The Silverado Squatters
by Robert Louis Stevenson
Hypertext Meanings and Commentaries
from the Encyclopedia of the Self
by Mark Zimmerman

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