: all of us abed in our different
+tiers, the single candle struggling with the darkness, and this plump,
+handsome woman, seated on an upturned valise beside the bunks, talking
+and showing her fine teeth, and laughing till the rafters rang.&nbsp;
+Any ship, to be sure, with a hundredth part as many holes in it as our
+barrack, must long ago have gone to her last port.&nbsp; Up to that
+time I had always imagined Mrs. Hanson&rsquo;s loquacity to be mere
+incontinence, that she said what was uppermost for the pleasure of speaking,
+and laughed and laughed again as a kind of musical accompaniment.&nbsp;
+But I now found there was an art in it, I found it less communicative
+than silence itself.&nbsp; I wished to know why Ronalds had come; how
+he had found his way without Rufe; and why, being on the spot, he had
+not refreshed his title.&nbsp; She talked interminably on, but her replies
+were never answers.&nbsp; She fled under a cloud of words; and when
+I had made sure that she was purposely eluding me, I dropped the subject
+in my turn, and let her rattle where she would.<br>
+<br>
+She had come to tell us that, instead of waiting for Tuesday, the claim
+was to be jumped on the morrow.&nbsp; How?&nbsp; If the time were not
+out, it was impossible.&nbsp; Why?&nbsp; If Ronalds had come and gone,
+and done nothing, there was the less cause for hurry.&nbsp; But again
+I could reach no satisfaction.&nbsp; The claim was to be jumped next
+morning, that was all that she would condescend upon.<br>
+<br>
+And yet it was not jumped the next morning, nor yet the next, and a
+whole week had come and gone before we heard more of this exploit.&nbsp;
+That day week, however, a day of great heat, Hanson, with a little roll
+of paper in his hand, and the eternal pipe alight; Breedlove, his large,
+dull friend, to act, I suppose, as witness; Mrs. Hanson, in her Sunday
+best; and all the children, from the oldest to the youngest; - arrived
+in a procession, tailing one behind another up the path.&nbsp; Caliban
+was absent, but he had been chary of his friendly visits since the row;
+and with that exception, the whole family was gathered together as for
+a marriage or a christening.&nbsp; Strong was sitting at work, in the
+shade of the dwarf madronas near the forge; and they planted themselves
+about him in a circle, one on a stone, another on the waggon rails,
+a third on a piece of plank.&nbsp; Gradually the children stole away
+up the canyon to where there was another chute, somewhat smaller than
+the one across the dump; and down this chute, for the rest of the afternoon,
+they poured one avalanche of stones after another, waking the echoes
+of the glen.&nbsp; Meantime we elders sat together on the platform,
+Hanson and his friend smoking in silence like Indian sachems, Mrs. Hanson
+rattling on as usual with an adroit volubility, saying nothing, but
+keeping the party at their ease like a courtly hostess.<br>
+<br>
+Not a word occurred about the business of the day.&nbsp; Once, twice,
+and thrice I tried to slide the subject in, but was discouraged by the
+stoic apathy of Rufe, and beaten down before the pouring verbiage of
+his wife.&nbsp; There is nothing of the Indian brave about me, and I
+began to grill with impatience.&nbsp; At last, like a highway robber,
+I cornered Hanson, and bade him stand and deliver his business.&nbsp;
+Thereupon he gravely rose, as though to hint that this was not a proper
+place, nor the subject one suitable for squaws, and I, following his
+example, led him up the plank into our barrack.&nbsp; There he bestowed
+himself on a box, and unrolled his papers with fastidious deliberation.&nbsp;
+There were two sheets of note-paper, and an old mining notice, dated
+May 30th, 1879, part print, part manuscript, and the latter much obliterated
+by the rains.&nbsp; It was by this identical piece of paper that the
+mine had been held last year.&nbsp; For thirteen months it had endured
+the weather and the change of seasons on a cairn behind the shoulder
+of the canyon; and it was now my business, spreading it before me on
+the table, and sitting on a valise, to copy its terms, with some necessary
+changes, twice over on the two sheets of note-paper.&nbsp; One was then
+to be placed on the same cairn - a &ldquo;mound of rocks&rdquo; the
+notice put it; and the other to be lodged for registration.<br>
+<br>
+Rufe watched me, silently smoking, till I came to the place for the
+locator&rsquo;s name at the end of the first copy; and when I proposed
+that he should sign, I thought I saw a scare in his eye.&nbsp; &ldquo;I
+don&rsquo;t think that&rsquo;ll be necessary,&rdquo; he said slowly;
+&ldquo;just you write it down.&rdquo;&nbsp; Perhaps this mighty hunter,
+who was the most active member of the local school board, could not
+write.&nbsp; There would be nothing strange in that.&nbsp; The constable
+of Calistoga is, and has been for years, a bed-ridden man, and, if I
+remember rightly, blind.&nbsp; He had more need of the emoluments than
+another, it was explained; and it was easy for him to &ldquo;depytize,&rdquo;
+with a strong accent on the last.&nbsp; So friendly and so free are
+popular institutions.<br>
+<br>
+When I had done my scrivening, Hanson strolled out, and addressed Breedlove,
+&ldquo;Will you step up here a bit?&rdquo; and after they had disappeared
+a little while into the chaparral and madrona thicket, they came back
+again, minus a notice, and the deed was done.&nbsp; The claim was jumped;
+a tract of mountain-side, fifteen hundred feet long by six hundred wide,
+with all the earth&rsquo;s precious bowels, had passed from Ronalds
+to Hanson, and, in the passage, changed its name from the &ldquo;Mammoth&rdquo;
+to the &ldquo;Calistoga.&rdquo;&nbsp; I had tried to get Rufe to call
+it after his wife, after himself, and after Garfield, the Republican
+Presidential candidate of the hour - since then elected, and, alas!
+dead - but all was in vain.&nbsp; The claim had once been called the
+Calistoga before, and he seemed to feel safety in returning to that.<br>
+<br>
+And so the history of that mine became once more plunged in darkness,
+lit only by some monster pyrotechnical displays of gossip.&nbsp; And
+perhaps the most curious feature of the whole matter is this: that we
+should have dwelt in this quiet corner of the mountains, with not a
+dozen neighbours, and yet struggled all the while, like desperate swimmers,
+in this sea of falsities and contradictions.&nbsp; Wherever a man is,
+there will be a lie.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+TOILS AND PLEASURES<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+I must try to convey some notion of our life, of how the days passed
+and what pleasure we took in them, of what there was to do and how we
+set about doing it, in our mountain hermitage.&nbsp; The house, after
+we had repaired the worst of the damages, and filled in some of the
+doors and windows with white cotton cloth, became a healthy and a pleasant
+dwelling-place, always airy and dry, and haunted by the outdoor perfumes
+of the glen.&nbsp; Within, it had the look of habitation, the human
+look.&nbsp; You had only to go into the third room, which we did not
+use, and see its stones, its sifting earth, its tumbled litter; and
+then return to our lodging, with the beds made, the plates on the rack,
+the pail of bright water behind the door, the stove crackling in a corner,
+and perhaps the table roughly laid against a meal, - and man&rsquo;s
+order, the little clean spots that he creates to dwell in, were at once
+contrasted with the rich passivity of nature.&nbsp; And yet our house
+was everywhere so wrecked and shattered, the air came and went so freely,
+the sun found so many portholes, the golden outdoor glow shone in so
+many open chinks, that we enjoyed, at the same time, some of the comforts
+of a roof and much of the gaiety and brightness of al fresco life.&nbsp;
+A single shower of rain, to be sure, and we should have been drowned
+out like mice.&nbsp; But ours was a Californian summer, and an earthquake
+was a far likelier accident than a shower of rain.<br>
+<br>
+Trustful in this fine weather, we kept the house for kitchen and bedroom,
+and used the platform as our summer parlour.&nbsp; The sense of privacy,
+as I have said already, was complete.&nbsp; We could look over the clump
+on miles of forest and rough hilltop; our eyes commanded some of Napa
+Valley, where the train ran, and the little country townships sat so
+close together along the line of the rail.&nbsp; But here there was
+no man to intrude.&nbsp; None but the Hansons were our visitors.&nbsp;
+Even they came but at long intervals, or twice daily, at a stated hour,
+with milk.&nbsp; So our days, as they were never interrupted, drew out
+to the greater length; hour melted insensibly into hour; the household
+duties, though they were many, and some of them laborious, dwindled
+into mere islets of business in a sea of sunny day-time; and it appears
+to me, looking back, as though the far greater part of our life at Silverado
+had been passed, propped upon an elbow, or seated on a plank, listening
+to the silence that there is among the hills.<br>
+<br>
+My work, it is true, was over early in the morning.&nbsp; I rose before
+any one else, lit the stove, put on the water to boil, and strolled
+forth upon the platform to wait till it was ready.&nbsp; Silverado would
+then be still in shadow, the sun shining on the mountain higher up.&nbsp;
+A clean smell of trees, a smell of the earth at morning, hung in the
+air.&nbsp; Regularly, every day, there was a single bird, not singing,
+but awkwardly chirruping among the green madronas, and the sound was
+cheerful, natural, and stirring.&nbsp; It did not hold the attention,
+nor interrupt the thread of meditation, like a blackbird or a nightingale;
+it was mere woodland prattle, of which the mind was conscious like a
+perfume.&nbsp; The freshness of these morning seasons remained with
+me far on into the day.<br>
+<br>
+As soon as the kettle boiled, I made porridge and coffee; and that,
+beyond the literal drawing of water, and the preparation of kindling,
+which it would be hyperbolical to call the hewing of wood, ended my
+domestic duties for the day.&nbsp; Thenceforth my wife laboured single-handed
+in the palace, and I lay or wandered on the platform at my own sweet
+will.&nbsp; The little corner near the forge, where we found a refuge
+under the madronas from the unsparing early sun, is indeed connected
+in my mind with some nightmare encounters over Euclid, and the Latin
+Grammar.&nbsp; These were known as Sam&rsquo;s lessons.&nbsp; He was
+supposed to be the victim and the sufferer; but here there must have
+been some misconception, for whereas I generally retired to bed after
+one of these engagements, he was no sooner set free than he dashed up
+to the Chinaman&rsquo;s house, where he had installed a printing press,
+that great element of civilization, and the sound of his labours would
+be faintly audible about the canyon half the day.<br>
+<br>
+To walk at all was a laborious business; the foot sank and slid, the
+boots were cut to pieces, among sharp, uneven, rolling stones.&nbsp;
+When we crossed the platform in any direction, it was usual to lay a
+course, following as much as possible the line of waggon rails.&nbsp;
+Thus, if water were to be drawn, the water-carrier left the house along
+some tilting planks that we had laid down, and not laid down very well.&nbsp;
+These carried him to that great highroad, the railway; and the railway
+served him as far as to the head of the shaft.&nbsp; But from thence
+to the spring and back again he made the best of his unaided way, staggering
+among the stones, and wading in low growth of the calcanthus, where
+the rattlesnakes lay hissing at his passage.&nbsp; Yet I liked to draw
+water.&nbsp; It was pleasant to dip the gray metal pail into the clean,
+colourless, cool water; pleasant to carry it back, with the water ripping
+at the edge, and a broken sunbeam quivering in the midst.<br>
+<br>
+But the extreme roughness of the walking confined us in common practice
+to the platform, and indeed to those parts of it that were most easily
+accessible along the line of rails.&nbsp; The rails came straight forward
+from the shaft, here and there overgrown with little green bushes, but
+still entire, and still carrying a truck, which it was Sam&rsquo;s delight
+to trundle to and fro by the hour with various ladings.&nbsp; About
+midway down the platform, the railroad trended to the right, leaving
+our house and coasting along the far side within a few yards of the
+madronas and the forge, and not far of the latter, ended in a sort of
+platform on the edge of the dump.&nbsp; There, in old days, the trucks
+were tipped, and their load sent thundering down the chute.&nbsp; There,
+besides, was the only spot where we could approach the margin of the
+dump.&nbsp; Anywhere else, you took your life in your right hand when
+you came within a yard and a half to peer over.&nbsp; For at any moment
+the dump might begin to slide and carry you down and bury you below
+its ruins.&nbsp; Indeed, the neighbourhood of an old mine is a place
+beset with dangers.&nbsp; For as still as Silverado was, at any moment
+the report of rotten wood might tell us that the platform had fallen
+into the shaft; the dump might begin to pour into the road below; or
+a wedge slip in the great upright seam, and hundreds of tons of mountain
+bury the scene of our encampment.<br>
+<br>
+I have already compared the dump to a rampart, built certainly by some
+rude people, and for prehistoric wars.&nbsp; It was likewise a frontier.&nbsp;
+All below was green and woodland, the tall pines soaring one above another,
+each with a firm outline and full spread of bough.&nbsp; All above was
+arid, rocky, and bald.&nbsp; The great spout of broken mineral, that
+had dammed the canyon up, was a creature of man&rsquo;s handiwork, its
+material dug out with a pick and powder, and spread by the service of
+the tracks.&nbsp; But nature herself, in that upper district, seemed
+to have had an eye to nothing besides mining; and even the natural hill-side
+was all sliding gravel and precarious boulder.&nbsp; Close at the margin
+of the well leaves would decay to skeletons and mummies, which at length
+some stronger gust would carry clear of the canyon and scatter in the
+subjacent woods.&nbsp; Even moisture and decaying vegetable matter could
+not, with all nature&rsquo;s alchemy, concoct enough soil to nourish
+a few poor grasses.&nbsp; It is the same, they say, in the neighbourhood
+of all silver mines; the nature of that precious rock being stubborn
+with quartz and poisonous with cinnabar.&nbsp; Both were plenty in our
+Silverado.&nbsp; The stones sparkled white in the sunshine with quartz;
+they were all stained red with cinnabar.&nbsp; Here, doubtless, came
+the Indians of yore to paint their faces for the war-path; and cinnabar,
+if I remember rightly, was one of the few articles of Indian commerce.&nbsp;
+Now, Sam had it in his undisturbed possession, to pound down and slake,
+and paint his rude designs with.&nbsp; But to me it had always a fine
+flavour of poetry, compounded out of Indian story and Hawthornden&rsquo;s
+allusion:<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+&ldquo;Desire, alas! I desire a Zeuxis new,<br>
+From Indies borrowing gold, from Eastern skies<br>
+Most bright cinoper . . .&rdquo;<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+Yet this is but half the picture; our Silverado platform has another
+side to it.&nbsp; Though there was no soil, and scarce a blade of grass,
+yet out of these tumbled gravel-heaps and broken boulders, a flower
+garden bloomed as at home in a conservatory.&nbsp; Calcanthus crept,
+like a hardy weed, all over our rough parlour, choking the railway,
+and pushing forth its rusty, aromatic cones from between two blocks
+of shattered mineral.&nbsp; Azaleas made a big snow-bed just above the
+well.&nbsp; The shoulder of the hill waved white with Mediterranean
+heath.&nbsp; In the crannies of the ledge and about the spurs of the
+tall pine, a red flowering stone-plant hung in clusters.&nbsp; Even
+the low, thorny chaparral was thick with pea-like blossom.&nbsp; Close
+at the foot of our path nutmegs prospered, delightful to the sight and
+smell.&nbsp; At sunrise, and again late at night, the scent of the sweet
+bay trees filled the canyon, and the down-blowing night wind must have
+borne it hundreds of feet into the outer air.<br>
+<br>
+All this vegetation, to be sure, was stunted.&nbsp; The madrona was
+here no bigger than the manzanita; the bay was but a stripling shrub;
+the very pines, with four or five exceptions in all our upper canyon,
+were not so tall as myself, or but a little taller, and the most of
+them came lower than my waist.&nbsp; For a prosperous forest tree, we
+must look below, where the glen was crowded with green spires.&nbsp;
+But for flowers and ravishing perfume, we had none to envy: our heap
+of road-metal was thick with bloom, like a hawthorn in the front of
+June; our red, baking angle in the mountain, a laboratory of poignant
+scents.&nbsp; It was an endless wonder to my mind, as I dreamed about
+the platform, following the progress of the shadows, where the madrona
+with its leaves, the azalea and calcanthus with their blossoms, could
+find moisture to support such thick, wet, waxy growths, or the bay tree
+collect the ingredients of its perfume.&nbsp; But there they all grew
+together, healthy, happy, and happy-making, as though rooted in a fathom
+of black soil.<br>
+<br>
+Nor was it only vegetable life that prospered.&nbsp; We had, indeed,
+few birds, and none that had much of a voice or anything worthy to be
+called a song.&nbsp; My morning comrade had a thin chirp, unmusical
+and monotonous, but friendly and pleasant to hear.&nbsp; He had but
+one rival: a fellow with an ostentatious cry of near an octave descending,
+not one note of which properly followed another.&nbsp; This is the only
+bird I ever knew with a wrong ear; but there was something enthralling
+about his performance.&nbsp; You listened and listened, thinking each
+time he must surely get it right; but no, it was always wrong, and always
+wrong the same way.&nbsp; Yet he seemed proud of his song, delivered
+it with execution and a manner of his own, and was charming to his mate.&nbsp;
+A very incorrect, incessant human whistler had thus a chance of knowing
+how his own music pleased the world.&nbsp; Two great birds - eagles,
+we thought - dwelt at the top of the canyon, among the crags that were
+printed on the sky.&nbsp; Now and again, but very rarely, they wheeled
+high over our heads in silence, or with a distant, dying scream; and
+then, with a fresh impulse, winged fleetly forward, dipped over a hilltop,
+and were gone.&nbsp; They seemed solemn and ancient things, sailing
+the blue air: perhaps co-oeval with the mountain where they haunted,
+perhaps emigrants from Rome, where the glad legions may have shouted
+to behold them on the morn of battle.<br>
+<br>
+But if birds were rare, the place abounded with rattlesnakes - the rattlesnake&rsquo;s
+nest, it might have been named.&nbsp; Wherever we brushed among the
+bushes, our passage woke their angry buzz.&nbsp; One dwelt habitually
+in the wood-pile, and sometimes, when we came for firewood, thrust up
+his small head between two logs, and hissed at the intrusion.&nbsp;
+The rattle has a legendary credit; it is said to be awe-inspiring, and,
+once heard, to stamp itself for ever in the memory.&nbsp; But the sound
+is not at all alarming; the hum of many insects, and the buzz of the
+wasp convince the ear of danger quite as readily.&nbsp; As a matter
+of fact, we lived for weeks in Silverado, coming and going, with rattles
+sprung on every side, and it never occurred to us to be afraid.&nbsp;
+I used to take sun-baths and do calisthenics in a certain pleasant nook
+among azalea and calcanthus, the rattles whizzing on every side like
+spinning-wheels, and the combined hiss or buzz rising louder and angrier
+at any sudden movement; but I was never in the least impressed, nor
+ever attacked.&nbsp; It was only towards the end of our stay, that a
+man down at Calistoga, who was expatiating on the terrifying nature
+of the sound, gave me at last a very good imitation; and it burst on
+me at once that we dwelt in the very metropolis of deadly snakes, and
+that the rattle was simply the commonest noise in Silverado.&nbsp; Immediately
+on our return, we attacked the Hansons on the subject.&nbsp; They had
+formerly assured us that our canyon was favoured, like Ireland, with
+an entire immunity from poisonous reptiles; but, with the perfect inconsequence
+of the natural man, they were no sooner found out than they went off
+at score in the contrary direction, and we were told that in no part
+of the world did rattlesnakes attain to such a monstrous bigness as
+among the warm, flower-dotted rocks of Silverado.&nbsp; This is a contribution
+rather to the natural history of the Hansons, than to that of snakes.<br>
+<br>
+One person, however, better served by his instinct, had known the rattle
+from the first; and that was Chuchu, the dog.&nbsp; No rational creature
+has ever led an existence more poisoned by terror than that dog&rsquo;s
+at Silverado.&nbsp; Every whiz of the rattle made him bound.&nbsp; His
+eyes rolled; he trembled; he would be often wet with sweat.&nbsp; One
+of our great mysteries was his terror of the mountain.&nbsp; A little
+away above our nook, the azaleas and almost all the vegetation ceased.&nbsp;
+Dwarf pines not big enough to be Christmas trees, grew thinly among
+loose stone and gravel scaurs.&nbsp; Here and there a big boulder sat
+quiescent on a knoll, having paused there till the next rain in his
+long slide down the mountain.&nbsp; There was here no ambuscade for
+the snakes, you could see clearly where you trod; and yet the higher
+I went, the more abject and appealing became Chuchu&rsquo;s terror.&nbsp;
+He was an excellent master of that composite language in which dogs
+communicate with men, and he would assure me, on his honour, that there
+was some peril on the mountain; appeal to me, by all that I held holy,
+to turn back; and at length, finding all was in vain, and that I still
+persisted, ignorantly foolhardy, he would suddenly whip round and make
+a bee-line down the slope for Silverado, the gravel showering after
+him.&nbsp; What was he afraid of?&nbsp; There were admittedly brown
+bears and California lions on the mountain; and a grizzly visited Rufe&rsquo;s
+poultry yard not long before, to the unspeakable alarm of Caliban, who
+dashed out to chastise the intruder, and found himself, by moonlight,
+face to face with such a tartar.&nbsp; Something at least there must
+have been: some hairy, dangerous brute lodged permanently among the
+rocks a little to the north-west of Silverado, spending his summer thereabout,
+with wife and family.<br>
+<br>
+And there was, or there had been, another animal.&nbsp; Once, under
+the broad daylight, on that open stony hillside, where the baby pines
+were growing, scarcely tall enough to be a badge for a MacGregor&rsquo;s
+bonnet, I came suddenly upon his innocent body, lying mummified by the
+dry air and sun: a pigmy kangaroo.&nbsp; I am ingloriously ignorant
+of these subjects; had never heard of such a beast; thought myself face
+to face with some incomparable sport of nature; and began to cherish
+hopes of immortality in science.&nbsp; Rarely have I been conscious
+of a stranger thrill than when I raised that singular creature from
+the stones, dry as a board, his innocent heart long quiet, and all warm
+with sunshine.&nbsp; His long hind legs were stiff, his tiny forepaws
+clutched upon his breast, as if to leap; his poor life cut short upon
+that mountain by some unknown accident.&nbsp; But the kangaroo rat,
+it proved, was no such unknown animal; and my discovery was nothing.<br>
+<br>
+Crickets were not wanting.&nbsp; I thought I could make out exactly
+four of them, each with a corner of his own, who used to make night
+musical at Silverado.&nbsp; In the matter of voice, they far excelled
+the birds, and their ringing whistle sounded from rock to rock, calling
+and replying the same thing, as in a meaningless opera.&nbsp; Thus,
+children in full health and spirits shout together, to the dismay of
+neighbours; and their idle, happy, deafening vociferations rise and
+fall, like the song of the crickets.&nbsp; I used to sit at night on
+the platform, and wonder why these creatures were so happy; and what
+was wrong with man that he also did not wind up his days with an hour
+or two of shouting; but I suspect that all long-lived animals are solemn.&nbsp;
+The dogs alone are hardly used by nature; and it seems a manifest injustice
+for poor Chuchu to die in his teens, after a life so shadowed and troubled,
+continually shaken with alarm, and the tear of elegant sentiment permanently
+in his eye.<br>
+<br>
+There was another neighbour of ours at Silverado, small but very active,
+a destructive fellow.&nbsp; This was a black, ugly fly - a bore, the
+Hansons called him - who lived by hundreds in the boarding of our house.&nbsp;
+He entered by a round hole, more neatly pierced than a man could do
+it with a gimlet, and he seems to have spent his life in cutting out
+the interior of the plank, but whether as a dwelling or a store-house,
+I could never find.&nbsp; When I used to lie in bed in the morning for
+a rest - we had no easy-chairs in Silverado - I would hear, hour after
+hour, the sharp cutting sound of his labours, and from time to time
+a dainty shower of sawdust would fall upon the blankets.&nbsp; There
+lives no more industrious creature than a bore.<br>
+<br>
+And now that I have named to the reader all our animals and insects
+without exception - only I find I have forgotten the flies - he will
+be able to appreciate the singular privacy and silence of our days.&nbsp;
+It was not only man who was excluded: animals, the song of birds, the
+lowing of cattle, the bleating of sheep, clouds even, and the variations
+of the weather, were here also wanting; and as, day after day, the sky
+was one dome of blue, and the pines below us stood motionless in the
+still air, so the hours themselves were marked out from each other only
+by the series of our own affairs, and the sun&rsquo;s great period as
+he ranged westward through the heavens.&nbsp; The two birds cackled
+a while in the early morning; all day the water tinkled in the shaft,
+the bores ground sawdust in the planking of our crazy palace - infinitesimal
+sounds; and it was only with the return of night that any change would
+fall on our surroundings, or the four crickets begin to flute together
+in the dark.<br>
+<br>
+Indeed, it would be hard to exaggerate the pleasure that we took in
+the approach of evening.&nbsp; Our day was not very long, but it was
+very tiring.&nbsp; To trip along unsteady planks or wade among shifting
+stones, to go to and fro for water, to clamber down the glen to the
+Toll House after meat and letters, to cook, to make fires and beds,
+were all exhausting to the body.&nbsp; Life out of doors, besides, under
+the fierce eye of day, draws largely on the animal spirits.&nbsp; There
+are certain hours in the afternoon when a man, unless he is in strong
+health or enjoys a vacant mind, would rather creep into a cool corner
+of a house and sit upon the chairs of civilization.&nbsp; About that
+time, the sharp stones, the planks, the upturned boxes of Silverado,
+began to grow irksome to my body; I set out on that hopeless, never-ending
+quest for a more comfortable posture; I would be fevered and weary of
+the staring sun; and just then he would begin courteously to withdraw
+his countenance, the shadows lengthened, the aromatic airs awoke, and
+an indescribable but happy change announced the coming of the night.<br>
+<br>
+The hours of evening, when we were once curtained in the friendly dark,
+sped lightly.&nbsp; Even as with the crickets, night brought to us a
+certain spirit of rejoicing.&nbsp; It was good to taste the air; good
+to mark the dawning of the stars, as they increased their glittering
+company; good, too, to gather stones, and send them crashing down the
+chute, a wave of light.&nbsp; It seemed, in some way, the reward and
+the fulfilment of the day.&nbsp; So it is when men dwell in the open
+air; it is one of the simple pleasures that we lose by living cribbed
+and covered in a house, that, though the coming of the day is still
+the most inspiriting, yet day&rsquo;s departure, also, and the return
+of night refresh, renew, and quiet us; and in the pastures of the dusk
+we stand, like cattle, exulting in the absence of the load.<br>
+<br>
+Our nights wore never cold, and they were always still, but for one
+remarkable exception.&nbsp; Regularly, about nine o&rsquo;clock, a warm
+wind sprang up, and blew for ten minutes, or maybe a quarter of an hour,
+right down the canyon, fanning it well out, airing it as a mother airs
+the night nursery before the children sleep.&nbsp; As far as I could
+judge, in the clear darkness of the night, this wind was purely local:
+perhaps dependant on the configuration of the glen.&nbsp; At least,
+it was very welcome to the hot and weary squatters; and if we were not
+abed already, the springing up of this lilliputian valley-wind would
+often be our signal to retire.<br>
+<br>
+I was the last to go to bed, as I was still the first to rise.&nbsp;
+Many a night I have strolled about the platform, taking a bath of darkness
+before I slept.&nbsp; The rest would be in bed, and even from the forge
+I could hear them talking together from bunk to bunk.&nbsp; A single
+candle in the neck of a pint bottle was their only illumination; and
+yet the old cracked house seemed literally bursting with the light.&nbsp;
+It shone keen as a knife through all the vertical chinks; it struck
+upward through the broken shingles; and through the eastern door and
+window, it fell in a great splash upon the thicket and the overhanging
+rock.&nbsp; You would have said a conflagration, or at the least a roaring
+forge; and behold, it was but a candle.&nbsp; Or perhaps it was yet
+more strange to see the procession moving bedwards round the corner
+of the house, and up the plank that brought us to the bedroom door;
+under the immense spread of the starry heavens, down in a crevice of
+the giant mountain these few human shapes, with their unshielded taper,
+made so disproportionate a figure in the eye and mind.&nbsp; But the
+more he is alone with nature, the greater man and his doings bulk in
+the consideration of his fellow-men.&nbsp; Miles and miles away upon
+the opposite hill-tops, if there were any hunter belated or any traveller
+who had lost his way, he must have stood, and watched and wondered,
+from the time the candle issued from the door of the assayer&rsquo;s
+office till it had mounted the plank and disappeared again into the
+miners&rsquo; dormitory.<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+<br>
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS ***<br>
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