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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Silverado Squatters, by Robert Louis Stevenson
+(#23 in our series by Robert Louis Stevenson)
+
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+Title: The Silverado Squatters
+
+Author: Robert Louis Stevenson
+
+Release Date: May, 1996  [EBook #516]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on March 12, 1996]
+[Most recently updated: August 27, 2002]
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+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS ***
+
+
+
+
+Transcribed from the 1906 Chatto & Windus edition by David Price,
+email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
+
+
+
+
+THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
+
+
+
+
+The scene of this little book is on a high mountain.  There are,
+indeed, many higher; there are many of a nobler outline.  It is no
+place of pilgrimage for the summary globe-trotter; but to one who
+lives upon its sides, Mount Saint Helena soon becomes a centre of
+interest.  It is the Mont Blanc of one section of the Californian
+Coast Range, none of its near neighbours rising to one-half its
+altitude.  It looks down on much green, intricate country.  It
+feeds in the spring-time many splashing brooks.  From its summit
+you must have an excellent lesson of geography:  seeing, to the
+south, San Francisco Bay, with Tamalpais on the one hand and Monte
+Diablo on the other; to the west and thirty miles away, the open
+ocean; eastward, across the corn-lands and thick tule swamps of
+Sacramento Valley, to where the Central Pacific railroad begins to
+climb the sides of the Sierras; and northward, for what I know, the
+white head of Shasta looking down on Oregon.  Three counties, Napa
+County, Lake County, and Sonoma County, march across its cliffy
+shoulders.  Its naked peak stands nearly four thousand five hundred
+feet above the sea; its sides are fringed with forest; and the
+soil, where it is bare, glows warm with cinnabar.
+
+Life in its shadow goes rustically forward.  Bucks, and bears, and
+rattle-snakes, and former mining operations, are the staple of
+men's talk.  Agriculture has only begun to mount above the valley.
+And though in a few years from now the whole district may be
+smiling with farms, passing trains shaking the mountain to the
+heart, many-windowed hotels lighting up the night like factories,
+and a prosperous city occupying the site of sleepy Calistoga; yet
+in the mean time, around the foot of that mountain the silence of
+nature reigns in a great measure unbroken, and the people of hill
+and valley go sauntering about their business as in the days before
+the flood.
+
+To reach Mount Saint Helena from San Francisco, the traveller has
+twice to cross the bay:  once by the busy Oakland Ferry, and again,
+after an hour or so of the railway, from Vallejo junction to
+Vallejo.  Thence he takes rail once more to mount the long green
+strath of Napa Valley.
+
+In all the contractions and expansions of that inland sea, the Bay
+of San Francisco, there can be few drearier scenes than the Vallejo
+Ferry.  Bald shores and a low, bald islet inclose the sea; through
+the narrows the tide bubbles, muddy like a river.  When we made the
+passage (bound, although yet we knew it not, for Silverado) the
+steamer jumped, and the black buoys were dancing in the jabble; the
+ocean breeze blew killing chill; and, although the upper sky was
+still unflecked with vapour, the sea fogs were pouring in from
+seaward, over the hilltops of Marin county, in one great,
+shapeless, silver cloud.
+
+South Vallejo is typical of many Californian towns.  It was a
+blunder; the site has proved untenable; and, although it is still
+such a young place by the scale of Europe, it has already begun to
+be deserted for its neighbour and namesake, North Vallejo.  A long
+pier, a number of drinking saloons, a hotel of a great size, marshy
+pools where the frogs keep up their croaking, and even at high noon
+the entire absence of any human face or voice--these are the marks
+of South Vallejo.  Yet there was a tall building beside the pier,
+labelled the Star Flour Mills; and sea-going, full-rigged ships lay
+close along shore, waiting for their cargo.  Soon these would be
+plunging round the Horn, soon the flour from the Star Flour Mills
+would be landed on the wharves of Liverpool.  For that, too, is one
+of England's outposts; thither, to this gaunt mill, across the
+Atlantic and Pacific deeps and round about the icy Horn, this crowd
+of great, three-masted, deep-sea ships come, bringing nothing, and
+return with bread.
+
+The Frisby House, for that was the name of the hotel, was a place
+of fallen fortunes, like the town.  It was now given up to
+labourers, and partly ruinous.  At dinner there was the ordinary
+display of what is called in the west a TWO-BIT HOUSE:  the
+tablecloth checked red and white, the plague of flies, the wire
+hencoops over the dishes, the great variety and invariable vileness
+of the food and the rough coatless men devoting it in silence.  In
+our bedroom, the stove would not burn, though it would smoke; and
+while one window would not open, the other would not shut.  There
+was a view on a bit of empty road, a few dark houses, a donkey
+wandering with its shadow on a slope, and a blink of sea, with a
+tall ship lying anchored in the moonlight.  All about that dreary
+inn frogs sang their ungainly chorus.
+
+Early the next morning we mounted the hill along a wooden footway,
+bridging one marish spot after another.  Here and there, as we
+ascended, we passed a house embowered in white roses.  More of the
+bay became apparent, and soon the blue peak of Tamalpais rose above
+the green level of the island opposite.  It told us we were still
+but a little way from the city of the Golden Gates, already, at
+that hour, beginning to awake among the sand-hills.  It called to
+us over the waters as with the voice of a bird.  Its stately head,
+blue as a sapphire on the paler azure of the sky, spoke to us of
+wider outlooks and the bright Pacific.  For Tamalpais stands
+sentry, like a lighthouse, over the Golden Gates, between the bay
+and the open ocean, and looks down indifferently on both.  Even as
+we saw and hailed it from Vallejo, seamen, far out at sea, were
+scanning it with shaded eyes; and, as if to answer to the thought,
+one of the great ships below began silently to clothe herself with
+white sails, homeward bound for England.
+
+For some way beyond Vallejo the railway led us through bald green
+pastures.  On the west the rough highlands of Marin shut off the
+ocean; in the midst, in long, straggling, gleaming arms, the bay
+died out among the grass; there were few trees and few enclosures;
+the sun shone wide over open uplands, the displumed hills stood
+clear against the sky.  But by-and-by these hills began to draw
+nearer on either hand, and first thicket and then wood began to
+clothe their sides; and soon we were away from all signs of the
+sea's neighbourhood, mounting an inland, irrigated valley.  A great
+variety of oaks stood, now severally, now in a becoming grove,
+among the fields and vineyards.  The towns were compact, in about
+equal proportions, of bright, new wooden houses and great and
+growing forest trees; and the chapel bell on the engine sounded
+most festally that sunny Sunday, as we drew up at one green town
+after another, with the townsfolk trooping in their Sunday's best
+to see the strangers, with the sun sparkling on the clean houses,
+and great domes of foliage humming overhead in the breeze.
+
+This pleasant Napa Valley is, at its north end, blockaded by our
+mountain.  There, at Calistoga, the railroad ceases, and the
+traveller who intends faring farther, to the Geysers or to the
+springs in Lake County, must cross the spurs of the mountain by
+stage.  Thus, Mount Saint Helena is not only a summit, but a
+frontier; and, up to the time of writing, it has stayed the
+progress of the iron horse.
+
+
+
+
+PART I--IN THE VALLEY
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I--CALISTOGA
+
+
+
+It is difficult for a European to imagine Calistoga, the whole
+place is so new, and of such an accidental pattern; the very name,
+I hear, was invented at a supper-party by the man who found the
+springs.
+
+The railroad and the highway come up the valley about parallel to
+one another.  The street of Calistoga joins the perpendicular to
+both--a wide street, with bright, clean, low houses, here and there
+a verandah over the sidewalk, here and there a horse-post, here and
+there lounging townsfolk.  Other streets are marked out, and most
+likely named; for these towns in the New World begin with a firm
+resolve to grow larger, Washington and Broadway, and then First and
+Second, and so forth, being boldly plotted out as soon as the
+community indulges in a plan.  But, in the meanwhile, all the life
+and most of the houses of Calistoga are concentrated upon that
+street between the railway station and the road.  I never heard it
+called by any name, but I will hazard a guess that it is either
+Washington or Broadway.  Here are the blacksmith's, the chemist's,
+the general merchant's, and Kong Sam Kee, the Chinese laundryman's;
+here, probably, is the office of the local paper (for the place has
+a paper--they all have papers); and here certainly is one of the
+hotels, Cheeseborough's, whence the daring Foss, a man dear to
+legend, starts his horses for the Geysers.
+
+It must be remembered that we are here in a land of stage-drivers
+and highwaymen:  a land, in that sense, like England a hundred
+years ago.  The highway robber--road-agent, he is quaintly called--
+is still busy in these parts.  The fame of Vasquez is still young.
+Only a few years go, the Lakeport stage was robbed a mile or two
+from Calistoga.  In 1879, the dentist of Mendocino City, fifty
+miles away upon the coast, suddenly threw off the garments of his
+trade, like Grindoff, in The Miller and his Men, and flamed forth
+in his second dress as a captain of banditti.  A great robbery was
+followed by a long chase, a chase of days if not of weeks, among
+the intricate hill-country; and the chase was followed by much
+desultory fighting, in which several--and the dentist, I believe,
+amongst the number--bit the dust.  The grass was springing for the
+first time, nourished upon their blood, when I arrived in
+Calistoga.  I am reminded of another highwayman of that same year.
+"He had been unwell," so ran his humorous defence, "and the doctor
+told him to take something, so he took the express-box."
+
+The cultus of the stage-coachman always flourishes highest where
+there are thieves on the road, and where the guard travels armed,
+and the stage is not only a link between country and city, and the
+vehicle of news, but has a faint warfaring aroma, like a man who
+should be brother to a soldier.  California boasts her famous
+stage-drivers, and among the famous Foss is not forgotten.  Along
+the unfenced, abominable mountain roads, he launches his team with
+small regard to human life or the doctrine of probabilities.
+Flinching travellers, who behold themselves coasting eternity at
+every corner, look with natural admiration at their driver's huge,
+impassive, fleshy countenance.  He has the very face for the driver
+in Sam Weller's anecdote, who upset the election party at the
+required point.  Wonderful tales are current of his readiness and
+skill.  One in particular, of how one of his horses fell at a
+ticklish passage of the road, and how Foss let slip the reins, and,
+driving over the fallen animal, arrived at the next stage with only
+three.  This I relate as I heard it, without guarantee.
+
+I only saw Foss once, though, strange as it may sound, I have twice
+talked with him.  He lives out of Calistoga, at a ranche called
+Fossville.  One evening, after he was long gone home, I dropped
+into Cheeseborough's, and was asked if I should like to speak with
+Mr. Foss.  Supposing that the interview was impossible, and that I
+was merely called upon to subscribe the general sentiment, I boldly
+answered "Yes."  Next moment, I had one instrument at my ear,
+another at my mouth and found myself, with nothing in the world to
+say, conversing with a man several miles off among desolate hills.
+Foss rapidly and somewhat plaintively brought the conversation to
+an end; and he returned to his night's grog at Fossville, while I
+strolled forth again on Calistoga high street.  But it was an odd
+thing that here, on what we are accustomed to consider the very
+skirts of civilization, I should have used the telephone for the
+first time in my civilized career.  So it goes in these young
+countries; telephones, and telegraphs, and newspapers, and
+advertisements running far ahead among the Indians and the grizzly
+bears.
+
+Alone, on the other side of the railway, stands the Springs Hotel,
+with its attendant cottages.  The floor of the valley is extremely
+level to the very roots of the hills; only here and there a
+hillock, crowned with pines, rises like the barrow of some
+chieftain famed in war; and right against one of these hillocks is
+the Springs Hotel--is or was; for since I was there the place has
+been destroyed by fire, and has risen again from its ashes.  A lawn
+runs about the house, and the lawn is in its turn surrounded by a
+system of little five-roomed cottages, each with a verandah and a
+weedy palm before the door.  Some of the cottages are let to
+residents, and these are wreathed in flowers.  The rest are
+occupied by ordinary visitors to the Hotel; and a very pleasant way
+this is, by which you have a little country cottage of your own,
+without domestic burthens, and by the day or week.
+
+The whole neighbourhood of Mount Saint Helena is full of sulphur
+and of boiling springs.  The Geysers are famous; they were the
+great health resort of the Indians before the coming of the whites.
+Lake County is dotted with spas; Hot Springs and White Sulphur
+Springs are the names of two stations on the Napa Valley railroad;
+and Calistoga itself seems to repose on a mere film above a
+boiling, subterranean lake.  At one end of the hotel enclosure are
+the springs from which it takes its name, hot enough to scald a
+child seriously while I was there.  At the other end, the tenant of
+a cottage sank a well, and there also the water came up boiling.
+It keeps this end of the valley as warm as a toast.  I have gone
+across to the hotel a little after five in the morning, when a sea
+fog from the Pacific was hanging thick and gray, and dark and dirty
+overhead, and found the thermometer had been up before me, and had
+already climbed among the nineties; and in the stress of the day it
+was sometimes too hot to move about.
+
+But in spite of this heat from above and below, doing one on both
+sides, Calistoga was a pleasant place to dwell in; beautifully
+green, for it was then that favoured moment in the Californian
+year, when the rains are over and the dusty summer has not yet set
+in; often visited by fresh airs, now from the mountain, now across
+Sonoma from the sea; very quiet, very idle, very silent but for the
+breezes and the cattle bells afield.  And there was something
+satisfactory in the sight of that great mountain that enclosed us
+to the north:  whether it stood, robed in sunshine, quaking to its
+topmost pinnacle with the heat and brightness of the day; or
+whether it set itself to weaving vapours, wisp after wisp growing,
+trembling, fleeting, and fading in the blue.
+
+The tangled, woody, and almost trackless foot-hills that enclose
+the valley, shutting it off from Sonoma on the west, and from Yolo
+on the east--rough as they were in outline, dug out by winter
+streams, crowned by cliffy bluffs and nodding pine trees--wore
+dwarfed into satellites by the bulk and bearing of Mount Saint
+Helena.  She over-towered them by two-thirds of her own stature.
+She excelled them by the boldness of her profile.  Her great bald
+summit, clear of trees and pasture, a cairn of quartz and cinnabar,
+rejected kinship with the dark and shaggy wilderness of lesser
+hill-tops.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II--THE PETRIFIED FOREST
+
+
+
+We drove off from the Springs Hotel about three in the afternoon.
+The sun warmed me to the heart.  A broad, cool wind streamed
+pauselessly down the valley, laden with perfume.  Up at the top
+stood Mount Saint Helena, a bulk of mountain, bare atop, with tree-
+fringed spurs, and radiating warmth.  Once we saw it framed in a
+grove of tall and exquisitely graceful white oaks, in line and
+colour a finished composition.  We passed a cow stretched by the
+roadside, her bell slowly beating time to the movement of her
+ruminating jaws, her big red face crawled over by half a dozen
+flies, a monument of content.
+
+A little farther, and we struck to the left up a mountain road, and
+for two hours threaded one valley after another, green, tangled,
+full of noble timber, giving us every now and again a sight of
+Mount Saint Helena and the blue hilly distance, and crossed by many
+streams, through which we splashed to the carriage-step.  To the
+right or the left, there was scarce any trace of man but the road
+we followed; I think we passed but one ranchero's house in the
+whole distance, and that was closed and smokeless.  But we had the
+society of these bright streams--dazzlingly clear, as is their
+wont, splashing from the wheels in diamonds, and striking a lively
+coolness through the sunshine.  And what with the innumerable
+variety of greens, the masses of foliage tossing in the breeze, the
+glimpses of distance, the descents into seemingly impenetrable
+thickets, the continual dodging of the road which made haste to
+plunge again into the covert, we had a fine sense of woods, and
+spring-time, and the open air.
+
+Our driver gave me a lecture by the way on Californian trees--a
+thing I was much in need of, having fallen among painters who know
+the name of nothing, and Mexicans who know the name of nothing in
+English.  He taught me the madrona, the manzanita, the buck-eye,
+the maple; he showed me the crested mountain quail; he showed me
+where some young redwoods were already spiring heavenwards from the
+ruins of the old; for in this district all had already perished:
+redwoods and redskins, the two noblest indigenous living things,
+alike condemned.
+
+At length, in a lonely dell, we came on a huge wooden gate with a
+sign upon it like an inn.  "The Petrified Forest.  Proprietor:  C.
+Evans," ran the legend.  Within, on a knoll of sward, was the house
+of the proprietor, and another smaller house hard by to serve as a
+museum, where photographs and petrifactions were retailed.  It was
+a pure little isle of touristry among these solitary hills.
+
+The proprietor was a brave old white-faced Swede.  He had wandered
+this way, Heaven knows how, and taken up his acres--I forget how
+many years ago--all alone, bent double with sciatica, and with six
+bits in his pocket and an axe upon his shoulder.  Long, useless
+years of seafaring had thus discharged him at the end, penniless
+and sick.  Without doubt he had tried his luck at the diggings, and
+got no good from that; without doubt he had loved the bottle, and
+lived the life of Jack ashore.  But at the end of these adventures,
+here he came; and, the place hitting his fancy, down he sat to make
+a new life of it, far from crimps and the salt sea.  And the very
+sight of his ranche had done him good.  It was "the handsomest spot
+in the Californy mountains."  "Isn't it handsome, now?" he said.
+Every penny he makes goes into that ranche to make it handsomer.
+Then the climate, with the sea-breeze every afternoon in the
+hottest summer weather, had gradually cured the sciatica; and his
+sister and niece were now domesticated with him for company--or,
+rather, the niece came only once in the two days, teaching music
+the meanwhile in the valley.  And then, for a last piece of luck,
+"the handsomest spot in the Californy mountains" had produced a
+petrified forest, which Mr. Evans now shows at the modest figure of
+half a dollar a head, or two-thirds of his capital when he first
+came there with an axe and a sciatica.
+
+This tardy favourite of fortune--hobbling a little, I think, as if
+in memory of the sciatica, but with not a trace that I can remember
+of the sea--thoroughly ruralized from head to foot, proceeded to
+escort us up the hill behind his house.
+
+"Who first found the forest?" asked my wife.
+
+"The first?  I was that man," said he.  "I was cleaning up the
+pasture for my beasts, when I found THIS"--kicking a great redwood
+seven feet in diameter, that lay there on its side, hollow heart,
+clinging lumps of bark, all changed into gray stone, with veins of
+quartz between what had been the layers of the wood.
+
+"Were you surprised?"
+
+"Surprised?  No!  What would I be surprised about?  What did I know
+about petrifactions--following the sea?  Petrifaction!  There was
+no such word in my language!  I knew about putrifaction, though!  I
+thought it was a stone; so would you, if you was cleaning up
+pasture."
+
+And now he had a theory of his own, which I did not quite grasp,
+except that the trees had not "grewed" there.  But he mentioned,
+with evident pride, that he differed from all the scientific people
+who had visited the spot; and he flung about such words as "tufa"
+and "scilica" with careless freedom.
+
+When I mentioned I was from Scotland, "My old country," he said;
+"my old country"--with a smiling look and a tone of real affection
+in his voice.  I was mightily surprised, for he was obviously
+Scandinavian, and begged him to explain.  It seemed he had learned
+his English and done nearly all his sailing in Scotch ships.  "Out
+of Glasgow," said he, "or Greenock; but that's all the same--they
+all hail from Glasgow." And he was so pleased with me for being a
+Scotsman, and his adopted compatriot, that he made me a present of
+a very beautiful piece of petrifaction--I believe the most
+beautiful and portable he had.
+
+Here was a man, at least, who was a Swede, a Scot, and an American,
+acknowledging some kind allegiance to three lands.  Mr. Wallace's
+Scoto-Circassian will not fail to come before the reader.  I have
+myself met and spoken with a Fifeshire German, whose combination of
+abominable accents struck me dumb.  But, indeed, I think we all
+belong to many countries.  And perhaps this habit of much travel,
+and the engendering of scattered friendships, may prepare the
+euthanasia of ancient nations.
+
+And the forest itself?  Well, on a tangled, briery hillside--for
+the pasture would bear a little further cleaning up, to my eyes--
+there lie scattered thickly various lengths of petrified trunk,
+such as the one already mentioned.  It is very curious, of course,
+and ancient enough, if that were all.  Doubtless, the heart of the
+geologist beats quicker at the sight; but, for my part, I was
+mightily unmoved.  Sight-seeing is the art of disappointment.
+
+
+"There's nothing under heaven so blue,
+That's fairly worth the travelling to."
+
+
+But, fortunately, Heaven rewards us with many agreeable prospects
+and adventures by the way; and sometimes, when we go out to see a
+petrified forest, prepares a far more delightful curiosity, in the
+form of Mr. Evans, whom may all prosperity attend throughout a long
+and green old age.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III--NAPA WINE
+
+
+
+I was interested in Californian wine.  Indeed, I am interested in
+all wines, and have been all my life, from the raisin wine that a
+schoolfellow kept secreted in his play-box up to my last discovery,
+those notable Valtellines, that once shone upon the board of
+Caesar.
+
+Some of us, kind old Pagans, watch with dread the shadows falling
+on the age:  how the unconquerable worm invades the sunny terraces
+of France, and Bordeaux is no more, and the Rhone a mere Arabia
+Petraea.  Chateau Neuf is dead, and I have never tasted it;
+Hermitage--a hermitage indeed from all life's sorrows--lies
+expiring by the river.  And in the place of these imperial elixirs,
+beautiful to every sense, gem-hued, flower-scented, dream-
+compellers:- behold upon the quays at Cette the chemicals arrayed;
+behold the analyst at Marseilles, raising hands in obsecration,
+attesting god Lyoeus, and the vats staved in, and the dishonest
+wines poured forth among the sea.  It is not Pan only; Bacchus,
+too, is dead.
+
+If wine is to withdraw its most poetic countenance, the sun of the
+white dinner-cloth, a deity to be invoked by two or three, all
+fervent, hushing their talk, degusting tenderly, and storing
+reminiscences--for a bottle of good wine, like a good act, shines
+ever in the retrospect--if wine is to desert us, go thy ways, old
+Jack!  Now we begin to have compunctions, and look back at the
+brave bottles squandered upon dinner-parties, where the guests
+drank grossly, discussing politics the while, and even the
+schoolboy "took his whack," like liquorice water.  And at the same
+time, we look timidly forward, with a spark of hope, to where the
+new lands, already weary of producing gold, begin to green with
+vineyards.  A nice point in human history falls to be decided by
+Californian and Australian wines.
+
+Wine in California is still in the experimental stage; and when you
+taste a vintage, grave economical questions are involved.  The
+beginning of vine-planting is like the beginning of mining for the
+precious metals:  the wine-grower also "Prospects." One corner of
+land after another is tried with one kind of grape after another.
+This is a failure; that is better; a third best.  So, bit by bit,
+they grope about for their Clos Vougeot and Lafite.  Those lodes
+and pockets of earth, more precious than the precious ores, that
+yield inimitable fragrance and soft fire; those virtuous Bonanzas,
+where the soil has sublimated under sun and stars to something
+finer, and the wine is bottled poetry:  these still lie
+undiscovered; chaparral conceals, thicket embowers them; the miner
+chips the rock and wanders farther, and the grizzly muses
+undisturbed.  But there they bide their hour, awaiting their
+Columbus; and nature nurses and prepares them.  The smack of
+Californian earth shall linger on the palate of your grandson.
+
+Meanwhile the wine is merely a good wine; the best that I have
+tasted better than a Beaujolais, and not unlike.  But the trade is
+poor; it lives from hand to mouth, putting its all into
+experiments, and forced to sell its vintages.  To find one properly
+matured, and bearing its own name, is to be fortune's favourite.
+
+Bearing its own name, I say, and dwell upon the innuendo.
+
+"You want to know why California wine is not drunk in the States?"
+a San Francisco wine merchant said to me, after he had shown me
+through his premises.  "Well, here's the reason."
+
+And opening a large cupboard, fitted with many little drawers, he
+proceeded to shower me all over with a great variety of gorgeously
+tinted labels, blue, red, or yellow, stamped with crown or coronet,
+and hailing from such a profusion of clos and chateaux, that a
+single department could scarce have furnished forth the names.  But
+it was strange that all looked unfamiliar.
+
+"Chateau X-?" said I.  "I never heard of that."
+
+"I dare say not," said he.  "I had been reading one of X-'s
+novels."
+
+They were all castles in Spain!  But that sure enough is the reason
+why California wine is not drunk in the States.
+
+Napa valley has been long a seat of the wine-growing industry.  It
+did not here begin, as it does too often, in the low valley lands
+along the river, but took at once to the rough foot-hills, where
+alone it can expect to prosper.  A basking inclination, and stones,
+to be a reservoir of the day's heat, seem necessary to the soil for
+wine; the grossness of the earth must be evaporated, its marrow
+daily melted and refined for ages; until at length these clods that
+break below our footing, and to the eye appear but common earth,
+are truly and to the perceiving mind, a masterpiece of nature.  The
+dust of Richebourg, which the wind carries away, what an apotheosis
+of the dust!  Not man himself can seem a stranger child of that
+brown, friable powder, than the blood and sun in that old flask
+behind the faggots.
+
+A Californian vineyard, one of man's outposts in the wilderness,
+has features of its own.  There is nothing here to remind you of
+the Rhine or Rhone, of the low cote d'or, or the infamous and
+scabby deserts of Champagne; but all is green, solitary, covert.
+We visited two of them, Mr. Schram's and Mr. M'Eckron's, sharing
+the same glen.
+
+Some way down the valley below Calistoga, we turned sharply to the
+south and plunged into the thick of the wood.  A rude trail rapidly
+mounting; a little stream tinkling by on the one hand, big enough
+perhaps after the rains, but already yielding up its life; overhead
+and on all sides a bower of green and tangled thicket, still
+fragrant and still flower-bespangled by the early season, where
+thimble-berry played the part of our English hawthorn, and the
+buck-eyes were putting forth their twisted horns of blossom:
+through all this, we struggled toughly upwards, canted to and fro
+by the roughness of the trail, and continually switched across the
+face by sprays of leaf or blossom.  The last is no great
+inconvenience at home; but here in California it is a matter of
+some moment.  For in all woods and by every wayside there prospers
+an abominable shrub or weed, called poison-oak, whose very
+neighbourhood is venomous to some, and whose actual touch is
+avoided by the most impervious.
+
+The two houses, with their vineyards, stood each in a green niche
+of its own in this steep and narrow forest dell.  Though they were
+so near, there was already a good difference in level; and Mr.
+M'Eckron's head must be a long way under the feet of Mr. Schram.
+No more had been cleared than was necessary for cultivation; close
+around each oasis ran the tangled wood; the glen enfolds them;
+there they lie basking in sun and silence, concealed from all but
+the clouds and the mountain birds.
+
+Mr. M'Eckron's is a bachelor establishment; a little bit of a
+wooden house, a small cellar hard by in the hillside, and a patch
+of vines planted and tended single-handed by himself.  He had but
+recently began; his vines were young, his business young also; but
+I thought he had the look of the man who succeeds.  He hailed from
+Greenock:  he remembered his father putting him inside Mons Meg,
+and that touched me home; and we exchanged a word or two of Scotch,
+which pleased me more than you would fancy.
+
+Mr. Schram's, on the other hand, is the oldest vineyard in the
+valley, eighteen years old, I think; yet he began a penniless
+barber, and even after he had broken ground up here with his black
+malvoisies, continued for long to tramp the valley with his razor.
+Now, his place is the picture of prosperity:  stuffed birds in the
+verandah, cellars far dug into the hillside, and resting on pillars
+like a bandit's cave:- all trimness, varnish, flowers, and
+sunshine, among the tangled wildwood.  Stout, smiling Mrs. Schram,
+who has been to Europe and apparently all about the States for
+pleasure, entertained Fanny in the verandah, while I was tasting
+wines in the cellar.  To Mr. Schram this was a solemn office; his
+serious gusto warmed my heart; prosperity had not yet wholly
+banished a certain neophite and girlish trepidation, and he
+followed every sip and read my face with proud anxiety.  I tasted
+all.  I tasted every variety and shade of Schramberger, red and
+white Schramberger, Burgundy Schramberger, Schramberger Hock,
+Schramberger Golden Chasselas, the latter with a notable bouquet,
+and I fear to think how many more.  Much of it goes to London--
+most, I think; and Mr. Schram has a great notion of the English
+taste.
+
+In this wild spot, I did not feel the sacredness of ancient
+cultivation.  It was still raw, it was no Marathon, and no
+Johannisberg; yet the stirring sunlight, and the growing vines, and
+the vats and bottles in the cavern, made a pleasant music for the
+mind.  Here, also, earth's cream was being skimmed and garnered;
+and the London customers can taste, such as it is, the tang of the
+earth in this green valley.  So local, so quintessential is a wine,
+that it seems the very birds in the verandah might communicate a
+flavour, and that romantic cellar influence the bottle next to be
+uncorked in Pimlico, and the smile of jolly Mr. Schram might mantle
+in the glass.
+
+But these are but experiments.  All things in this new land are
+moving farther on:  the wine-vats and the miner's blasting tools
+but picket for a night, like Bedouin pavillions; and to-morrow, to
+fresh woods!  This stir of change and these perpetual echoes of the
+moving footfall, haunt the land.  Men move eternally, still chasing
+Fortune; and, fortune found, still wander.  As we drove back to
+Calistoga, the road lay empty of mere passengers, but its green
+side was dotted with the camps of travelling families:  one
+cumbered with a great waggonful of household stuff, settlers going
+to occupy a ranche they had taken up in Mendocino, or perhaps
+Tehama County; another, a party in dust coats, men and women, whom
+we found camped in a grove on the roadside, all on pleasure bent,
+with a Chinaman to cook for them, and who waved their hands to us
+as we drove by.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV--THE SCOT ABROAD
+
+
+
+A few pages back, I wrote that a man belonged, in these days, to a
+variety of countries; but the old land is still the true love, the
+others are but pleasant infidelities.  Scotland is indefinable; it
+has no unity except upon the map.  Two languages, many dialects,
+innumerable forms of piety, and countless local patriotisms and
+prejudices, part us among ourselves more widely than the extreme
+east and west of that great continent of America.  When I am at
+home, I feel a man from Glasgow to be something like a rival, a man
+from Barra to be more than half a foreigner.  Yet let us meet in
+some far country, and, whether we hail from the braes of Manor or
+the braes of Mar, some ready-made affection joins us on the
+instant.  It is not race.  Look at us.  One is Norse, one Celtic,
+and another Saxon.  It is not community of tongue.  We have it not
+among ourselves; and we have it almost to perfection, with English,
+or Irish, or American.  It is no tie of faith, for we detest each
+other's errors.  And yet somewhere, deep down in the heart of each
+one of us, something yearns for the old land, and the old kindly
+people.
+
+Of all mysteries of the human heart, this is perhaps the most
+inscrutable.  There is no special loveliness in that gray country,
+with its rainy, sea-beat archipelago; its fields of dark mountains;
+its unsightly places, black with coal; its treeless, sour,
+unfriendly looking corn-lands; its quaint, gray, castled city,
+where the bells clash of a Sunday, and the wind squalls, and the
+salt showers fly and beat.  I do not even know if I desire to live
+there; but let me hear, in some far land, a kindred voice sing out,
+"Oh, why left I my hame?" and it seems at once as if no beauty
+under the kind heavens, and no society of the wise and good, can
+repay me for my absence from my country.  And though I think I
+would rather die elsewhere, yet in my heart of hearts I long to be
+buried among good Scots clods.  I will say it fairly, it grows on
+me with every year:  there are no stars so lovely as Edinburgh
+street-lamps.  When I forget thee, auld Reekie, may my right hand
+forget its cunning!
+
+The happiest lot on earth is to be born a Scotchman.  You must pay
+for it in many ways, as for all other advantages on earth.  You
+have to learn the paraphrases and the shorter catechism; you
+generally take to drink; your youth, as far as I can find out, is a
+time of louder war against society, of more outcry and tears and
+turmoil, than if you had been born, for instance, in England.  But
+somehow life is warmer and closer; the hearth burns more redly; the
+lights of home shine softer on the rainy street; the very names,
+endeared in verse and music, cling nearer round our hearts.  An
+Englishman may meet an Englishman to-morrow, upon Chimborazo, and
+neither of them care; but when the Scotch wine-grower told me of
+Mons Meg, it was like magic.
+
+
+"From the dim shieling on the misty island
+Mountains divide us, and a world of seas;
+Yet still our hearts are true, our hearts are Highland,
+And we, in dreams, behold the Hebrides."
+
+
+And, Highland and Lowland, all our hearts are Scotch.
+
+Only a few days after I had seen M'Eckron, a message reached me in
+my cottage.  It was a Scotchman who had come down a long way from
+the hills to market.  He had heard there was a countryman in
+Calistoga, and came round to the hotel to see him.  We said a few
+words to each other; we had not much to say--should never have seen
+each other had we stayed at home, separated alike in space and in
+society; and then we shook hands, and he went his way again to his
+ranche among the hills, and that was all.
+
+Another Scotchman there was, a resident, who for the more love of
+the common country, douce, serious, religious man, drove me all
+about the valley, and took as much interest in me as if I had been
+his son:  more, perhaps; for the son has faults too keenly felt,
+while the abstract countryman is perfect--like a whiff of peats.
+
+And there was yet another.  Upon him I came suddenly, as he was
+calmly entering my cottage, his mind quite evidently bent on
+plunder:  a man of about fifty, filthy, ragged, roguish, with a
+chimney-pot hat and a tail coat, and a pursing of his mouth that
+might have been envied by an elder of the kirk.  He had just such a
+face as I have seen a dozen times behind the plate.
+
+"Hullo, sir!" I cried.  "Where are you going?"
+
+He turned round without a quiver.
+
+"You're a Scotchman, sir?" he said gravely.  "So am I; I come from
+Aberdeen.  This is my card," presenting me with a piece of
+pasteboard which he had raked out of some gutter in the period of
+the rains.  "I was just examining this palm," he continued,
+indicating the misbegotten plant before our door, "which is the
+largest spAcimen I have yet observed in Califoarnia."
+
+There were four or five larger within sight.  But where was the use
+of argument?  He produced a tape-line, made me help him to measure
+the tree at the level of the ground, and entered the figures in a
+large and filthy pocket-book, all with the gravity of Solomon.  He
+then thanked me profusely, remarking that such little services were
+due between countrymen; shook hands with me, "for add lang syne,"
+as he said; and took himself solemnly away, radiating dirt and
+humbug as he went.
+
+A month or two after this encounter of mine, there came a Scot to
+Sacramento--perhaps from Aberdeen.  Anyway, there never was any one
+more Scotch in this wide world.  He could sing and dance, and
+drink, I presume; and he played the pipes with vigour and success.
+All the Scotch in Sacramento became infatuated with him, and spent
+their spare time and money, driving him about in an open cab,
+between drinks, while he blew himself scarlet at the pipes.  This
+is a very sad story.  After he had borrowed money from every one,
+he and his pipes suddenly disappeared from Sacramento, and when I
+last heard, the police were looking for him.
+
+I cannot say how this story amused me, when I felt myself so
+thoroughly ripe on both sides to be duped in the same way.
+
+It is at least a curious thing, to conclude, that the races which
+wander widest, Jews and Scotch, should be the most clannish in the
+world.  But perhaps these two are cause and effect:  "For ye were
+strangers in the land of Egypt."
+
+
+
+
+PART II--WITH THE CHILDREN OF ISRAEL
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.--TO INTRODUCE MR. KELMAR
+
+
+
+One thing in this new country very particularly strikes a stranger,
+and that is the number of antiquities.  Already there have been
+many cycles of population succeeding each other, and passing away
+and leaving behind them relics.  These, standing on into changed
+times, strike the imagination as forcibly as any pyramid or feudal
+tower.  The towns, like the vineyards, are experimentally founded:
+they grow great and prosper by passing occasions; and when the lode
+comes to an end, and the miners move elsewhere, the town remains
+behind them, like Palmyra in the desert.  I suppose there are, in
+no country in the world, so many deserted towns as here in
+California.
+
+The whole neighbourhood of Mount Saint Helena, now so quiet and
+sylvan, was once alive with mining camps and villages.  Here there
+would be two thousand souls under canvas; there one thousand or
+fifteen hundred ensconced, as if for ever, in a town of comfortable
+houses.  But the luck had failed, the mines petered out; and the
+army of miners had departed, and left this quarter of the world to
+the rattlesnakes and deer and grizzlies, and to the slower but
+steadier advance of husbandry.
+
+It was with an eye on one of these deserted places, Pine Flat, on
+the Geysers road, that we had come first to Calistoga.  There is
+something singularly enticing in the idea of going, rent-free, into
+a ready-made house.  And to the British merchant, sitting at home
+at ease, it may appear that, with such a roof over your head and a
+spring of clear water hard by, the whole problem of the squatter's
+existence would be solved.  Food, however, has yet to be
+considered, I will go as far as most people on tinned meats; some
+of the brightest moments of my life were passed over tinned mulli-
+gatawney in the cabin of a sixteen-ton schooner, storm-stayed in
+Portree Bay; but after suitable experiments, I pronounce
+authoritatively that man cannot live by tins alone.  Fresh meat
+must be had on an occasion.  It is true that the great Foss,
+driving by along the Geysers road, wooden-faced, but glorified with
+legend, might have been induced to bring us meat, but the great
+Foss could hardly bring us milk.  To take a cow would have involved
+taking a field of grass and a milkmaid; after which it would have
+been hardly worth while to pause, and we might have added to our
+colony a flock of sheep and an experienced butcher.
+
+It is really very disheartening how we depend on other people in
+this life.  "Mihi est propositum," as you may see by the motto, "id
+quod regibus;" and behold it cannot be carried out, unless I find a
+neighbour rolling in cattle.
+
+Now, my principal adviser in this matter was one whom I will call
+Kelmar.  That was not what he called himself, but as soon as I set
+eyes on him, I knew it was or ought to be his name; I am sure it
+will be his name among the angels.  Kelmar was the store-keeper, a
+Russian Jew, good-natured, in a very thriving way of business, and,
+on equal terms, one of the most serviceable of men.  He also had
+something of the expression of a Scotch country elder, who, by some
+peculiarity, should chance to be a Hebrew.  He had a projecting
+under lip, with which he continually smiled, or rather smirked.
+Mrs. Kelmar was a singularly kind woman; and the oldest son had
+quite a dark and romantic bearing, and might be heard on summer
+evenings playing sentimental airs on the violin.
+
+I had no idea, at the time I made his acquaintance, what an
+important person Kelmar was.  But the Jew store-keepers of
+California, profiting at once by the needs and habits of the
+people, have made themselves in too many cases the tyrants of the
+rural population.  Credit is offered, is pressed on the new
+customer, and when once he is beyond his depth, the tune changes,
+and he is from thenceforth a white slave.  I believe, even from the
+little I saw, that Kelmar, if he choose to put on the screw, could
+send half the settlers packing in a radius of seven or eight miles
+round Calistoga.  These are continually paying him, but are never
+suffered to get out of debt.  He palms dull goods upon them, for
+they dare not refuse to buy; he goes and dines with them when he is
+on an outing, and no man is loudlier welcomed; he is their family
+friend, the director of their business, and, to a degree elsewhere
+unknown in modern days, their king.
+
+For some reason, Kelmar always shook his head at the mention of
+Pine Flat, and for some days I thought he disapproved of the whole
+scheme and was proportionately sad.  One fine morning, however, he
+met me, wreathed in smiles.  He had found the very place for me--
+Silverado, another old mining town, right up the mountain.  Rufe
+Hanson, the hunter, could take care of us--fine people the Hansons;
+we should be close to the Toll House, where the Lakeport stage
+called daily; it was the best place for my health, besides.  Rufe
+had been consumptive, and was now quite a strong man, ain't it?  In
+short, the place and all its accompaniments seemed made for us on
+purpose.
+
+He took me to his back door, whence, as from every point of
+Calistoga, Mount Saint Helena could be seen towering in the air.
+There, in the nick, just where the eastern foothills joined the
+mountain, and she herself began to rise above the zone of forest--
+there was Silverado.  The name had already pleased me; the high
+station pleased me still more.  I began to inquire with some
+eagerness.  It was but a little while ago that Silverado was a
+great place.  The mine--a silver mine, of course--had promised
+great things.  There was quite a lively population, with several
+hotels and boarding-houses; and Kelmar himself had opened a branch
+store, and done extremely well--"Ain't it?" he said, appealing to
+his wife.  And she said, "Yes; extremely well." Now there was no
+one living in the town but Rufe the hunter; and once more I heard
+Rufe's praises by the yard, and this time sung in chorus.
+
+I could not help perceiving at the time that there was something
+underneath; that no unmixed desire to have us comfortably settled
+had inspired the Kelmars with this flow of words.  But I was
+impatient to be gone, to be about my kingly project; and when we
+were offered seats in Kelmar's waggon, I accepted on the spot.  The
+plan of their next Sunday's outing took them, by good fortune, over
+the border into Lake County.  They would carry us so far, drop us
+at the Toll House, present us to the Hansons, and call for us again
+on Monday morning early.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II--FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF SILVERADO
+
+
+
+We were to leave by six precisely; that was solemnly pledged on
+both sides; and a messenger came to us the last thing at night, to
+remind us of the hour.  But it was eight before we got clear of
+Calistoga:  Kelmar, Mrs. Kelmar, a friend of theirs whom we named
+Abramina, her little daughter, my wife, myself, and, stowed away
+behind us, a cluster of ship's coffee-kettles.  These last were
+highly ornamental in the sheen of their bright tin, but I could
+invent no reason for their presence.  Our carriageful reckoned up,
+as near as we could get at it, some three hundred years to the six
+of us.  Four of the six, besides, were Hebrews.  But I never, in
+all my life, was conscious of so strong an atmosphere of holiday.
+No word was spoken but of pleasure; and even when we drove in
+silence, nods and smiles went round the party like refreshments.
+
+The sun shone out of a cloudless sky.  Close at the zenith rode the
+belated moon, still clearly visible, and, along one margin, even
+bright.  The wind blew a gale from the north; the trees roared; the
+corn and the deep grass in the valley fled in whitening surges; the
+dust towered into the air along the road and dispersed like the
+smoke of battle.  It was clear in our teeth from the first, and for
+all the windings of the road it managed to keep clear in our teeth
+until the end.
+
+For some two miles we rattled through the valley, skirting the
+eastern foothills; then we struck off to the right, through haugh-
+land, and presently, crossing a dry water-course, entered the Toll
+road, or, to be more local, entered on "the grade."  The road
+mounts the near shoulder of Mount Saint Helena, bound northward
+into Lake County.  In one place it skirts along the edge of a
+narrow and deep canyon, filled with trees, and I was glad, indeed,
+not to be driven at this point by the dashing Foss.  Kelmar, with
+his unvarying smile, jogging to the motion of the trap, drove for
+all the world like a good, plain, country clergyman at home; and I
+profess I blessed him unawares for his timidity.
+
+Vineyards and deep meadows, islanded and framed with thicket, gave
+place more and more as we ascended to woods of oak and madrona,
+dotted with enormous pines.  It was these pines, as they shot above
+the lower wood, that produced that pencilling of single trees I had
+so often remarked from the valley.  Thence, looking up and from
+however far, each fir stands separate against the sky no bigger
+than an eyelash; and all together lend a quaint, fringed aspect to
+the hills.  The oak is no baby; even the madrona, upon these spurs
+of Mount Saint Helena, comes to a fine bulk and ranks with forest
+trees--but the pines look down upon the rest for underwood.  As
+Mount Saint Helena among her foothills, so these dark giants out-
+top their fellow-vegetables.  Alas! if they had left the redwoods,
+the pines, in turn, would have been dwarfed.  But the redwoods,
+fallen from their high estate, are serving as family bedsteads, or
+yet more humbly as field fences, along all Napa Valley.
+
+A rough smack of resin was in the air, and a crystal mountain
+purity.  It came pouring over these green slopes by the oceanful.
+The woods sang aloud, and gave largely of their healthful breath.
+Gladness seemed to inhabit these upper zones, and we had left
+indifference behind us in the valley.  "I to the hills lift mine
+eyes!"  There are days in a life when thus to climb out of the
+lowlands, seems like scaling heaven.
+
+As we continued to ascend, the wind fell upon us with increasing
+strength.  It was a wonder how the two stout horses managed to pull
+us up that steep incline and still face the athletic opposition of
+the wind, or how their great eyes were able to endure the dust.
+Ten minutes after we went by, a tree fell, blocking the road; and
+even before us leaves were thickly strewn, and boughs had fallen,
+large enough to make the passage difficult.  But now we were hard
+by the summit.  The road crosses the ridge, just in the nick that
+Kelmar showed me from below, and then, without pause, plunges down
+a deep, thickly wooded glen on the farther side.  At the highest
+point a trail strikes up the main hill to the leftward; and that
+leads to Silverado.  A hundred yards beyond, and in a kind of elbow
+of the glen, stands the Toll House Hotel.  We came up the one side,
+were caught upon the summit by the whole weight of the wind as it
+poured over into Napa Valley, and a minute after had drawn up in
+shelter, but all buffetted and breathless, at the Toll House door.
+
+A water-tank, and stables, and a gray house of two stories, with
+gable ends and a verandah, are jammed hard against the hillside,
+just where a stream has cut for itself a narrow canyon, filled with
+pines.  The pines go right up overhead; a little more and the
+stream might have played, like a fire-hose, on the Toll House roof.
+In front the ground drops as sharply as it rises behind.  There is
+just room for the road and a sort of promontory of croquet ground,
+and then you can lean over the edge and look deep below you through
+the wood.  I said croquet GROUND, not GREEN; for the surface was of
+brown, beaten earth.  The toll-bar itself was the only other note
+of originality:  a long beam, turning on a post, and kept slightly
+horizontal by a counterweight of stones.  Regularly about sundown
+this rude barrier was swung, like a derrick, across the road and
+made fast, I think, to a tree upon the farther side.
+
+On our arrival there followed a gay scene in the bar.  I was
+presented to Mr. Corwin, the landlord; to Mr. Jennings, the
+engineer, who lives there for his health; to Mr. Hoddy, a most
+pleasant little gentleman, once a member of the Ohio legislature,
+again the editor of a local paper, and now, with undiminished
+dignity, keeping the Toll House bar.  I had a number of drinks and
+cigars bestowed on me, and enjoyed a famous opportunity of seeing
+Kelmar in his glory, friendly, radiant, smiling, steadily edging
+one of the ship's kettles on the reluctant Corwin.
+
+Corwin, plainly aghast, resisted gallantly, and for that bout
+victory crowned his arms.
+
+At last we set forth for Silverado on foot.  Kelmar and his jolly
+Jew girls were full of the sentiment of Sunday outings, breathed
+geniality and vagueness, and suffered a little vile boy from the
+hotel to lead them here and there about the woods.  For three
+people all so old, so bulky in body, and belonging to a race so
+venerable, they could not but surprise us by their extreme and
+almost imbecile youthfulness of spirit.  They were only going to
+stay ten minutes at the Toll House; had they not twenty long miles
+of road before them on the other side?  Stay to dinner?  Not they!
+Put up the horses? Never.  Let us attach them to the verandah by a
+wisp of straw rope, such as would not have held a person's hat on
+that blustering day.  And with all these protestations of hurry,
+they proved irresponsible like children.  Kelmar himself, shrewd
+old Russian Jew, with a smirk that seemed just to have concluded a
+bargain to its satisfaction, intrusted himself and us devoutly to
+that boy.  Yet the boy was patently fallacious; and for that matter
+a most unsympathetic urchin, raised apparently on gingerbread.  He
+was bent on his own pleasure, nothing else; and Kelmar followed him
+to his ruin, with the same shrewd smirk.  If the boy said there was
+"a hole there in the hill"--a hole, pure and simple, neither more
+nor less--Kelmar and his Jew girls would follow him a hundred yards
+to look complacently down that hole.  For two hours we looked for
+houses; and for two hours they followed us, smelling trees, picking
+flowers, foisting false botany on the unwary.  Had we taken five,
+with that vile lad to head them off on idle divagations, for five
+they would have smiled and stumbled through the woods.
+
+However, we came forth at length, and as by accident, upon a lawn,
+sparse planted like an orchard, but with forest instead of fruit
+trees.  That was the site of Silverado mining town.  A piece of
+ground was levelled up, where Kelmar's store had been; and facing
+that we saw Rufe Hanson's house, still bearing on its front the
+legend Silverado Hotel.  Not another sign of habitation.  Silverado
+town had all been carted from the scene; one of the houses was now
+the school-house far down the road; one was gone here, one there,
+but all were gone away.
+
+It was now a sylvan solitude, and the silence was unbroken but by
+the great, vague voice of the wind.  Some days before our visit, a
+grizzly bear had been sporting round the Hansons' chicken-house.
+
+Mrs. Hanson was at home alone, we found.  Rufe had been out after a
+"bar," had risen late, and was now gone, it did not clearly appear
+whither.  Perhaps he had had wind of Kelmar's coming, and was now
+ensconced among the underwood, or watching us from the shoulder of
+the mountain.  We, hearing there were no houses to be had, were for
+immediately giving up all hopes of Silverado.  But this, somehow,
+was not to Kelmar's fancy.  He first proposed that we should "camp
+someveres around, ain't it?" waving his hand cheerily as though to
+weave a spell; and when that was firmly rejected, he decided that
+we must take up house with the Hansons.  Mrs. Hanson had been, from
+the first, flustered, subdued, and a little pale; but from this
+proposition she recoiled with haggard indignation.  So did we, who
+would have preferred, in a manner of speaking, death.  But Kelmar
+was not to be put by.  He edged Mrs. Hanson into a corner, where
+for a long time he threatened her with his forefinger, like a
+character in Dickens; and the poor woman, driven to her
+entrenchments, at last remembered with a shriek that there were
+still some houses at the tunnel.
+
+Thither we went; the Jews, who should already have been miles into
+Lake County, still cheerily accompanying us.  For about a furlong
+we followed a good road alone, the hillside through the forest,
+until suddenly that road widened out and came abruptly to an end.
+A canyon, woody below, red, rocky, and naked overhead, was here
+walled across by a dump of rolling stones, dangerously steep, and
+from twenty to thirty feet in height.  A rusty iron chute on wooden
+legs came flying, like a monstrous gargoyle, across the parapet.
+It was down this that they poured the precious ore; and below here
+the carts stood to wait their lading, and carry it mill-ward down
+the mountain.
+
+The whole canyon was so entirely blocked, as if by some rude
+guerilla fortification, that we could only mount by lengths of
+wooden ladder, fixed in the hillside.  These led us round the
+farther corner of the dump; and when they were at an end, we still
+persevered over loose rubble and wading deep in poison oak, till we
+struck a triangular platform, filling up the whole glen, and shut
+in on either hand by bold projections of the mountain.  Only in
+front the place was open like the proscenium of a theatre, and we
+looked forth into a great realm of air, and down upon treetops and
+hilltops, and far and near on wild and varied country.  The place
+still stood as on the day it was deserted:  a line of iron rails
+with a bifurcation; a truck in working order; a world of lumber,
+old wood, old iron; a blacksmith's forge on one side, half buried
+in the leaves of dwarf madronas; and on the other, an old brown
+wooden house.
+
+Fanny and I dashed at the house.  It consisted of three rooms, and
+was so plastered against the hill, that one room was right atop of
+another, that the upper floor was more than twice as large as the
+lower, and that all three apartments must be entered from a
+different side and level.  Not a window-sash remained.
+
+The door of the lower room was smashed, and one panel hung in
+splinters.  We entered that, and found a fair amount of rubbish:
+sand and gravel that had been sifted in there by the mountain
+winds; straw, sticks, and stones; a table, a barrel; a plate-rack
+on the wall; two home-made bootjacks, signs of miners and their
+boots; and a pair of papers pinned on the boarding, headed
+respectively "Funnel No. 1," and "Funnel No. 2," but with the tails
+torn away.  The window, sashless of course, was choked with the
+green and sweetly smelling foliage of a bay; and through a chink in
+the floor, a spray of poison oak had shot up and was handsomely
+prospering in the interior.  It was my first care to cut away that
+poison oak, Fanny standing by at a respectful distance.  That was
+our first improvement by which we took possession.
+
+The room immediately above could only be entered by a plank propped
+against the threshold, along which the intruder must foot it
+gingerly, clutching for support to sprays of poison oak, the proper
+product of the country.  Herein was, on either hand, a triple tier
+of beds, where miners had once lain; and the other gable was
+pierced by a sashless window and a doorless doorway opening on the
+air of heaven, five feet above the ground.  As for the third room,
+which entered squarely from the ground level, but higher up the
+hill and farther up the canyon, it contained only rubbish and the
+uprights for another triple tier of beds.
+
+The whole building was overhung by a bold, lion-like, red rock.
+Poison oak, sweet bay trees, calcanthus, brush, and chaparral, grew
+freely but sparsely all about it. In front, in the strong sunshine,
+the platform lay overstrewn with busy litter, as though the labours
+of the mine might begin again to-morrow in the morning.
+
+Following back into the canyon, among the mass of rotting plant and
+through the flowering bushes, we came to a great crazy staging,
+with a wry windless on the top; and clambering up, we could look
+into an open shaft, leading edgeways down into the bowels of the
+mountain, trickling with water, and lit by some stray sun-gleams,
+whence I know not.  In that quiet place the still, far-away tinkle
+of the water-drops was loudly audible.  Close by, another shaft led
+edgeways up into the superincumbent shoulder of the hill.  It lay
+partly open; and sixty or a hundred feet above our head, we could
+see the strata propped apart by solid wooden wedges, and a pine,
+half undermined, precariously nodding on the verge.  Here also a
+rugged, horizontal tunnel ran straight into the unsunned bowels of
+the rock.  This secure angle in the mountain's flank was, even on
+this wild day, as still as my lady's chamber.  But in the tunnel a
+cold, wet draught tempestuously blew.  Nor have I ever known that
+place otherwise than cold and windy.
+
+Such was our fist prospect of Juan Silverado.  I own I had looked
+for something different:  a clique of neighbourly houses on a
+village green, we shall say, all empty to be sure, but swept and
+varnished; a trout stream brawling by; great elms or chestnuts,
+humming with bees and nested in by song-birds; and the mountains
+standing round about, as at Jerusalem.  Here, mountain and house
+and the old tools of industry were all alike rusty and downfalling.
+The hill was here wedged up, and there poured forth its bowels in a
+spout of broken mineral; man with his picks and powder, and nature
+with her own great blasting tools of sun and rain, labouring
+together at the ruin of that proud mountain.  The view up the
+canyon was a glimpse of devastation; dry red minerals sliding
+together, here and there a crag, here and there dwarf thicket
+clinging in the general glissade, and over all a broken outline
+trenching on the blue of heaven.  Downwards indeed, from our rock
+eyrie, we behold the greener side of nature; and the bearing of the
+pines and the sweet smell of bays and nutmegs commanded themselves
+gratefully to our senses.  One way and another, now the die was
+cast.  Silverado be it!
+
+After we had got back to the Toll House, the Jews were not long of
+striking forward.  But I observed that one of the Hanson lads came
+down, before their departure, and returned with a ship's kettle.
+Happy Hansons!  Nor was it until after Kelmar was gone, if I
+remember rightly, that Rufe put in an appearance to arrange the
+details of our installation.
+
+The latter part of the day, Fanny and I sat in the verandah of the
+Toll House, utterly stunned by the uproar of the wind among the
+trees on the other side of the valley.  Sometimes, we would have it
+it was like a sea, but it was not various enough for that; and
+again, we thought it like the roar of a cataract, but it was too
+changeful for the cataract; and then we would decide, speaking in
+sleepy voices, that it could be compared with nothing but itself.
+My mind was entirely preoccupied by the noise.  I hearkened to it
+by the hour, gapingly hearkened, and let my cigarette go out.
+Sometimes the wind would make a sally nearer hand, and send a
+shrill, whistling crash among the foliage on our side of the glen;
+and sometimes a back-draught would strike into the elbow where we
+sat, and cast the gravel and torn leaves into our faces.  But for
+the most part, this great, streaming gale passed unweariedly by us
+into Napa Valley, not two hundred yards away, visible by the
+tossing boughs, stunningly audible, and yet not moving a hair upon
+our heads.  So it blew all night long while I was writing up my
+journal, and after we were in bed, under a cloudless, starset
+heaven; and so it was blowing still next morning when we rose.
+
+It was a laughable thought to us, what had become of our cheerful,
+wandering Hebrews.  We could not suppose they had reached a
+destination.  The meanest boy could lead them miles out of their
+way to see a gopher-hole.  Boys, we felt to be their special
+danger; none others were of that exact pitch of cheerful
+irrelevancy to exercise a kindred sway upon their minds:  but
+before the attractions of a boy their most settled resolutions
+would be war.  We thought we could follow in fancy these three aged
+Hebrew truants wandering in and out on hilltop and in thicket, a
+demon boy trotting far ahead, their will-o'-the-wisp conductor; and
+at last about midnight, the wind still roaring in the darkness, we
+had a vision of all three on their knees upon a mountain-top around
+a glow-worm.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III. THE RETURN
+
+
+
+Next morning we were up by half-past five, according to agreement,
+and it was ten by the clock before our Jew boys returned to pick us
+up.  Kelmar, Mrs. Kelmar, and Abramina, all smiling from ear to
+ear, and full of tales of the hospitality they had found on the
+other side.  It had not gone unrewarded; for I observed with
+interest that the ship's kettles, all but one, had been "placed."
+Three Lake County families, at least, endowed for life with a
+ship's kettle.  Come, this was no misspent Sunday.  The absence of
+the kettles told its own story:  our Jews said nothing about them;
+but, on the other hand, they said many kind and comely things about
+the people they had met.  The two women, in particular, had been
+charmed out of themselves by the sight of a young girl surrounded
+by her admirers; all evening, it appeared, they had been triumphing
+together in the girl's innocent successes, and to this natural and
+unselfish joy they gave expression in language that was beautiful
+by its simplicity and truth.
+
+Take them for all in all, few people have done my heart more good;
+they seemed so thoroughly entitled to happiness, and to enjoy it in
+so large a measure and so free from after-thought; almost they
+persuaded me to be a Jew.  There was, indeed, a chink of money in
+their talk.  They particularly commanded people who were well to
+do.  "HE don't care--ain't it?" was their highest word of
+commendation to an individual fate; and here I seem to grasp the
+root of their philosophy--it was to be free from care, to be free
+to make these Sunday wanderings, that they so eagerly pursued after
+wealth; and all this carefulness was to be careless.  The fine,
+good humour of all three seemed to declare they had attained their
+end.  Yet there was the other side to it; and the recipients of
+kettles perhaps cared greatly.
+
+No sooner had they returned, than the scene of yesterday began
+again.  The horses were not even tied with a straw rope this time--
+it was not worth while; and Kelmar disappeared into the bar,
+leaving them under a tree on the other side of the road.  I had to
+devote myself.  I stood under the shadow of that tree for, I
+suppose, hard upon an hour, and had not the heart to be angry.
+Once some one remembered me, and brought me out half a tumblerful
+of the playful, innocuous American cocktail.  I drank it, and lo!
+veins of living fire ran down my leg; and then a focus of
+conflagration remained seated in my stomach, not unpleasantly, for
+quarter of an hour.  I love these sweet, fiery pangs, but I will
+not court them.  The bulk of the time I spent in repeating as much
+French poetry as I could remember to the horses, who seemed to
+enjoy it hugely.  And now it went -
+
+
+"O ma vieille Font-georges
+Ou volent les rouges-gorges:"
+
+
+and again, to a more trampling measure -
+
+
+"Et tout tremble, Irun, Coimbre,
+Sautander, Almodovar,
+Sitot qu'on entend le timbre
+Des cymbales do Bivar."
+
+
+The redbreasts and the brooks of Europe, in that dry and songless
+land; brave old names and wars, strong cities, cymbals, and bright
+armour, in that nook of the mountain, sacred only to the Indian and
+the bear!  This is still the strangest thing in all man's
+travelling, that he should carry about with him incongruous
+memories.  There is no foreign land; it is the traveller only that
+is foreign, and now and again, by a flash of recollection, lights
+up the contrasts of the earth.
+
+But while I was thus wandering in my fancy, great feats had been
+transacted in the bar.  Corwin the bold had fallen, Kelmar was
+again crowned with laurels, and the last of the ship's kettles had
+changed hands.  If I had ever doubted the purity of Kelmar's
+motives, if I had ever suspected him of a single eye to business in
+his eternal dallyings, now at least, when the last kettle was
+disposed of, my suspicions must have been allayed.  I dare not
+guess how much more time was wasted; nor how often we drove off,
+merely to drive back again and renew interrupted conversations
+about nothing, before the Toll House was fairly left behind.  Alas!
+and not a mile down the grade there stands a ranche in a sunny
+vineyard, and here we must all dismount again and enter.
+
+Only the old lady was at home, Mrs. Guele, a brown old Swiss dame,
+the picture of honesty; and with her we drank a bottle of wine and
+had an age-long conversation, which would have been highly
+delightful if Fanny and I had not been faint with hunger.  The
+ladies each narrated the story of her marriage, our two Hebrews
+with the prettiest combination of sentiment and financial bathos.
+Abramina, specially, endeared herself with every word.  She was as
+simple, natural, and engaging as a kid that should have been
+brought up to the business of a money-changer.  One touch was so
+resplendently Hebraic that I cannot pass it over.  When her "old
+man" wrote home for her from America, her old man's family would
+not intrust her with the money for the passage, till she had bound
+herself by an oath--on her knees, I think she said--not to employ
+it otherwise.
+
+This had tickled Abramina hugely, but I think it tickled me fully
+more.
+
+Mrs. Guele told of her home-sickness up here in the long winters;
+of her honest, country-woman troubles and alarms upon the journey;
+how in the bank at Frankfort she had feared lest the banker, after
+having taken her cheque, should deny all knowledge of it--a fear I
+have myself every time I go to a bank; and how crossing the
+Luneburger Heath, an old lady, witnessing her trouble and finding
+whither she was bound, had given her "the blessing of a person
+eighty years old, which would be sure to bring her safely to the
+States.  And the first thing I did," added Mrs. Guele, "was to fall
+downstairs."
+
+At length we got out of the house, and some of us into the trap,
+when--judgment of Heaven!--here came Mr. Guele from his vineyard.
+So another quarter of an hour went by; till at length, at our
+earnest pleading, we set forth again in earnest, Fanny and I white-
+faced and silent, but the Jews still smiling.  The heart fails me.
+There was yet another stoppage!  And we drove at last into
+Calistoga past two in the afternoon, Fanny and I having breakfasted
+at six in the morning, eight mortal hours before.  We were a pallid
+couple; but still the Jews were smiling.
+
+So ended our excursion with the village usurers; and, now that it
+was done, we had no more idea of the nature of the business, nor of
+the part we had been playing in it, than the child unborn.  That
+all the people we had met were the slaves of Kelmar, though in
+various degrees of servitude; that we ourselves had been sent up
+the mountain in the interests of none but Kelmar; that the money we
+laid out, dollar by dollar, cent by cent, and through the hands of
+various intermediaries, should all hop ultimately into Kelmar's
+till;--these were facts that we only grew to recognize in the
+course of time and by the accumulation of evidence.  At length all
+doubt was quieted, when one of the kettle-holders confessed.
+Stopping his trap in the moonlight, a little way out of Calistoga,
+he told me, in so many words, that he dare not show face therewith
+an empty pocket.  "You see, I don't mind if it was only five
+dollars, Mr. Stevens," he said, "but I must give Mr. Kelmar
+SOMETHING."
+
+Even now, when the whole tyranny is plain to me, I cannot find it
+in my heart to be as angry as perhaps I should be with the Hebrew
+tyrant.  The whole game of business is beggar my neighbour; and
+though perhaps that game looks uglier when played at such close
+quarters and on so small a scale, it is none the more intrinsically
+inhumane for that.  The village usurer is not so sad a feature of
+humanity and human progress as the millionaire manufacturer,
+fattening on the toil and loss of thousands, and yet declaiming
+from the platform against the greed and dishonesty of landlords.
+If it were fair for Cobden to buy up land from owners whom he
+thought unconscious of its proper value, it was fair enough for my
+Russian Jew to give credit to his farmers.  Kelmar, if he was
+unconscious of the beam in his own eye, was at least silent in the
+matter of his brother's mote.
+
+
+
+THE ACT OF SQUATTING
+
+
+
+There were four of us squatters--myself and my wife, the King and
+Queen of Silverado; Sam, the Crown Prince; and Chuchu, the Grand
+Duke.  Chuchu, a setter crossed with spaniel, was the most unsuited
+for a rough life.  He had been nurtured tenderly in the society of
+ladies; his heart was large and soft; he regarded the sofa-cushion
+as a bed-rook necessary of existence.  Though about the size of a
+sheep, he loved to sit in ladies' laps; he never said a bad word in
+all his blameless days; and if he had seen a flute, I am sure he
+could have played upon it by nature.  It may seem hard to say it of
+a dog, but Chuchu was a tame cat.
+
+The king and queen, the grand duke, and a basket of cold provender
+for immediate use, set forth from Calistoga in a double buggy; the
+crown prince, on horseback, led the way like an outrider.  Bags and
+boxes and a second-hand stove were to follow close upon our heels
+by Hanson's team.
+
+It was a beautiful still day; the sky was one field of azure.  Not
+a leaf moved, not a speck appeared in heaven.  Only from the summit
+of the mountain one little snowy wisp of cloud after another kept
+detaching itself, like smoke from a volcano, and blowing southward
+in some high stream of air:  Mount Saint Helena still at her
+interminable task, making the weather, like a Lapland witch.
+
+By noon we had come in sight of the mill:  a great brown building,
+half-way up the hill, big as a factory, two stories high, and with
+tanks and ladders along the roof; which, as a pendicle of Silverado
+mine, we held to be an outlying province of our own.  Thither,
+then, we went, crossing the valley by a grassy trail; and there
+lunched out of the basket, sitting in a kind of portico, and
+wondering, while we ate, at this great bulk of useless building.
+Through a chink we could look far down into the interior, and see
+sunbeams floating in the dust and striking on tier after tier of
+silent, rusty machinery.  It cost six thousand dollars, twelve
+hundred English sovereigns; and now, here it stands deserted, like
+the temple of a forgotten religion, the busy millers toiling
+somewhere else.  All the time we were there, mill and mill town
+showed no sign of life; that part of the mountain-side, which is
+very open and green, was tenanted by no living creature but
+ourselves and the insects; and nothing stirred but the cloud
+manufactory upon the mountain summit.  It was odd to compare this
+with the former days, when the engine was in fall blast, the mill
+palpitating to its strokes, and the carts came rattling down from
+Silverado, charged with ore.
+
+By two we had been landed at the mine, the buggy was gone again,
+and we were left to our own reflections and the basket of cold
+provender, until Hanson should arrive.  Hot as it was by the sun,
+there was something chill in such a home-coming, in that world of
+wreck and rust, splinter and rolling gravel, where for so many
+years no fire had smoked.
+
+Silverado platform filled the whole width of the canyon.  Above, as
+I have said, this was a wild, red, stony gully in the mountains;
+but below it was a wooded dingle.  And through this, I was told,
+there had gone a path between the mine and the Toll House--our
+natural north-west passage to civilization.  I found and followed
+it, clearing my way as I went through fallen branches and dead
+trees.  It went straight down that steep canyon, till it brought
+you out abruptly over the roofs of the hotel.  There was nowhere
+any break in the descent.  It almost seemed as if, were you to drop
+a stone down the old iron chute at our platform, it would never
+rest until it hopped upon the Toll House shingles.  Signs were not
+wanting of the ancient greatness of Silverado.  The footpath was
+well marked, and had been well trodden in the old clays by thirsty
+miners.  And far down, buried in foliage, deep out of sight of
+Silverado, I came on a last outpost of the mine--a mound of gravel,
+some wreck of wooden aqueduct, and the mouth of a tunnel, like a
+treasure grotto in a fairy story.  A stream of water, fed by the
+invisible leakage from our shaft, and dyed red with cinnabar or
+iron, ran trippingly forth out of the bowels of the cave; and,
+looking far under the arch, I could see something like an iron
+lantern fastened on the rocky wall.  It was a promising spot for
+the imagination.  No boy could have left it unexplored.
+
+The stream thenceforward stole along the bottom of the dingle, and
+made, for that dry land, a pleasant warbling in the leaves.  Once,
+I suppose, it ran splashing down the whole length of the canyon,
+but now its head waters had been tapped by the shaft at Silverado,
+and for a great part of its course it wandered sunless among the
+joints of the mountain.  No wonder that it should better its pace
+when it sees, far before it, daylight whitening in the arch, or
+that it should come trotting forth into the sunlight with a song.
+
+The two stages had gone by when I got down, and the Toll House
+stood, dozing in sun and dust and silence, like a place enchanted.
+My mission was after hay for bedding, and that I was readily
+promised.  But when I mentioned that we were waiting for Rufe, the
+people shook their heads.  Rufe was not a regular man any way, it
+seemed; and if he got playing poker--Well, poker was too many for
+Rufe.  I had not yet heard them bracketted together; but it seemed
+a natural conjunction, and commended itself swiftly to my fears;
+and as soon as I returned to Silverado and had told my story, we
+practically gave Hanson up, and set ourselves to do what we could
+find do-able in our desert-island state.
+
+The lower room had been the assayer's office.  The floor was thick
+with debris--part human, from the former occupants; part natural,
+sifted in by mountain winds.  In a sea of red dust there swam or
+floated sticks, boards, hay, straw, stones, and paper; ancient
+newspapers, above all--for the newspaper, especially when torn,
+soon becomes an antiquity--and bills of the Silverado boarding-
+house, some dated Silverado, some Calistoga Mine.  Here is one,
+verbatim; and if any one can calculate the scale of charges, he has
+my envious admiration.
+
+
+Calistoga Mine, May 3rd, 1875.
+John Stanley
+To S. Chapman, Cr.
+To board from April 1st, to April 30  $25 75
+  "    "     "  May lst, to 3rd  ...    2 00
+                                       27 75
+
+
+Where is John Stanley mining now?  Where is S. Chapman, within
+whose hospitable walls we were to lodge?  The date was but five
+years old, but in that time the world had changed for Silverado;
+like Palmyra in the desert, it had outlived its people and its
+purpose; we camped, like Layard, amid ruins, and these names spoke
+to us of prehistoric time.  A boot-jack, a pair of boots, a dog-
+hutch, and these bills of Mr. Chapman's were the only speaking
+relics that we disinterred from all that vast Silverado rubbish-
+heap; but what would I not have given to unearth a letter, a
+pocket-book, a diary, only a ledger, or a roll of names, to take me
+back, in a more personal manner, to the past?  It pleases me,
+besides, to fancy that Stanley or Chapman, or one of their
+companions, may light upon this chronicle, and be struck by the
+name, and read some news of their anterior home, coming, as it
+were, out of a subsequent epoch of history in that quarter of the
+world.
+
+As we were tumbling the mingled rubbish on the floor, kicking it
+with our feet, and groping for these written evidences of the past,
+Sam, with a somewhat whitened face, produced a paper bag.  "What's
+this?" said he.  It contained a granulated powder, something the
+colour of Gregory's Mixture, but rosier; and as there were several
+of the bags, and each more or less broken, the powder was spread
+widely on the floor.  Had any of us ever seen giant powder?  No,
+nobody had; and instantly there grew up in my mind a shadowy
+belief, verging with every moment nearer to certitude, that I had
+somewhere heard somebody describe it as just such a powder as the
+one around us.  I have learnt since that it is a substance not
+unlike tallow, and is made up in rolls for all the world like
+tallow candles.
+
+Fanny, to add to our happiness, told us a story of a gentleman who
+had camped one night, like ourselves, by a deserted mine.  He was a
+handy, thrifty fellow, and looked right and left for plunder, but
+all he could lay his hands on was a can of oil.  After dark he had
+to see to the horses with a lantern; and not to miss an
+opportunity, filled up his lamp from the oil can.  Thus equipped,
+he set forth into the forest.  A little while after, his friends
+heard a loud explosion; the mountain echoes bellowed, and then all
+was still.  On examination, the can proved to contain oil, with the
+trifling addition of nitro-glycerine; but no research disclosed a
+trace of either man or lantern.
+
+It was a pretty sight, after this anecdote, to see us sweeping out
+the giant powder.  It seemed never to be far enough away.  And,
+after all, it was only some rock pounded for assay.
+
+So much for the lower room.  We scraped some of the rougher dirt
+off the floor, and left it.  That was our sitting-room and kitchen,
+though there was nothing to sit upon but the table, and no
+provision for a fire except a hole in the roof of the room above,
+which had once contained the chimney of a stove.
+
+To that upper room we now proceeded.  There were the eighteen bunks
+in a double tier, nine on either hand, where from eighteen to
+thirty-six miners had once snored together all night long, John
+Stanley, perhaps, snoring loudest.  There was the roof, with a hole
+in it through which the sun now shot an arrow.  There was the
+floor, in much the same state as the one below, though, perhaps,
+there was more hay, and certainly there was the added ingredient of
+broken glass, the man who stole the window-frames having apparently
+made a miscarriage with this one.  Without a broom, without hay or
+bedding, we could but look about us with a beginning of despair.
+The one bright arrow of day, in that gaunt and shattered barrack,
+made the rest look dirtier and darker, and the sight drove us at
+last into the open.
+
+Here, also, the handiwork of man lay ruined:  but the plants were
+all alive and thriving; the view below was fresh with the colours
+of nature; and we had exchanged a dim, human garret for a corner,
+even although it were untidy, of the blue hall of heaven.  Not a
+bird, not a beast, not a reptile.  There was no noise in that part
+of the world, save when we passed beside the staging, and heard the
+water musically falling in the shaft.
+
+We wandered to and fro.  We searched among that drift of lumber-
+wood and iron, nails and rails, and sleepers and the wheels of
+tracks.  We gazed up the cleft into the bosom of the mountain.  We
+sat by the margin of the dump and saw, far below us, the green
+treetops standing still in the clear air.  Beautiful perfumes,
+breaths of bay, resin, and nutmeg, came to us more often and grew
+sweeter and sharper as the afternoon declined.  But still there was
+no word of Hanson.
+
+I set to with pick and shovel, and deepened the pool behind the
+shaft, till we were sure of sufficient water for the morning; and
+by the time I had finished, the sun had begun to go down behind the
+mountain shoulder, the platform was plunged in quiet shadow, and a
+chill descended from the sky.  Night began early in our cleft.
+Before us, over the margin of the dump, we could see the sun still
+striking aslant into the wooded nick below, and on the
+battlemented, pine-bescattered ridges on the farther side.
+
+There was no stove, of course, and no hearth in our lodging, so we
+betook ourselves to the blacksmith's forge across the platform.  If
+the platform be taken as a stage, and the out-curving margin of the
+dump to represent the line of the foot-lights, then our house would
+be the first wing on the actor's left, and this blacksmith's forge,
+although no match for it in size, the foremost on the right.  It
+was a low, brown cottage, planted close against the hill, and
+overhung by the foliage and peeling boughs of a madrona thicket.
+Within it was full of dead leaves and mountain dust, and rubbish
+from the mine.  But we soon had a good fire brightly blazing, and
+sat close about it on impromptu seats.  Chuchu, the slave of sofa-
+cushions, whimpered for a softer bed; but the rest of us were
+greatly revived and comforted by that good creature-fire, which
+gives us warmth and light and companionable sounds, and colours up
+the emptiest building with better than frescoes.  For a while it
+was even pleasant in the forge, with the blaze in the midst, and a
+look over our shoulders on the woods and mountains where the day
+was dying like a dolphin.
+
+It was between seven and eight before Hanson arrived, with a
+waggonful of our effects and two of his wife's relatives to lend
+him a hand.  The elder showed surprising strength.  He would pick
+up a huge packing-case, full of books of all things, swing it on
+his shoulder, and away up the two crazy ladders and the breakneck
+spout of rolling mineral, familiarly termed a path, that led from
+the cart-track to our house.  Even for a man unburthened, the
+ascent was toilsome and precarious; but Irvine sealed it with a
+light foot, carrying box after box, as the hero whisks the stage
+child up the practicable footway beside the waterfall of the fifth
+act.  With so strong a helper, the business was speedily
+transacted.  Soon the assayer's office was thronged with our
+belongings, piled higgledy-piggledy, and upside down, about the
+floor.  There were our boxes, indeed, but my wife had left her keys
+in Calistoga.  There was the stove, but, alas! our carriers had
+forgot the chimney, and lost one of the plates along the road.  The
+Silverado problem was scarce solved.
+
+Rufe himself was grave and good-natured over his share of blame; he
+even, if I remember right, expressed regret.  But his crew, to my
+astonishment and anger, grinned from ear to ear, and laughed aloud
+at our distress.  They thought it "real funny" about the stove-pipe
+they had forgotten; "real funny" that they should have lost a
+plate.  As for hay, the whole party refused to bring us any till
+they should have supped.  See how late they were!  Never had there
+been such a job as coming up that grade!  Nor often, I suspect,
+such a game of poker as that before they started.  But about nine,
+as a particular favour, we should have some hay.
+
+So they took their departure, leaving me still staring, and we
+resigned ourselves to wait for their return.  The fire in the forge
+had been suffered to go out, and we were one and all too weary to
+kindle another.  We dined, or, not to take that word in vain, we
+ate after a fashion, in the nightmare disorder of the assayer's
+office, perched among boxes.  A single candle lighted us.  It could
+scarce be called a housewarming; for there was, of course, no fire,
+and with the two open doors and the open window gaping on the
+night, like breaches in a fortress, it began to grow rapidly chill.
+Talk ceased; nobody moved but the unhappy Chuchu, still in quest of
+sofa-cushions, who tumbled complainingly among the trunks.  It
+required a certain happiness of disposition to look forward
+hopefully, from so dismal a beginning, across the brief hours of
+night, to the warm shining of to-morrow's sun.
+
+But the hay arrived at last, and we turned, with our last spark of
+courage, to the bedroom.  We had improved the entrance, but it was
+still a kind of rope-walking; and it would have been droll to see
+us mounting, one after another, by candle-light, under the open
+stars.
+
+The western door--that which looked up the canyon, and through
+which we entered by our bridge of flying plank--was still entire, a
+handsome, panelled door, the most finished piece of carpentry in
+Silverado.  And the two lowest bunks next to this we roughly filled
+with hay for that night's use.  Through the opposite, or eastern-
+looking gable, with its open door and window, a faint, disused
+starshine came into the room like mist; and when we were once in
+bed, we lay, awaiting sleep, in a haunted, incomplete obscurity.
+At first the silence of the night was utter.  Then a high wind
+began in the distance among the tree-tops, and for hours continued
+to grow higher.  It seemed to me much such a wind as we had found
+on our visit; yet here in our open chamber we were fanned only by
+gentle and refreshing draughts, so deep was the canyon, so close
+our house was planted under the overhanging rock.
+
+
+
+THE HUNTER'S FAMILY
+
+
+
+There is quite a large race or class of people in America, for whom
+we scarcely seem to have a parallel in England.  Of pure white
+blood, they are unknown or unrecognizable in towns; inhabit the
+fringe of settlements and the deep, quiet places of the country;
+rebellious to all labour, and pettily thievish, like the English
+gipsies; rustically ignorant, but with a touch of wood-lore and the
+dexterity of the savage.  Whence they came is a moot point.  At the
+time of the war, they poured north in crowds to escape the
+conscription; lived during summer on fruits, wild animals, and
+petty theft; and at the approach of winter, when these supplies
+failed, built great fires in the forest, and there died stoically
+by starvation.  They are widely scattered, however, and easily
+recognized.  Loutish, but not ill-looking, they will sit all day,
+swinging their legs on a field fence, the mind seemingly as devoid
+of all reflection as a Suffolk peasant's, careless of politics, for
+the most part incapable of reading, but with a rebellious vanity
+and a strong sense of independence.  Hunting is their most
+congenial business, or, if the occasion offers, a little amateur
+detection.  In tracking a criminal, following a particular horse
+along a beaten highway, and drawing inductions from a hair or a
+footprint, one of those somnolent, grinning Hodges will suddenly
+display activity of body and finesse of mind.  By their names ye
+may know them, the women figuring as Loveina, Larsenia, Serena,
+Leanna, Orreana; the men answering to Alvin, Alva, or Orion,
+pronounced Orrion, with the accent on the first.  Whether they are
+indeed a race, or whether this is the form of degeneracy common to
+all back-woodsmen, they are at least known by a generic byword, as
+Poor Whites or Low-downers.
+
+I will not say that the Hanson family was Poor White, because the
+name savours of offence; but I may go as far as this--they were, in
+many points, not unsimilar to the people usually so-cared.  Rufe
+himself combined two of the qualifications, for he was both a
+hunter and an amateur detective.  It was he who pursued Russel and
+Dollar, the robbers of the Lake Port stage, and captured them the
+very morning after the exploit, while they were still sleeping in a
+hayfield.  Russel, a drunken Scotch carpenter, was even an
+acquaintance of his own, and he expressed much grave commiseration
+for his fate.  In all that he said and did, Rufe was grave.  I
+never saw him hurried.  When he spoke, he took out his pipe with
+ceremonial deliberation, looked east and west, and then, in quiet
+tones and few words, stated his business or told his story.  His
+gait was to match; it would never have surprised you if, at any
+step, he had turned round and walked away again, so warily and
+slowly, and with so much seeming hesitation did he go about.  He
+lay long in bed in the morning--rarely indeed, rose before noon; he
+loved all games, from poker to clerical croquet; and in the Toll
+House croquet ground I have seen him toiling at the latter with the
+devotion of a curate.  He took an interest in education, was an
+active member of the local school-board, and when I was there, he
+had recently lost the schoolhouse key.  His waggon was broken, but
+it never seemed to occur to him to mend it.  Like all truly idle
+people, he had an artistic eye.  He chose the print stuff for his
+wife's dresses, and counselled her in the making of a patchwork
+quilt, always, as she thought, wrongly, but to the more educated
+eye, always with bizarre and admirable taste--the taste of an
+Indian.  With all this, he was a perfect, unoffending gentleman in
+word and act.  Take his clay pipe from him, and he was fit for any
+society but that of fools.  Quiet as he was, there burned a deep,
+permanent excitement in his dark blue eyes; and when this grave man
+smiled, it was like sunshine in a shady place.
+
+Mrs. Hanson (nee, if you please, Lovelands) was more commonplace
+than her lord.  She was a comely woman, too, plump, fair-coloured,
+with wonderful white teeth; and in her print dresses (chosen by
+Rufe) and with a large sun-bonnet shading her valued complexion,
+made, I assure you, a very agreeable figure.  But she was on the
+surface, what there was of her, out-spoken and loud-spoken.  Her
+noisy laughter had none of the charm of one of Hanson's rare, slow-
+spreading smiles; there was no reticence, no mystery, no manner
+about the woman:  she was a first-class dairymaid, but her husband
+was an unknown quantity between the savage and the nobleman.  She
+was often in and out with us, merry, and healthy, and fair; he came
+far seldomer--only, indeed, when there was business, or now and
+again, to pay a visit of ceremony, brushed up for the occasion,
+with his wife on his arm, and a clean clay pipe in his teeth.
+These visits, in our forest state, had quite the air of an event,
+and turned our red canyon into a salon.
+
+Such was the pair who ruled in the old Silverado Hotel, among the
+windy trees, on the mountain shoulder overlooking the whole length
+of Napa Valley, as the man aloft looks down on the ship's deck.
+There they kept house, with sundry horses and fowls, and a family
+of sons, Daniel Webster, and I think George Washington, among the
+number.  Nor did they want visitors.  An old gentleman, of singular
+stolidity, and called Breedlove--I think he had crossed the plains
+in the same caravan with Rufe--housed with them for awhile during
+our stay; and they had besides a permanent lodger, in the form of
+Mrs. Hanson's brother, Irvine Lovelands.  I spell Irvine by guess;
+for I could get no information on the subject, just as I could
+never find out, in spite of many inquiries, whether or not Rufe was
+a contraction for Rufus.  They were all cheerfully at sea about
+their names in that generation.  And this is surely the more
+notable where the names are all so strange, and even the family
+names appear to have been coined.  At one time, at least, the
+ancestors of all these Alvins and Alvas, Loveinas, Lovelands, and
+Breedloves, must have taken serious council and found a certain
+poetry in these denominations; that must have been, then, their
+form of literature.  But still times change; and their next
+descendants, the George Washingtons and Daniel Websters, will at
+least be clear upon the point.  And anyway, and however his name
+should be spelt, this Irvine Lovelands was the most unmitigated
+Caliban I ever knew.
+
+Our very first morning at Silverado, when we were full of business,
+patching up doors and windows, making beds and seats, and getting
+our rough lodging into shape, Irvine and his sister made their
+appearance together, she for neighbourliness and general curiosity;
+he, because he was working for me, to my sorrow, cutting firewood
+at I forget how much a day.  The way that he set about cutting wood
+was characteristic.  We were at that moment patching up and
+unpacking in the kitchen.  Down he sat on one side, and down sat
+his sister on the other.  Both were chewing pine-tree gum, and he,
+to my annoyance, accompanied that simple pleasure with profuse
+expectoration.  She rattled away, talking up hill and down dale,
+laughing, tossing her head, showing her brilliant teeth.  He looked
+on in silence, now spitting heavily on the floor, now putting his
+head back and uttering a loud, discordant, joyless laugh.  He had a
+tangle of shock hair, the colour of wool; his mouth was a grin;
+although as strong as a horse, he looked neither heavy nor yet
+adroit, only leggy, coltish, and in the road.  But it was plain he
+was in high spirits, thoroughly enjoying his visit; and he laughed
+frankly whenever we failed to accomplish what we were about.  This
+was scarcely helpful:  it was even, to amateur carpenters,
+embarrassing; but it lasted until we knocked off work and began to
+get dinner.  Then Mrs. Hanson remembered she should have been gone
+an hour ago; and the pair retired, and the lady's laughter died
+away among the nutmegs down the path.  That was Irvine's first
+day's work in my employment--the devil take him!
+
+The next morning he returned and, as he was this time alone, he
+bestowed his conversation upon us with great liberality.  He prided
+himself on his intelligence; asked us if we knew the school ma'am.
+HE didn't think much of her, anyway.  He had tried her, he had.  He
+had put a question to her.  If a tree a hundred feet high were to
+fall a foot a day, how long would it take to fall right down?  She
+had not been able to solve the problem.  "She don't know nothing,"
+he opined.  He told us how a friend of his kept a school with a
+revolver, and chuckled mightily over that; his friend could teach
+school, he could.  All the time he kept chewing gum and spitting.
+He would stand a while looking down; and then he would toss back
+his shock of hair, and laugh hoarsely, and spit, and bring forward
+a new subject.  A man, he told us, who bore a grudge against him,
+had poisoned his dog.  "That was a low thing for a man to do now,
+wasn't it?  It wasn't like a man, that, nohow.  But I got even with
+him:  I pisoned HIS dog."  His clumsy utterance, his rude
+embarrassed manner, set a fresh value on the stupidity of his
+remarks.  I do not think I ever appreciated the meaning of two
+words until I knew Irvine--the verb, loaf, and the noun, oaf;
+between them, they complete his portrait.  He could lounge, and
+wriggle, and rub himself against the wall, and grin, and be more in
+everybody's way than any other two people that I ever set my eyes
+on.  Nothing that he did became him; and yet you were conscious
+that he was one of your own race, that his mind was cumbrously at
+work, revolving the problem of existence like a quid of gum, and in
+his own cloudy manner enjoying life, and passing judgment on his
+fellows.  Above all things, he was delighted with himself.  You
+would not have thought it, from his uneasy manners and troubled,
+struggling utterance; but he loved himself to the marrow, and was
+happy and proud like a peacock on a rail.
+
+His self-esteem was, indeed, the one joint in his harness.  He
+could be got to work, and even kept at work, by flattery.  As long
+as my wife stood over him, crying out how strong he was, so long
+exactly he would stick to the matter in hand; and the moment she
+turned her back, or ceased to praise him, he would stop.  His
+physical strength was wonderful; and to have a woman stand by and
+admire his achievements, warmed his heart like sunshine.  Yet he
+was as cowardly as he was powerful, and felt no shame in owning to
+the weakness.  Something was once wanted from the crazy platform
+over the shaft, and he at once refused to venture there--"did not
+like," as he said, "foolen' round them kind o' places," and let my
+wife go instead of him, looking on with a grin.  Vanity, where it
+rules, is usually more heroic:  but Irvine steadily approved
+himself, and expected others to approve him; rather looked down
+upon my wife, and decidedly expected her to look up to him, on the
+strength of his superior prudence.
+
+Yet the strangest part of the whole matter was perhaps this, that
+Irvine was as beautiful as a statue.  His features were, in
+themselves, perfect; it was only his cloudy, uncouth, and coarse
+expression that disfigured them.  So much strength residing in so
+spare a frame was proof sufficient of the accuracy of his shape.
+He must have been built somewhat after the pattern of Jack
+Sheppard; but the famous housebreaker, we may be certain, was no
+lout.  It was by the extraordinary powers of his mind no less than
+by the vigour of his body, that he broke his strong prison with
+such imperfect implements, turning the very obstacles to service.
+Irvine, in the same case, would have sat down and spat, and
+grumbled curses.  He had the soul of a fat sheep, but, regarded as
+an artist's model, the exterior of a Greek God.  It was a cruel
+thought to persons less favoured in their birth, that this
+creature, endowed--to use the language of theatres--with
+extraordinary "means," should so manage to misemploy them that he
+looked ugly and almost deformed.  It was only by an effort of
+abstraction, and after many days, that you discovered what he was.
+
+By playing on the oaf's conceit, and standing closely over him, we
+got a path made round the corner of the dump to our door, so that
+we could come and go with decent ease; and he even enjoyed the
+work, for in that there were boulders to be plucked up bodily,
+bushes to be uprooted, and other occasions for athletic display:
+but cutting wood was a different matter.  Anybody could cut wood;
+and, besides, my wife was tired of supervising him, and had other
+things to attend to.  And, in short, days went by, and Irvine came
+daily, and talked and lounged and spat; but the firewood remained
+intact as sleepers on the platform or growing trees upon the
+mountainside.  Irvine, as a woodcutter, we could tolerate; but
+Irvine as a friend of the family, at so much a day, was too bald an
+imposition, and at length, on the afternoon of the fourth or fifth
+day of our connection, I explained to him, as clearly as I could,
+the light in which I had grown to regard his presence.  I pointed
+out to him that I could not continue to give him a salary for
+spitting on the floor; and this expression, which came after a good
+many others, at last penetrated his obdurate wits.  He rose at
+once, and said if that was the way he was going to be spoke to, he
+reckoned he would quit.  And, no one interposing, he departed.
+
+So far, so good.  But we had no firewood.  The next afternoon, I
+strolled down to Rufe's and consulted him on the subject.  It was a
+very droll interview, in the large, bare north room of the
+Silverado Hotel, Mrs. Hanson's patchwork on a frame, and Rufe, and
+his wife, and I, and the oaf himself, all more or less embarrassed.
+Rufe announced there was nobody in the neighbourhood but Irvine who
+could do a day's work for anybody.  Irvine, thereupon, refused to
+have any more to do with my service; he "wouldn't work no more for
+a man as had spoke to him's I had done."  I found myself on the
+point of the last humiliation--driven to beseech the creature whom
+I had just dismissed with insult:  but I took the high hand in
+despair, said there must be no talk of Irvine coming back unless
+matters were to be differently managed; that I would rather chop
+firewood for myself than be fooled; and, in short, the Hansons
+being eager for the lad's hire, I so imposed upon them with merely
+affected resolution, that they ended by begging me to re-employ him
+again, on a solemn promise that he should be more industrious.  The
+promise, I am bound to say, was kept.  We soon had a fine pile of
+firewood at our door; and if Caliban gave me the cold shoulder and
+spared me his conversation, I thought none the worse of him for
+that, nor did I find my days much longer for the deprivation.
+
+The leading spirit of the family was, I am inclined to fancy, Mrs.
+Hanson.  Her social brilliancy somewhat dazzled the others, and she
+had more of the small change of sense.  It was she who faced
+Kelmar, for instance; and perhaps, if she had been alone, Kelmar
+would have had no rule within her doors.  Rufe, to be sure, had a
+fine, sober, open-air attitude of mind, seeing the world without
+exaggeration--perhaps, we may even say, without enough; for he
+lacked, along with the others, that commercial idealism which puts
+so high a value on time and money.  Sanity itself is a kind of
+convention.  Perhaps Rufe was wrong; but, looking on life plainly,
+he was unable to perceive that croquet or poker were in any way
+less important than, for instance, mending his waggon.  Even his
+own profession, hunting, was dear to him mainly as a sort of play;
+even that he would have neglected, had it not appealed to his
+imagination.  His hunting-suit, for instance, had cost I should be
+afraid to say how many bucks--the currency in which he paid his
+way:  it was all befringed, after the Indian fashion, and it was
+dear to his heart.  The pictorial side of his daily business was
+never forgotten.  He was even anxious to stand for his picture in
+those buckskin hunting clothes; and I remember how he once warmed
+almost into enthusiasm, his dark blue eyes growing perceptibly
+larger, as he planned the composition in which he should appear,
+"with the horns of some real big bucks, and dogs, and a camp on a
+crick" (creek, stream).
+
+There was no trace in Irvine of this woodland poetry.  He did not
+care for hunting, nor yet for buckskin suits.  He had never
+observed scenery.  The world, as it appeared to him, was almost
+obliterated by his own great grinning figure in the foreground:
+Caliban Malvolio.  And it seems to me as if, in the persons of
+these brothers-in-law, we had the two sides of rusticity fairly
+well represented:  the hunter living really in nature; the
+clodhopper living merely out of society:  the one bent up in every
+corporal agent to capacity in one pursuit, doing at least one thing
+keenly and thoughtfully, and thoroughly alive to all that touches
+it; the other in the inert and bestial state, walking in a faint
+dream, and taking so dim an impression of the myriad sides of life
+that he is truly conscious of nothing but himself.  It is only in
+the fastnesses of nature, forests, mountains, and the back of man's
+beyond, that a creature endowed with five senses can grow up into
+the perfection of this crass and earthy vanity.  In towns or the
+busier country sides, he is roughly reminded of other men's
+existence; and if he learns no more, he learns at least to fear
+contempt.  But Irvine had come scatheless through life, conscious
+only of himself, of his great strength and intelligence; and in the
+silence of the universe, to which he did not listen, dwelling with
+delight on the sound of his own thoughts.
+
+
+
+THE SEA FOGS
+
+
+
+A change in the colour of the light usually called me in the
+morning.  By a certain hour, the long, vertical chinks in our
+western gable, where the boards had shrunk and separated, flashed
+suddenly into my eyes as stripes of dazzling blue, at once so dark
+and splendid that I used to marvel how the qualities could be
+combined.  At an earlier hour, the heavens in that quarter were
+still quietly coloured, but the shoulder of the mountain which
+shuts in the canyon already glowed with sunlight in a wonderful
+compound of gold and rose and green; and this too would kindle,
+although more mildly and with rainbow tints, the fissures of our
+crazy gable.  If I were sleeping heavily, it was the bold blue that
+struck me awake; if more lightly, then I would come to myself in
+that earlier and fairier fight.
+
+One Sunday morning, about five, the first brightness called me.  I
+rose and turned to the east, not for my devotions, but for air.
+The night had been very still.  The little private gale that blew
+every evening in our canyon, for ten minutes or perhaps a quarter
+of an hour, had swiftly blown itself out; in the hours that
+followed not a sigh of wind had shaken the treetops; and our
+barrack, for all its breaches, was less fresh that morning than of
+wont.  But I had no sooner reached the window than I forgot all
+else in the sight that met my eyes, and I made but two bounds into
+my clothes, and down the crazy plank to the platform.
+
+The sun was still concealed below the opposite hilltops, though it
+was shining already, not twenty feet above my head, on our own
+mountain slope.  But the scene, beyond a few near features, was
+entirely changed.  Napa valley was gone; gone were all the lower
+slopes and woody foothills of the range; and in their place, not a
+thousand feet below me, rolled a great level ocean.  It was as
+though I had gone to bed the night before, safe in a nook of inland
+mountains, and had awakened in a bay upon the coast.  I had seen
+these inundations from below; at Calistoga I had risen and gone
+abroad in the early morning, coughing and sneezing, under fathoms
+on fathoms of gray sea vapour, like a cloudy sky--a dull sight for
+the artist, and a painful experience for the invalid.  But to sit
+aloft one's self in the pure air and under the unclouded dome of
+heaven, and thus look down on the submergence of the valley, was
+strangely different and even delightful to the eyes.  Far away were
+hilltops like little islands.  Nearer, a smoky surf beat about the
+foot of precipices and poured into all the coves of these rough
+mountains.  The colour of that fog ocean was a thing never to be
+forgotten.  For an instant, among the Hebrides and just about
+sundown, I have seen something like it on the sea itself.  But the
+white was not so opaline; nor was there, what surprisingly
+increased the effect, that breathless, crystal stillness over all.
+Even in its gentlest moods the salt sea travails, moaning among the
+weeds or lisping on the sand; but that vast fog ocean lay in a
+trance of silence, nor did the sweet air of the morning tremble
+with a sound.
+
+As I continued to sit upon the dump, I began to observe that this
+sea was not so level as at first sight it appeared to be.  Away in
+the extreme south, a little hill of fog arose against the sky above
+the general surface, and as it had already caught the sun, it shone
+on the horizon like the topsails of some giant ship.  There were
+huge waves, stationary, as it seemed, like waves in a frozen sea;
+and yet, as I looked again, I was not sure but they were moving
+after all, with a slow and august advance.  And while I was yet
+doubting, a promontory of the some four or five miles away,
+conspicuous by a bouquet of tall pines, was in a single instant
+overtaken and swallowed up.  It reappeared in a little, with its
+pines, but this time as an islet, and only to be swallowed up once
+more and then for good.  This set me looking nearer, and I saw that
+in every cove along the line of mountains the fog was being piled
+in higher and higher, as though by some wind that was inaudible to
+me.  I could trace its progress, one pine tree first growing hazy
+and then disappearing after another; although sometimes there was
+none of this fore-running haze, but the whole opaque white ocean
+gave a start and swallowed a piece of mountain at a gulp.  It was
+to flee these poisonous fogs that I had left the seaboard, and
+climbed so high among the mountains.  And now, behold, here came
+the fog to besiege me in my chosen altitudes, and yet came so
+beautifully that my first thought was of welcome.
+
+The sun had now gotten much higher, and through all the gaps of the
+hills it cast long bars of gold across that white ocean.  An eagle,
+or some other very great bird of the mountain, came wheeling over
+the nearer pine-tops, and hung, poised and something sideways, as
+if to look abroad on that unwonted desolation, spying, perhaps with
+terror, for the eyries of her comrades.  Then, with a long cry, she
+disappeared again towards Lake County and the clearer air.  At
+length it seemed to me as if the flood were beginning to subside.
+The old landmarks, by whose disappearance I had measured its
+advance, here a crag, there a brave pine tree, now began, in the
+inverse order, to make their reappearance into daylight.  I judged
+all danger of the fog was over.  This was not Noah's flood; it was
+but a morning spring, and would now drift out seaward whence it
+came.  So, mightily relieved, and a good deal exhilarated by the
+sight, I went into the house to light the fire.
+
+I suppose it was nearly seven when I once more mounted the platform
+to look abroad.  The fog ocean had swelled up enormously since last
+I saw it; and a few hundred feet below me, in the deep gap where
+the Toll House stands and the road runs through into Lake County,
+it had already topped the slope, and was pouring over and down the
+other side like driving smoke.  The wind had climbed along with it;
+and though I was still in calm air, I could see the trees tossing
+below me, and their long, strident sighing mounted to me where I
+stood.
+
+Half an hour later, the fog had surmounted all the ridge on the
+opposite side of the gap, though a shoulder of the mountain still
+warded it out of our canyon.  Napa valley and its bounding hills
+were now utterly blotted out.  The fog, sunny white in the
+sunshine, was pouring over into Lake County in a huge, ragged
+cataract, tossing treetops appearing and disappearing in the spray.
+The air struck with a little chill, and set me coughing.  It smelt
+strong of the fog, like the smell of a washing-house, but with a
+shrewd tang of the sea salt.
+
+Had it not been for two things--the sheltering spur which answered
+as a dyke, and the great valley on the other side which rapidly
+engulfed whatever mounted--our own little platform in the canyon
+must have been already buried a hundred feet in salt and poisonous
+air.  As it was, the interest of the scene entirely occupied our
+minds.  We were set just out of the wind, and but just above the
+fog; we could listen to the voice of the one as to music on the
+stage; we could plunge our eyes down into the other, as into some
+flowing stream from over the parapet of a bridge; thus we looked on
+upon a strange, impetuous, silent, shifting exhibition of the
+powers of nature, and saw the familiar landscape changing from
+moment to moment like figures in a dream.
+
+The imagination loves to trifle with what is not.  Had this been
+indeed the deluge, I should have felt more strongly, but the
+emotion would have been similar in kind.  I played with the idea,
+as the child flees in delighted terror from the creations of his
+fancy.  The look of the thing helped me.  And when at last I began
+to flee up the mountain, it was indeed partly to escape from the
+raw air that kept me coughing, but it was also part in play.
+
+As I ascended the mountain-side, I came once more to overlook the
+upper surface of the fog; but it wore a different appearance from
+what I had beheld at daybreak.  For, first, the sun now fell on it
+from high overhead, and its surface shone and undulated like a
+great nor'land moor country, sheeted with untrodden morning snow.
+And next the new level must have been a thousand or fifteen hundred
+feet higher than the old, so that only five or six points of all
+the broken country below me, still stood out.  Napa valley was now
+one with Sonoma on the west.  On the hither side, only a thin
+scattered fringe of bluffs was unsubmerged; and through all the
+gaps the fog was pouring over, like an ocean, into the blue clear
+sunny country on the east.  There it was soon lost; for it fell
+instantly into the bottom of the valleys, following the water-shed;
+and the hilltops in that quarter were still clear cut upon the
+eastern sky.
+
+Through the Toll House gap and over the near ridges on the other
+side, the deluge was immense.  A spray of thin vapour was thrown
+high above it, rising and falling, and blown into fantastic shapes.
+The speed of its course was like a mountain torrent.  Here and
+there a few treetops were discovered and then whelmed again; and
+for one second, the bough of a dead pine beckoned out of the spray
+like the arm of a drowning man.  But still the imagination was
+dissatisfied, still the ear waited for something more.  Had this
+indeed been water (as it seemed so, to the eye), with what a plunge
+of reverberating thunder would it have rolled upon its course,
+disembowelling mountains and deracinating pines!  And yet water it
+was, and sea-water at that--true Pacific billows, only somewhat
+rarefied, rolling in mid air among the hilltops.
+
+I climbed still higher, among the red rattling gravel and dwarf
+underwood of Mount Saint Helena, until I could look right down upon
+Silverado, and admire the favoured nook in which it lay.  The sunny
+plain of fog was several hundred feet higher; behind the protecting
+spur a gigantic accumulation of cottony vapour threatened, with
+every second, to blow over and submerge our homestead; but the
+vortex setting past the Toll House was too strong; and there lay
+our little platform, in the arms of the deluge, but still enjoying
+its unbroken sunshine.  About eleven, however, thin spray came
+flying over the friendly buttress, and I began to think the fog had
+hunted out its Jonah after all.  But it was the last effort.  The
+wind veered while we were at dinner, and began to blow squally from
+the mountain summit; and by half-past one, all that world of sea-
+fogs was utterly routed and flying here and there into the south in
+little rags of cloud.  And instead of a lone sea-beach, we found
+ourselves once more inhabiting a high mountainside, with the clear
+green country far below us, and the light smoke of Calistoga
+blowing in the air.
+
+This was the great Russian campaign for that season.  Now and then,
+in the early morning, a little white lakelet of fog would be seen
+far down in Napa Valley; but the heights were not again assailed,
+nor was the surrounding world again shut off from Silverado.
+
+
+
+THE TOLL HOUSE
+
+
+
+The Toll House, standing alone by the wayside under nodding pines,
+with its streamlet and water-tank; its backwoods, toll-bar, and
+well trodden croquet ground; the ostler standing by the stable
+door, chewing a straw; a glimpse of the Chinese cook in the back
+parts; and Mr. Hoddy in the bar, gravely alert and serviceable, and
+equally anxious to lend or borrow books;--dozed all day in the
+dusty sunshine, more than half asleep.  There were no neighbours,
+except the Hansons up the hill.  The traffic on the road was
+infinitesimal; only, at rare intervals, a couple in a waggon, or a
+dusty farmer on a springboard, toiling over "the grade" to that
+metropolitan hamlet, Calistoga; and, at the fixed hours, the
+passage of the stages.
+
+The nearest building was the school-house, down the road; and the
+school-ma'am boarded at the Toll House, walking thence in the
+morning to the little brown shanty, where she taught the young ones
+of the district, and returning thither pretty weary in the
+afternoon.  She had chosen this outlying situation, I understood,
+for her health.  Mr. Corwin was consumptive; so was Rufe; so was
+Mr. Jennings, the engineer.  In short, the place was a kind of
+small Davos:  consumptive folk consorting on a hilltop in the most
+unbroken idleness.  Jennings never did anything that I could see,
+except now and then to fish, and generally to sit about in the bar
+and the verandah, waiting for something to happen.  Corwin and Rufe
+did as little as possible; and if the school-ma'am, poor lady, had
+to work pretty hard all morning, she subsided when it was over into
+much the same dazed beatitude as all the rest.
+
+Her special corner was the parlour--a very genteel room, with Bible
+prints, a crayon portrait of Mrs. Corwin in the height of fashion,
+a few years ago, another of her son (Mr. Corwin was not
+represented), a mirror, and a selection of dried grasses.  A large
+book was laid religiously on the table--"From Palace to Hovel," I
+believe, its name--full of the raciest experiences in England.  The
+author had mingled freely with all classes, the nobility
+particularly meeting him with open arms; and I must say that
+traveller had ill requited his reception.  His book, in short, was
+a capital instance of the Penny Messalina school of literature; and
+there arose from it, in that cool parlour, in that silent, wayside,
+mountain inn, a rank atmosphere of gold and blood and "Jenkins,"
+and the "Mysteries of London," and sickening, inverted snobbery,
+fit to knock you down.  The mention of this book reminds me of
+another and far racier picture of our island life.  The latter
+parts of Rocambole are surely too sparingly consulted in the
+country which they celebrate.  No man's education can be said to be
+complete, nor can he pronounce the world yet emptied of enjoyment,
+till he has made the acquaintance of "the Reverend Patterson,
+director of the Evangelical Society."  To follow the evolutions of
+that reverend gentleman, who goes through scenes in which even Mr.
+Duffield would hesitate to place a bishop, is to rise to new ideas.
+But, alas! there was no Patterson about the Toll House.  Only,
+alongside of "From Palace to Hovel," a sixpenny "Ouida" figured.
+So literature, you see, was not unrepresented.
+
+The school-ma'am had friends to stay with her, other school-ma'ams
+enjoying their holidays, quite a bevy of damsels.  They seemed
+never to go out, or not beyond the verandah, but sat close in the
+little parlour, quietly talking or listening to the wind among the
+trees.  Sleep dwelt in the Toll House, like a fixture:  summer
+sleep, shallow, soft, and dreamless.  A cuckoo-clock, a great
+rarity in such a place, hooted at intervals about the echoing
+house; and Mr. Jenning would open his eyes for a moment in the bar,
+and turn the leaf of a newspaper, and the resting school-ma'ams in
+the parlour would be recalled to the consciousness of their
+inaction.  Busy Mrs. Corwin and her busy Chinaman might be heard
+indeed, in the penetralia, pounding dough or rattling dishes; or
+perhaps Rufe had called up some of the sleepers for a game of
+croquet, and the hollow strokes of the mallet sounded far away
+among the woods:  but with these exceptions, it was sleep and
+sunshine and dust, and the wind in the pine trees, all day long.
+
+A little before stage time, that castle of indolence awoke.  The
+ostler threw his straw away and set to his preparations.  Mr.
+Jennings rubbed his eyes; happy Mr. Jennings, the something he had
+been waiting for all day about to happen at last!  The boarders
+gathered in the verandah, silently giving ear, and gazing down the
+road with shaded eyes.  And as yet there was no sign for the
+senses, not a sound, not a tremor of the mountain road.  The birds,
+to whom the secret of the hooting cuckoo is unknown, must have set
+down to instinct this premonitory bustle.
+
+And then the first of the two stages swooped upon the Toll House
+with a roar and in a cloud of dust; and the shock had not yet time
+to subside, before the second was abreast of it.  Huge concerns
+they were, well-horsed and loaded, the men in their shirt-sleeves,
+the women swathed in veils, the long whip cracking like a pistol;
+and as they charged upon that slumbering hostelry, each shepherding
+a dust storm, the dead place blossomed into life and talk and
+clatter.  This the Toll House?--with its city throng, its jostling
+shoulders, its infinity of instant business in the bar?  The mind
+would not receive it!  The heartfelt bustle of that hour is hardly
+credible; the thrill of the great shower of letters from the post-
+bag, the childish hope and interest with which one gazed in all
+these strangers' eyes.  They paused there but to pass:  the blue-
+clad China-boy, the San Francisco magnate, the mystery in the dust
+coat, the secret memoirs in tweed, the ogling, well-shod lady with
+her troop of girls; they did but flash and go; they were hull-down
+for us behind life's ocean, and we but hailed their topsails on the
+line.  Yet, out of our great solitude of four and twenty mountain
+hours, we thrilled to their momentary presence gauged and divined
+them, loved and hated; and stood light-headed in that storm of
+human electricity.  Yes, like Piccadilly circus, this is also one
+of life's crossing-places.  Here I beheld one man, already famous
+or infamous, a centre of pistol-shots:  and another who, if not yet
+known to rumour, will fill a column of the Sunday paper when he
+comes to hang--a burly, thick-set, powerful Chinese desperado, six
+long bristles upon either lip; redolent of whiskey, playing cards,
+and pistols; swaggering in the bar with the lowest assumption of
+the lowest European manners; rapping out blackguard English oaths
+in his canorous oriental voice; and combining in one person the
+depravities of two races and two civilizations.  For all his lust
+and vigour, he seemed to look cold upon me from the valley of the
+shadow of the gallows.  He imagined a vain thing; and while he
+drained his cock-tail, Holbein's death was at his elbow.  Once,
+too, I fell in talk with another of these flitting strangers--like
+the rest, in his shirt-sleeves and all begrimed with dust--and the
+next minute we were discussing Paris and London, theatres and
+wines.  To him, journeying from one human place to another, this
+was a trifle; but to me!  No, Mr. Lillie, I have not forgotten it.
+
+And presently the city-tide was at its flood and began to ebb.
+Life runs in Piccadilly Circus, say, from nine to one, and then,
+there also, ebbs into the small hours of the echoing policeman and
+the lamps and stars.  But the Toll House is far up stream, and near
+its rural springs; the bubble of the tide but touches it.  Before
+you had yet grasped your pleasure, the horses were put to, the loud
+whips volleyed, and the tide was gone.  North and south had the two
+stages vanished, the towering dust subsided in the woods; but there
+was still an interval before the flush had fallen on your cheeks,
+before the ear became once more contented with the silence, or the
+seven sleepers of the Toll House dozed back to their accustomed
+corners.  Yet a little, and the ostler would swing round the great
+barrier across the road; and in the golden evening, that dreamy inn
+begin to trim its lamps and spread the board for supper.
+
+As I recall the place--the green dell below; the spires of pine;
+the sun-warm, scented air; that gray, gabled inn, with its faint
+stirrings of life amid the slumber of the mountains--I slowly awake
+to a sense of admiration, gratitude, and almost love.  A fine
+place, after all, for a wasted life to doze away in--the cuckoo
+clock hooting of its far home country; the croquet mallets,
+eloquent of English lawns; the stages daily bringing news of--the
+turbulent world away below there; and perhaps once in the summer, a
+salt fog pouring overhead with its tale of the Pacific.
+
+
+
+A STARRY DRIVE
+
+
+
+In our rule at Silverado, there was a melancholy interregnum.  The
+queen and the crown prince with one accord fell sick; and, as I was
+sick to begin with, our lone position on Mount Saint Helena was no
+longer tenable, and we had to hurry back to Calistoga and a cottage
+on the green.  By that time we had begun to realize the
+difficulties of our position.  We had found what an amount of
+labour it cost to support life in our red canyon; and it was the
+dearest desire of our hearts to get a China-boy to go along with us
+when we returned.  We could have given him a whole house to
+himself, self-contained, as they say in the advertisements; and on
+the money question we were prepared to go far.  Kong Sam Kee, the
+Calistoga washerman, was entrusted with the affair; and from day to
+day it languished on, with protestations on our part and
+mellifluous excuses on the part of Kong Sam Kee.
+
+At length, about half-past eight of our last evening, with the
+waggon ready harnessed to convey us up the grade, the washerman,
+with a somewhat sneering air, produced the boy.  He was a handsome,
+gentlemanly lad, attired in rich dark blue, and shod with snowy
+white; but, alas! he had heard rumours of Silverado.  He know it
+for a lone place on the mountain-side, with no friendly wash-house
+near by, where he might smoke a pipe of opium o' nights with other
+China-boys, and lose his little earnings at the game of tan; and he
+first backed out for more money; and then, when that demand was
+satisfied, refused to come point-blank.  He was wedded to his wash-
+houses; he had no taste for the rural life; and we must go to our
+mountain servantless.  It must have been near half an hour before
+we reached that conclusion, standing in the midst of Calistoga high
+street under the stars, and the China-boy and Kong Sam Kee singing
+their pigeon English in the sweetest voices and with the most
+musical inflections.
+
+We were not, however, to return alone; for we brought with us Joe
+Strong, the painter, a most good-natured comrade and a capital hand
+at an omelette.  I do not know in which capacity he was most
+valued--as a cook or a companion; and he did excellently well in
+both.
+
+The Kong Sam Kee negotiation had delayed us unduly; it must have
+been half-past nine before we left Calistoga, and night came fully
+ere we struck the bottom of the grade.  I have never seen such a
+night.  It seemed to throw calumny in the teeth of all the painters
+that ever dabbled in starlight.  The sky itself was of a ruddy,
+powerful, nameless, changing colour, dark and glossy like a
+serpent's back.  The stars, by innumerable millions, stuck boldly
+forth like lamps.  The milky way was bright, like a moonlit cloud;
+half heaven seemed milky way.  The greater luminaries shone each
+more clearly than a winter's moon.  Their light was dyed in every
+sort of colour--red, like fire; blue, like steel; green, like the
+tracks of sunset; and so sharply did each stand forth in its own
+lustre that there was no appearance of that flat, star-spangled
+arch we know so well in pictures, but all the hollow of heaven was
+one chaos of contesting luminaries--a hurry-burly of stars.
+Against this the hills and rugged treetops stood out redly dark.
+
+As we continued to advance, the lesser lights and milky ways first
+grew pale, and then vanished; the countless hosts of heaven
+dwindled in number by successive millions; those that still shone
+had tempered their exceeding brightness and fallen back into their
+customary wistful distance; and the sky declined from its first
+bewildering splendour into the appearance of a common night.
+Slowly this change proceeded, and still there was no sign of any
+cause.  Then a whiteness like mist was thrown over the spurs of the
+mountain.  Yet a while, and, as we turned a corner, a great leap of
+silver light and net of forest shadows fell across the road and
+upon our wondering waggonful; and, swimming low among the trees, we
+beheld a strange, misshapen, waning moon, half-tilted on her back.
+
+"Where are ye when the moon appears?" so the old poet sang, half-
+taunting, to the stars, bent upon a courtly purpose.
+
+
+"As the sunlight round the dim earth's midnight tower of shadow
+pours,
+Streaming past the dim, wide portals,
+Viewless to the eyes of mortals,
+Till it floods the moon's pale islet or the morning's golden
+shores."
+
+
+So sings Mr. Trowbridge, with a noble inspiration.  And so had the
+sunlight flooded that pale islet of the moon, and her lit face put
+out, one after another, that galaxy of stars.  The wonder of the
+drive was over; but, by some nice conjunction of clearness in the
+air and fit shadow in the valley where we travelled, we had seen
+for a little while that brave display of the midnight heavens.  It
+was gone, but it had been; nor shall I ever again behold the stars
+with the same mind.  He who has seen the sea commoved with a great
+hurricane, thinks of it very differently from him who has seen it
+only in a calm.  And the difference between a calm and a hurricane
+is not greatly more striking than that between the ordinary face of
+night and the splendour that shone upon us in that drive.  Two in
+our waggon knew night as she shines upon the tropics, but even that
+bore no comparison.  The nameless colour of the sky, the hues of
+the star-fire, and the incredible projection of the stars
+themselves, starting from their orbits, so that the eye seemed to
+distinguish their positions in the hollow of space--these were
+things that we had never seen before and shall never see again.
+
+Meanwhile, in this altered night, we proceeded on our way among the
+scents and silence of the forest, reached the top of the grade,
+wound up by Hanson's, and came at last to a stand under the flying
+gargoyle of the chute.  Sam, who had been lying back, fast asleep,
+with the moon on his face, got down, with the remark that it was
+pleasant "to be home."  The waggon turned and drove away, the noise
+gently dying in the woods, and we clambered up the rough path,
+Caliban's great feat of engineering, and came home to Silverado.
+
+The moon shone in at the eastern doors and windows, and over the
+lumber on the platform.  The one tall pine beside. the ledge was
+steeped in silver.  Away up the canyon, a wild cat welcomed us with
+three discordant squalls.  But once we had lit a candle, and began
+to review our improvements, homely in either sense, and count our
+stores, it was wonderful what a feeling of possession and
+permanence grow up in the hearts of the lords of Silverado.  A bed
+had still to be made up for Strong, and the morning's water to be
+fetched, with clinking pail; and as we set about these household
+duties, and showed off our wealth and conveniences before the
+stranger, and had a glass of wine, I think, in honour of our
+return, and trooped at length one after another up the flying
+bridge of plank, and lay down to sleep in our shattered, moon-
+pierced barrack, we were among the happiest sovereigns in the
+world, and certainly ruled over the most contented people.  Yet, in
+our absence, the palace had been sacked.  Wild cats, so the Hansons
+said, had broken in and carried off a side of bacon, a hatchet, and
+two knives.
+
+
+
+EPISODES IN THE STORY OF A MINE
+
+
+
+No one could live at Silverado and not be curious about the story
+of the mine.  We were surrounded by so many evidences of expense
+and toil, we lived so entirely in the wreck of that great
+enterprise, like mites in the ruins of a cheese, that the idea of
+the old din and bustle haunted our repose.  Our own house, the
+forge, the dump, the chutes, the rails, the windlass, the mass of
+broken plant; the two tunnels, one far below in the green dell, the
+other on the platform where we kept our wine; the deep shaft, with
+the sun-glints and the water-drops; above all, the ledge, that
+great gaping slice out of the mountain shoulder, propped apart by
+wooden wedges, on whose immediate margin, high above our heads, the
+one tall pine precariously nodded--these stood for its greatness;
+while, the dog-hutch, boot-jacks, old boots, old tavern bills, and
+the very beds that we inherited from bygone miners, put in human
+touches and realized for us the story of the past.
+
+I have sat on an old sleeper, under the thick madronas near the
+forge, with just a look over the dump on the green world below, and
+seen the sun lying broad among the wreck, and heard the silence
+broken only by the tinkling water in the shaft, or a stir of the
+royal family about the battered palace, and my mind has gone back
+to the epoch of the Stanleys and the Chapmans, with a grand tutti
+of pick and drill, hammer and anvil, echoing about the canyon; the
+assayer hard at it in our dining-room; the carts below on the road,
+and their cargo of red mineral bounding and thundering down the
+iron chute.  And now all gone--all fallen away into this sunny
+silence and desertion:  a family of squatters dining in the
+assayer's office, making their beds in the big sleeping room
+erstwhile so crowded, keeping their wine in the tunnel that once
+rang with picks.
+
+But Silverado itself, although now fallen in its turn into decay,
+was once but a mushroom, and had succeeded to other mines and other
+flitting cities.  Twenty years ago, away down the glen on the Lake
+County side there was a place, Jonestown by name, with two thousand
+inhabitants dwelling under canvas, and one roofed house for the
+sale of whiskey.  Round on the western side of Mount Saint Helena,
+there was at the same date, a second large encampment, its name, if
+it ever had one, lost for me.  Both of these have perished, leaving
+not a stick and scarce a memory behind them.  Tide after tide of
+hopeful miners have thus flowed and ebbed about the mountain,
+coming and going, now by lone prospectors, now with a rush.  Last,
+in order of time came Silverado, reared the big mill, in the
+valley, founded the town which is now represented, monumentally, by
+Hanson's, pierced all these slaps and shafts and tunnels, and in
+turn declined and died away.
+
+
+"Our noisy years seem moments in the wake
+Of the eternal silence."
+
+
+As to the success of Silverado in its time of being, two reports
+were current.  According to the first, six hundred thousand dollars
+were taken out of that great upright seam, that still hung open
+above us on crazy wedges.  Then the ledge pinched out, and there
+followed, in quest of the remainder, a great drifting and
+tunnelling in all directions, and a great consequent effusion of
+dollars, until, all parties being sick of the expense, the mine was
+deserted, and the town decamped.  According to the second version,
+told me with much secrecy of manner, the whole affair, mine, mill,
+and town, were parts of one majestic swindle.  There had never come
+any silver out of any portion of the mine; there was no silver to
+come.  At midnight trains of packhorses might have been observed
+winding by devious tracks about the shoulder of the mountain.  They
+came from far away, from Amador or Placer, laden with silver in
+"old cigar boxes."  They discharged their load at Silverado, in the
+hour of sleep; and before the morning they were gone again with
+their mysterious drivers to their unknown source.  In this way,
+twenty thousand pounds' worth of silver was smuggled in under cover
+of night, in these old cigar boxes; mixed with Silverado mineral;
+carted down to the mill; crushed, amalgated, and refined, and
+despatched to the city as the proper product of the mine.  Stock-
+jobbing, if it can cover such expenses, must be a profitable
+business in San Francisco.
+
+I give these two versions as I got them.  But I place little
+reliance on either, my belief in history having been greatly
+shaken.  For it chanced that I had come to dwell in Silverado at a
+critical hour; great events in its history were about to happen--
+did happen, as I am led to believe; nay, and it will be seen that I
+played a part in that revolution myself.  And yet from first to
+last I never had a glimmer of an idea what was going on; and even
+now, after full reflection, profess myself at sea.  That there was
+some obscure intrigue of the cigar-box order, and that I, in the
+character of a wooden puppet, set pen to paper in the interest of
+somebody, so much, and no more, is certain.
+
+Silverado, then under my immediate sway, belonged to one whom I
+will call a Mr. Ronalds.  I only knew him through the
+extraordinarily distorting medium of local gossip, now as a
+momentous jobber; now as a dupe to point an adage; and again, and
+much more probably, as an ordinary Christian gentleman like you or
+me, who had opened a mine and worked it for a while with better and
+worse fortune.  So, through a defective window-pane, you may see
+the passer-by shoot up into a hunchbacked giant or dwindle into a
+potbellied dwarf.
+
+To Ronalds, at least, the mine belonged; but the notice by which he
+held it would ran out upon the 30th of June--or rather, as I
+suppose, it had run out already, and the month of grace would
+expire upon that day, after which any American citizen might post a
+notice of his own, and make Silverado his.  This, with a sort of
+quiet slyness, Rufe told me at an early period of our acquaintance.
+There was no silver, of course; the mine "wasn't worth nothing, Mr.
+Stevens," but there was a deal of old iron and wood around, and to
+gain possession of this old wood and iron, and get a right to the
+water, Rufe proposed, if I had no objections, to "jump the claim."
+
+Of course, I had no objection.  But I was filled with wonder.  If
+all he wanted was the wood and iron, what, in the name of fortune,
+was to prevent him taking them?  "His right there was none to
+dispute."  He might lay hands on all to-morrow, as the wild cats
+had laid hands upon our knives and hatchet.  Besides, was this mass
+of heavy mining plant worth transportation?  If it was, why had not
+the rightful owners carted it away?  If it was, would they not
+preserve their title to these movables, even after they had lost
+their title to the mine?  And if it were not, what the better was
+Rufe?  Nothing would grow at Silverado; there was even no wood to
+cut; beyond a sense of property, there was nothing to be gained.
+Lastly, was it at all credible that Ronalds would forget what Rufe
+remembered?  The days of grace were not yet over:  any fine morning
+he might appear, paper in hand, and enter for another year on his
+inheritance.  However, it was none of my business; all seemed
+legal; Rufe or Ronalds, all was one to me.
+
+On the morning of the 27th, Mrs. Hanson appeared with the milk as
+usual, in her sun-bonnet.  The time would be out on Tuesday, she
+reminded us, and bade me be in readiness to play my part, though I
+had no idea what it was to be.  And suppose Ronalds came? we asked.
+She received the idea with derision, laughing aloud with all her
+fine teeth.  He could not find the mine to save his life, it
+appeared, without Rufe to guide him.  Last year, when he came, they
+heard him "up and down the road a hollerin' and a raisin' Cain."
+And at last he had to come to the Hansons in despair, and bid Rufe,
+"Jump into your pants and shoes, and show me where this old mine
+is, anyway!"  Seeing that Ronalds had laid out so much money in the
+spot, and that a beaten road led right up to the bottom of the
+clump, I thought this a remarkable example.  The sense of locality
+must be singularly in abeyance in the case of Ronalds.
+
+That same evening, supper comfortably over, Joe Strong busy at work
+on a drawing of the dump and the opposite hills, we were all out on
+the platform together, sitting there, under the tented heavens,
+with the same sense of privacy as if we had been cabined in a
+parlour, when the sound of brisk footsteps came mounting up the
+path.  We pricked our ears at this, for the tread seemed lighter
+and firmer than was usual with our country neighbours.  And
+presently, sure enough, two town gentlemen, with cigars and kid
+gloves, came debauching past the house.  They looked in that place
+like a blasphemy.
+
+"Good evening," they said.  For none of us had stirred; we all sat
+stiff with wonder.
+
+"Good evening," I returned; and then, to put them at their ease, "A
+stiff climb," I added.
+
+"Yes," replied the leader; "but we have to thank you for this
+path."
+
+I did not like the man's tone.  None of us liked it.  He did not
+seem embarrassed by the meeting, but threw us his remarks like
+favours, and strode magisterially by us towards the shaft and
+tunnel.
+
+Presently we heard his voice raised to his companion.  "We drifted
+every sort of way, but couldn't strike the ledge."  Then again:
+"It pinched out here."  And once more:  "Every minor that ever
+worked upon it says there's bound to be a ledge somewhere."
+
+These were the snatches of his talk that reached us, and they had a
+damning significance.  We, the lords of Silverado, had come face to
+face with our superior.  It is the worst of all quaint and of all
+cheap ways of life that they bring us at last to the pinch of some
+humiliation.  I liked well enough to be a squatter when there was
+none but Hanson by; before Ronalds, I will own, I somewhat quailed.
+I hastened to do him fealty, said I gathered he was the Squattee,
+and apologized.  He threatened me with ejection, in a manner grimly
+pleasant--more pleasant to him, I fancy, than to me; and then he
+passed off into praises of the former state of Silverado.  "It was
+the busiest little mining town you ever saw:" a population of
+between a thousand and fifteen hundred souls, the engine in full
+blast, the mill newly erected; nothing going but champagne, and
+hope the order of the day.  Ninety thousand dollars came out; a
+hundred and forty thousand were put in, making a net loss of fifty
+thousand.  The last days, I gathered, the days of John Stanley,
+were not so bright; the champagne had ceased to flow, the
+population was already moving elsewhere, and Silverado had begun to
+wither in the branch before it was cut at the root.  The last shot
+that was fired knocked over the stove chimney, and made that hole
+in the roof of our barrack, through which the sun was wont to visit
+slug-a-beds towards afternoon.  A noisy, last shot, to inaugurate
+the days of silence.
+
+Throughout this interview, my conscience was a good deal exercised;
+and I was moved to throw myself on my knees and own the intended
+treachery.  But then I had Hanson to consider.  I was in much the
+same position as Old Rowley, that royal humourist, whom "the rogue
+had taken into his confidence."  And again, here was Ronalds on the
+spot.  He must know the day of the month as well as Hanson and I.
+If a broad hint were necessary, he had the broadest in the world.
+For a large board had been nailed by the crown prince on the very
+front of our house, between the door and window, painted in
+cinnabar--the pigment of the country--with doggrel rhymes and
+contumelious pictures, and announcing, in terms unnecessarily
+figurative, that the trick was already played, the claim already
+jumped, and Master Sam the legitimate successor of Mr. Ronalds.
+But no, nothing could save that man; quem deus vult perdere, prius
+dementat.  As he came so he went, and left his rights depending.
+
+Late at night, by Silverado reckoning, and after we were all abed,
+Mrs. Hanson returned to give us the newest of her news.  It was
+like a scene in a ship's steerage:  all of us abed in our different
+tiers, the single candle struggling with the darkness, and this
+plump, handsome woman, seated on an upturned valise beside the
+bunks, talking and showing her fine teeth, and laughing till the
+rafters rang.  Any ship, to be sure, with a hundredth part as many
+holes in it as our barrack, must long ago have gone to her last
+port.  Up to that time I had always imagined Mrs. Hanson's
+loquacity to be mere incontinence, that she said what was uppermost
+for the pleasure of speaking, and laughed and laughed again as a
+kind of musical accompaniment.  But I now found there was an art in
+it, I found it less communicative than silence itself.  I wished to
+know why Ronalds had come; how he had found his way without Rufe;
+and why, being on the spot, he had not refreshed his title.  She
+talked interminably on, but her replies were never answers.  She
+fled under a cloud of words; and when I had made sure that she was
+purposely eluding me, I dropped the subject in my turn, and let her
+rattle where she would.
+
+She had come to tell us that, instead of waiting for Tuesday, the
+claim was to be jumped on the morrow.  How?  If the time were not
+out, it was impossible.  Why?  If Ronalds had come and gone, and
+done nothing, there was the less cause for hurry.  But again I
+could reach no satisfaction.  The claim was to be jumped next
+morning, that was all that she would condescend upon.
+
+And yet it was not jumped the next morning, nor yet the next, and a
+whole week had come and gone before we heard more of this exploit.
+That day week, however, a day of great heat, Hanson, with a little
+roll of paper in his hand, and the eternal pipe alight; Breedlove,
+his large, dull friend, to act, I suppose, as witness; Mrs. Hanson,
+in her Sunday best; and all the children, from the oldest to the
+youngest;--arrived in a procession, tailing one behind another up
+the path.  Caliban was absent, but he had been chary of his
+friendly visits since the row; and with that exception, the whole
+family was gathered together as for a marriage or a christening.
+Strong was sitting at work, in the shade of the dwarf madronas near
+the forge; and they planted themselves about him in a circle, one
+on a stone, another on the waggon rails, a third on a piece of
+plank.  Gradually the children stole away up the canyon to where
+there was another chute, somewhat smaller than the one across the
+dump; and down this chute, for the rest of the afternoon, they
+poured one avalanche of stones after another, waking the echoes of
+the glen.  Meantime we elders sat together on the platform, Hanson
+and his friend smoking in silence like Indian sachems, Mrs. Hanson
+rattling on as usual with an adroit volubility, saying nothing, but
+keeping the party at their ease like a courtly hostess.
+
+Not a word occurred about the business of the day.  Once, twice,
+and thrice I tried to slide the subject in, but was discouraged by
+the stoic apathy of Rufe, and beaten down before the pouring
+verbiage of his wife.  There is nothing of the Indian brave about
+me, and I began to grill with impatience.  At last, like a highway
+robber, I cornered Hanson, and bade him stand and deliver his
+business.  Thereupon he gravely rose, as though to hint that this
+was not a proper place, nor the subject one suitable for squaws,
+and I, following his example, led him up the plank into our
+barrack.  There he bestowed himself on a box, and unrolled his
+papers with fastidious deliberation.  There were two sheets of
+note-paper, and an old mining notice, dated May 30th, 1879, part
+print, part manuscript, and the latter much obliterated by the
+rains.  It was by this identical piece of paper that the mine had
+been held last year.  For thirteen months it had endured the
+weather and the change of seasons on a cairn behind the shoulder of
+the canyon; and it was now my business, spreading it before me on
+the table, and sitting on a valise, to copy its terms, with some
+necessary changes, twice over on the two sheets of note-paper.  One
+was then to be placed on the same cairn--a "mound of rocks" the
+notice put it; and the other to be lodged for registration.
+
+Rufe watched me, silently smoking, till I came to the place for the
+locator's name at the end of the first copy; and when I proposed
+that he should sign, I thought I saw a scare in his eye.  "I don't
+think that'll be necessary," he said slowly; "just you write it
+down."  Perhaps this mighty hunter, who was the most active member
+of the local school board, could not write.  There would be nothing
+strange in that.  The constable of Calistoga is, and has been for
+years, a bed-ridden man, and, if I remember rightly, blind.  He had
+more need of the emoluments than another, it was explained; and it
+was easy for him to "depytize," with a strong accent on the last.
+So friendly and so free are popular institutions.
+
+When I had done my scrivening, Hanson strolled out, and addressed
+Breedlove, "Will you step up here a bit?" and after they had
+disappeared a little while into the chaparral and madrona thicket,
+they came back again, minus a notice, and the deed was done.  The
+claim was jumped; a tract of mountain-side, fifteen hundred feet
+long by six hundred wide, with all the earth's precious bowels, had
+passed from Ronalds to Hanson, and, in the passage, changed its
+name from the "Mammoth" to the "Calistoga."  I had tried to get
+Rufe to call it after his wife, after himself, and after Garfield,
+the Republican Presidential candidate of the hour--since then
+elected, and, alas! dead--but all was in vain.  The claim had once
+been called the Calistoga before, and he seemed to feel safety in
+returning to that.
+
+And so the history of that mine became once more plunged in
+darkness, lit only by some monster pyrotechnical displays of
+gossip.  And perhaps the most curious feature of the whole matter
+is this:  that we should have dwelt in this quiet corner of the
+mountains, with not a dozen neighbours, and yet struggled all the
+while, like desperate swimmers, in this sea of falsities and
+contradictions.  Wherever a man is, there will be a lie.
+
+
+
+TOILS AND PLEASURES
+
+
+
+I must try to convey some notion of our life, of how the days
+passed and what pleasure we took in them, of what there was to do
+and how we set about doing it, in our mountain hermitage.  The
+house, after we had repaired the worst of the damages, and filled
+in some of the doors and windows with white cotton cloth, became a
+healthy and a pleasant dwelling-place, always airy and dry, and
+haunted by the outdoor perfumes of the glen.  Within, it had the
+look of habitation, the human look.  You had only to go into the
+third room, which we did not use, and see its stones, its sifting
+earth, its tumbled litter; and then return to our lodging, with the
+beds made, the plates on the rack, the pail of bright water behind
+the door, the stove crackling in a corner, and perhaps the table
+roughly laid against a meal,--and man's order, the little clean
+spots that he creates to dwell in, were at once contrasted with the
+rich passivity of nature.  And yet our house was everywhere so
+wrecked and shattered, the air came and went so freely, the sun
+found so many portholes, the golden outdoor glow shone in so many
+open chinks, that we enjoyed, at the same time, some of the
+comforts of a roof and much of the gaiety and brightness of al
+fresco life.  A single shower of rain, to be sure, and we should
+have been drowned out like mice.  But ours was a Californian
+summer, and an earthquake was a far likelier accident than a shower
+of rain.
+
+Trustful in this fine weather, we kept the house for kitchen and
+bedroom, and used the platform as our summer parlour.  The sense of
+privacy, as I have said already, was complete.  We could look over
+the clump on miles of forest and rough hilltop; our eyes commanded
+some of Napa Valley, where the train ran, and the little country
+townships sat so close together along the line of the rail.  But
+here there was no man to intrude.  None but the Hansons were our
+visitors.  Even they came but at long intervals, or twice daily, at
+a stated hour, with milk.  So our days, as they were never
+interrupted, drew out to the greater length; hour melted insensibly
+into hour; the household duties, though they were many, and some of
+them laborious, dwindled into mere islets of business in a sea of
+sunny day-time; and it appears to me, looking back, as though the
+far greater part of our life at Silverado had been passed, propped
+upon an elbow, or seated on a plank, listening to the silence that
+there is among the hills.
+
+My work, it is true, was over early in the morning.  I rose before
+any one else, lit the stove, put on the water to boil, and strolled
+forth upon the platform to wait till it was ready.  Silverado would
+then be still in shadow, the sun shining on the mountain higher up.
+A clean smell of trees, a smell of the earth at morning, hung in
+the air.  Regularly, every day, there was a single bird, not
+singing, but awkwardly chirruping among the green madronas, and the
+sound was cheerful, natural, and stirring.  It did not hold the
+attention, nor interrupt the thread of meditation, like a blackbird
+or a nightingale; it was mere woodland prattle, of which the mind
+was conscious like a perfume.  The freshness of these morning
+seasons remained with me far on into the day.
+
+As soon as the kettle boiled, I made porridge and coffee; and that,
+beyond the literal drawing of water, and the preparation of
+kindling, which it would be hyperbolical to call the hewing of
+wood, ended my domestic duties for the day.  Thenceforth my wife
+laboured single-handed in the palace, and I lay or wandered on the
+platform at my own sweet will.  The little corner near the forge,
+where we found a refuge under the madronas from the unsparing early
+sun, is indeed connected in my mind with some nightmare encounters
+over Euclid, and the Latin Grammar.  These were known as Sam's
+lessons.  He was supposed to be the victim and the sufferer; but
+here there must have been some misconception, for whereas I
+generally retired to bed after one of these engagements, he was no
+sooner set free than he dashed up to the Chinaman's house, where he
+had installed a printing press, that great element of civilization,
+and the sound of his labours would be faintly audible about the
+canyon half the day.
+
+To walk at all was a laborious business; the foot sank and slid,
+the boots were cut to pieces, among sharp, uneven, rolling stones.
+When we crossed the platform in any direction, it was usual to lay
+a course, following as much as possible the line of waggon rails.
+Thus, if water were to be drawn, the water-carrier left the house
+along some tilting planks that we had laid down, and not laid down
+very well.  These carried him to that great highroad, the railway;
+and the railway served him as far as to the head of the shaft.  But
+from thence to the spring and back again he made the best of his
+unaided way, staggering among the stones, and wading in low growth
+of the calcanthus, where the rattlesnakes lay hissing at his
+passage.  Yet I liked to draw water.  It was pleasant to dip the
+gray metal pail into the clean, colourless, cool water; pleasant to
+carry it back, with the water ripping at the edge, and a broken
+sunbeam quivering in the midst.
+
+But the extreme roughness of the walking confined us in common
+practice to the platform, and indeed to those parts of it that were
+most easily accessible along the line of rails.  The rails came
+straight forward from the shaft, here and there overgrown with
+little green bushes, but still entire, and still carrying a truck,
+which it was Sam's delight to trundle to and fro by the hour with
+various ladings.  About midway down the platform, the railroad
+trended to the right, leaving our house and coasting along the far
+side within a few yards of the madronas and the forge, and not far
+of the latter, ended in a sort of platform on the edge of the dump.
+There, in old days, the trucks were tipped, and their load sent
+thundering down the chute.  There, besides, was the only spot where
+we could approach the margin of the dump.  Anywhere else, you took
+your life in your right hand when you came within a yard and a half
+to peer over.  For at any moment the dump might begin to slide and
+carry you down and bury you below its ruins.  Indeed, the
+neighbourhood of an old mine is a place beset with dangers.  For as
+still as Silverado was, at any moment the report of rotten wood
+might tell us that the platform had fallen into the shaft; the dump
+might begin to pour into the road below; or a wedge slip in the
+great upright seam, and hundreds of tons of mountain bury the scene
+of our encampment.
+
+I have already compared the dump to a rampart, built certainly by
+some rude people, and for prehistoric wars.  It was likewise a
+frontier.  All below was green and woodland, the tall pines soaring
+one above another, each with a firm outline and full spread of
+bough.  All above was arid, rocky, and bald.  The great spout of
+broken mineral, that had dammed the canyon up, was a creature of
+man's handiwork, its material dug out with a pick and powder, and
+spread by the service of the tracks.  But nature herself, in that
+upper district, seemed to have had an eye to nothing besides
+mining; and even the natural hill-side was all sliding gravel and
+precarious boulder.  Close at the margin of the well leaves would
+decay to skeletons and mummies, which at length some stronger gust
+would carry clear of the canyon and scatter in the subjacent woods.
+Even moisture and decaying vegetable matter could not, with all
+nature's alchemy, concoct enough soil to nourish a few poor
+grasses.  It is the same, they say, in the neighbourhood of all
+silver mines; the nature of that precious rock being stubborn with
+quartz and poisonous with cinnabar.  Both were plenty in our
+Silverado.  The stones sparkled white in the sunshine with quartz;
+they were all stained red with cinnabar.  Here, doubtless, came the
+Indians of yore to paint their faces for the war-path; and
+cinnabar, if I remember rightly, was one of the few articles of
+Indian commerce.  Now, Sam had it in his undisturbed possession, to
+pound down and slake, and paint his rude designs with.  But to me
+it had always a fine flavour of poetry, compounded out of Indian
+story and Hawthornden's allusion:
+
+
+"Desire, alas! I desire a Zeuxis new,
+From Indies borrowing gold, from Eastern skies
+Most bright cinoper . . ."
+
+
+Yet this is but half the picture; our Silverado platform has
+another side to it.  Though there was no soil, and scarce a blade
+of grass, yet out of these tumbled gravel-heaps and broken
+boulders, a flower garden bloomed as at home in a conservatory.
+Calcanthus crept, like a hardy weed, all over our rough parlour,
+choking the railway, and pushing forth its rusty, aromatic cones
+from between two blocks of shattered mineral.  Azaleas made a big
+snow-bed just above the well.  The shoulder of the hill waved white
+with Mediterranean heath.  In the crannies of the ledge and about
+the spurs of the tall pine, a red flowering stone-plant hung in
+clusters.  Even the low, thorny chaparral was thick with pea-like
+blossom.  Close at the foot of our path nutmegs prospered,
+delightful to the sight and smell.  At sunrise, and again late at
+night, the scent of the sweet bay trees filled the canyon, and the
+down-blowing night wind must have borne it hundreds of feet into
+the outer air.
+
+All this vegetation, to be sure, was stunted.  The madrona was here
+no bigger than the manzanita; the bay was but a stripling shrub;
+the very pines, with four or five exceptions in all our upper
+canyon, were not so tall as myself, or but a little taller, and the
+most of them came lower than my waist.  For a prosperous forest
+tree, we must look below, where the glen was crowded with green
+spires.  But for flowers and ravishing perfume, we had none to
+envy:  our heap of road-metal was thick with bloom, like a hawthorn
+in the front of June; our red, baking angle in the mountain, a
+laboratory of poignant scents.  It was an endless wonder to my
+mind, as I dreamed about the platform, following the progress of
+the shadows, where the madrona with its leaves, the azalea and
+calcanthus with their blossoms, could find moisture to support such
+thick, wet, waxy growths, or the bay tree collect the ingredients
+of its perfume.  But there they all grew together, healthy, happy,
+and happy-making, as though rooted in a fathom of black soil.
+
+Nor was it only vegetable life that prospered.  We had, indeed, few
+birds, and none that had much of a voice or anything worthy to be
+called a song.  My morning comrade had a thin chirp, unmusical and
+monotonous, but friendly and pleasant to hear.  He had but one
+rival:  a fellow with an ostentatious cry of near an octave
+descending, not one note of which properly followed another.  This
+is the only bird I ever knew with a wrong ear; but there was
+something enthralling about his performance.  You listened and
+listened, thinking each time he must surely get it right; but no,
+it was always wrong, and always wrong the same way.  Yet he seemed
+proud of his song, delivered it with execution and a manner of his
+own, and was charming to his mate.  A very incorrect, incessant
+human whistler had thus a chance of knowing how his own music
+pleased the world.  Two great birds--eagles, we thought--dwelt at
+the top of the canyon, among the crags that were printed on the
+sky.  Now and again, but very rarely, they wheeled high over our
+heads in silence, or with a distant, dying scream; and then, with a
+fresh impulse, winged fleetly forward, dipped over a hilltop, and
+were gone.  They seemed solemn and ancient things, sailing the blue
+air:  perhaps co-oeval with the mountain where they haunted,
+perhaps emigrants from Rome, where the glad legions may have
+shouted to behold them on the morn of battle.
+
+But if birds were rare, the place abounded with rattlesnakes--the
+rattlesnake's nest, it might have been named.  Wherever we brushed
+among the bushes, our passage woke their angry buzz.  One dwelt
+habitually in the wood-pile, and sometimes, when we came for
+firewood, thrust up his small head between two logs, and hissed at
+the intrusion.  The rattle has a legendary credit; it is said to be
+awe-inspiring, and, once heard, to stamp itself for ever in the
+memory.  But the sound is not at all alarming; the hum of many
+insects, and the buzz of the wasp convince the ear of danger quite
+as readily.  As a matter of fact, we lived for weeks in Silverado,
+coming and going, with rattles sprung on every side, and it never
+occurred to us to be afraid.  I used to take sun-baths and do
+calisthenics in a certain pleasant nook among azalea and
+calcanthus, the rattles whizzing on every side like spinning-
+wheels, and the combined hiss or buzz rising louder and angrier at
+any sudden movement; but I was never in the least impressed, nor
+ever attacked.  It was only towards the end of our stay, that a man
+down at Calistoga, who was expatiating on the terrifying nature of
+the sound, gave me at last a very good imitation; and it burst on
+me at once that we dwelt in the very metropolis of deadly snakes,
+and that the rattle was simply the commonest noise in Silverado.
+Immediately on our return, we attacked the Hansons on the subject.
+They had formerly assured us that our canyon was favoured, like
+Ireland, with an entire immunity from poisonous reptiles; but, with
+the perfect inconsequence of the natural man, they were no sooner
+found out than they went off at score in the contrary direction,
+and we were told that in no part of the world did rattlesnakes
+attain to such a monstrous bigness as among the warm, flower-dotted
+rocks of Silverado.  This is a contribution rather to the natural
+history of the Hansons, than to that of snakes.
+
+One person, however, better served by his instinct, had known the
+rattle from the first; and that was Chuchu, the dog.  No rational
+creature has ever led an existence more poisoned by terror than
+that dog's at Silverado.  Every whiz of the rattle made him bound.
+His eyes rolled; he trembled; he would be often wet with sweat.
+One of our great mysteries was his terror of the mountain.  A
+little away above our nook, the azaleas and almost all the
+vegetation ceased.  Dwarf pines not big enough to be Christmas
+trees, grew thinly among loose stone and gravel scaurs.  Here and
+there a big boulder sat quiescent on a knoll, having paused there
+till the next rain in his long slide down the mountain.  There was
+here no ambuscade for the snakes, you could see clearly where you
+trod; and yet the higher I went, the more abject and appealing
+became Chuchu's terror.  He was an excellent master of that
+composite language in which dogs communicate with men, and he would
+assure me, on his honour, that there was some peril on the
+mountain; appeal to me, by all that I held holy, to turn back; and
+at length, finding all was in vain, and that I still persisted,
+ignorantly foolhardy, he would suddenly whip round and make a bee-
+line down the slope for Silverado, the gravel showering after him.
+What was he afraid of?  There were admittedly brown bears and
+California lions on the mountain; and a grizzly visited Rufe's
+poultry yard not long before, to the unspeakable alarm of Caliban,
+who dashed out to chastise the intruder, and found himself, by
+moonlight, face to face with such a tartar.  Something at least
+there must have been:  some hairy, dangerous brute lodged
+permanently among the rocks a little to the north-west of
+Silverado, spending his summer thereabout, with wife and family.
+
+And there was, or there had been, another animal.  Once, under the
+broad daylight, on that open stony hillside, where the baby pines
+were growing, scarcely tall enough to be a badge for a MacGregor's
+bonnet, I came suddenly upon his innocent body, lying mummified by
+the dry air and sun:  a pigmy kangaroo.  I am ingloriously ignorant
+of these subjects; had never heard of such a beast; thought myself
+face to face with some incomparable sport of nature; and began to
+cherish hopes of immortality in science.  Rarely have I been
+conscious of a stranger thrill than when I raised that singular
+creature from the stones, dry as a board, his innocent heart long
+quiet, and all warm with sunshine.  His long hind legs were stiff,
+his tiny forepaws clutched upon his breast, as if to leap; his poor
+life cut short upon that mountain by some unknown accident.  But
+the kangaroo rat, it proved, was no such unknown animal; and my
+discovery was nothing.
+
+Crickets were not wanting.  I thought I could make out exactly four
+of them, each with a corner of his own, who used to make night
+musical at Silverado.  In the matter of voice, they far excelled
+the birds, and their ringing whistle sounded from rock to rock,
+calling and replying the same thing, as in a meaningless opera.
+Thus, children in full health and spirits shout together, to the
+dismay of neighbours; and their idle, happy, deafening
+vociferations rise and fall, like the song of the crickets.  I used
+to sit at night on the platform, and wonder why these creatures
+were so happy; and what was wrong with man that he also did not
+wind up his days with an hour or two of shouting; but I suspect
+that all long-lived animals are solemn.  The dogs alone are hardly
+used by nature; and it seems a manifest injustice for poor Chuchu
+to die in his teens, after a life so shadowed and troubled,
+continually shaken with alarm, and the tear of elegant sentiment
+permanently in his eye.
+
+There was another neighbour of ours at Silverado, small but very
+active, a destructive fellow.  This was a black, ugly fly--a bore,
+the Hansons called him--who lived by hundreds in the boarding of
+our house.  He entered by a round hole, more neatly pierced than a
+man could do it with a gimlet, and he seems to have spent his life
+in cutting out the interior of the plank, but whether as a dwelling
+or a store-house, I could never find.  When I used to lie in bed in
+the morning for a rest--we had no easy-chairs in Silverado--I would
+hear, hour after hour, the sharp cutting sound of his labours, and
+from time to time a dainty shower of sawdust would fall upon the
+blankets.  There lives no more industrious creature than a bore.
+
+And now that I have named to the reader all our animals and insects
+without exception--only I find I have forgotten the flies--he will
+be able to appreciate the singular privacy and silence of our days.
+It was not only man who was excluded:  animals, the song of birds,
+the lowing of cattle, the bleating of sheep, clouds even, and the
+variations of the weather, were here also wanting; and as, day
+after day, the sky was one dome of blue, and the pines below us
+stood motionless in the still air, so the hours themselves were
+marked out from each other only by the series of our own affairs,
+and the sun's great period as he ranged westward through the
+heavens.  The two birds cackled a while in the early morning; all
+day the water tinkled in the shaft, the bores ground sawdust in the
+planking of our crazy palace--infinitesimal sounds; and it was only
+with the return of night that any change would fall on our
+surroundings, or the four crickets begin to flute together in the
+dark.
+
+Indeed, it would be hard to exaggerate the pleasure that we took in
+the approach of evening.  Our day was not very long, but it was
+very tiring.  To trip along unsteady planks or wade among shifting
+stones, to go to and fro for water, to clamber down the glen to the
+Toll House after meat and letters, to cook, to make fires and beds,
+were all exhausting to the body.  Life out of doors, besides, under
+the fierce eye of day, draws largely on the animal spirits.  There
+are certain hours in the afternoon when a man, unless he is in
+strong health or enjoys a vacant mind, would rather creep into a
+cool corner of a house and sit upon the chairs of civilization.
+About that time, the sharp stones, the planks, the upturned boxes
+of Silverado, began to grow irksome to my body; I set out on that
+hopeless, never-ending quest for a more comfortable posture; I
+would be fevered and weary of the staring sun; and just then he
+would begin courteously to withdraw his countenance, the shadows
+lengthened, the aromatic airs awoke, and an indescribable but happy
+change announced the coming of the night.
+
+The hours of evening, when we were once curtained in the friendly
+dark, sped lightly.  Even as with the crickets, night brought to us
+a certain spirit of rejoicing.  It was good to taste the air; good
+to mark the dawning of the stars, as they increased their
+glittering company; good, too, to gather stones, and send them
+crashing down the chute, a wave of light.  It seemed, in some way,
+the reward and the fulfilment of the day.  So it is when men dwell
+in the open air; it is one of the simple pleasures that we lose by
+living cribbed and covered in a house, that, though the coming of
+the day is still the most inspiriting, yet day's departure, also,
+and the return of night refresh, renew, and quiet us; and in the
+pastures of the dusk we stand, like cattle, exulting in the absence
+of the load.
+
+Our nights wore never cold, and they were always still, but for one
+remarkable exception.  Regularly, about nine o'clock, a warm wind
+sprang up, and blew for ten minutes, or maybe a quarter of an hour,
+right down the canyon, fanning it well out, airing it as a mother
+airs the night nursery before the children sleep.  As far as I
+could judge, in the clear darkness of the night, this wind was
+purely local:  perhaps dependant on the configuration of the glen.
+At least, it was very welcome to the hot and weary squatters; and
+if we were not abed already, the springing up of this lilliputian
+valley-wind would often be our signal to retire.
+
+I was the last to go to bed, as I was still the first to rise.
+Many a night I have strolled about the platform, taking a bath of
+darkness before I slept.  The rest would be in bed, and even from
+the forge I could hear them talking together from bunk to bunk.  A
+single candle in the neck of a pint bottle was their only
+illumination; and yet the old cracked house seemed literally
+bursting with the light.  It shone keen as a knife through all the
+vertical chinks; it struck upward through the broken shingles; and
+through the eastern door and window, it fell in a great splash upon
+the thicket and the overhanging rock.  You would have said a
+conflagration, or at the least a roaring forge; and behold, it was
+but a candle.  Or perhaps it was yet more strange to see the
+procession moving bedwards round the corner of the house, and up
+the plank that brought us to the bedroom door; under the immense
+spread of the starry heavens, down in a crevice of the giant
+mountain these few human shapes, with their unshielded taper, made
+so disproportionate a figure in the eye and mind.  But the more he
+is alone with nature, the greater man and his doings bulk in the
+consideration of his fellow-men.  Miles and miles away upon the
+opposite hill-tops, if there were any hunter belated or any
+traveller who had lost his way, he must have stood, and watched and
+wondered, from the time the candle issued from the door of the
+assayer's office till it had mounted the plank and disappeared
+again into the miners' dormitory.
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS ***
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