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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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