The Silverado Squatters

Next morning we were up by half-past five, according to agreement, and it was ten by the clock before our Jew boys returned to pick us up.  Kelmar, Mrs. Kelmar, and Abramina, all smiling from ear to ear, and full of tales of the hospitality they had found on the other side.  It had not gone unrewarded; for I observed with interest that the ship’s kettles, all but one, had been “placed.”  Three Lake County families, at least, endowed for life with a ship’s kettle.  Come, this was no misspent Sunday.  The absence of the kettles told its own story: our Jews said nothing about them; but, on the other hand, they said many kind and comely things about the people they had met.  The two women, in particular, had been charmed out of themselves by the sight of a young girl surrounded by her admirers; all evening, it appeared, they had been triumphing together in the girl’s innocent successes, and to this natural and unselfish joy they gave expression in language that was beautiful by its simplicity and truth.

Take them for all in all, few people have done my heart more good; they seemed so thoroughly entitled to happiness, and to enjoy it in so large a measure and so free from after-thought; almost they persuaded me to be a Jew.  There was, indeed, a chink of money in their talk.  They particularly commanded people who were well to do.  “He don’t care—ain’t it?” was their highest word of commendation to an individual fate; and here I seem to grasp the root of their philosophy—it was to be free from care, to be free to make these Sunday wanderings, that they so eagerly pursued after wealth; and all this carefulness was to be careless.  The fine, good humour of all three seemed to declare they had attained their end.  Yet there was the other side to it; and the recipients of kettles perhaps cared greatly.

No sooner had they returned, than the scene of yesterday began again.  The horses were not even tied with a straw rope this time—it was not worth while; and Kelmar disappeared into the bar, leaving them under a tree on the other side of the road.  I had to devote myself.  I stood under the shadow of that tree for, I suppose, hard upon an hour, and had not the heart to be angry.  Once some one remembered me, and brought me out half a tumblerful of the playful, innocuous American cocktail.  I drank it, and lo! veins of living fire ran down my leg; and then a focus of conflagration remained seated in my stomach, not unpleasantly, for quarter of an hour.  I love these sweet, fiery pangs, but I will not court them.  The bulk of the time I spent in repeating as much French poetry as I could remember to the horses, who seemed to enjoy it hugely.  And now it went—

“O ma vieille Font-georges
Où volent les rouges-gorges:”

and again, to a more trampling measure—

“Et tout tremble, Irun, Coïmbre,
   Sautander, Almodovar,
Sitôt qu’on entend le timbre
   Des cymbales do Bivar.”

The redbreasts and the brooks of Europe, in that dry and songless land; brave old names and wars, strong cities, cymbals, and bright armour, in that nook of the mountain, sacred only to the Indian and the bear!  This is still the strangest thing in all man’s travelling, that he should carry about with him incongruous memories.  There is no foreign land; it is the traveller only that is foreign, and now and again, by a flash of recollection, lights up the contrasts of the earth.

But while I was thus wandering in my fancy, great feats had been transacted in the bar.  Corwin the bold had fallen, Kelmar was again crowned with laurels, and the last of the ship’s kettles had changed hands.  If I had ever doubted the purity of Kelmar’s motives, if I had ever suspected him of a single eye to business in his eternal dallyings, now at least, when the last kettle was disposed of, my suspicions must have been allayed.  I dare not guess how much more time was wasted; nor how often we drove off, merely to drive back again and renew interrupted conversations about nothing, before the Toll House was fairly left behind.  Alas! and not a mile down the grade there stands a ranche in a sunny vineyard, and here we must all dismount again and enter.

Only the old lady was at home, Mrs. Guele, a brown old Swiss dame, the picture of honesty; and with her we drank a bottle of wine and had an age-long conversation, which would have been highly delightful if Fanny and I had not been faint with hunger.  The ladies each narrated the story of her marriage, our two Hebrews with the prettiest combination of sentiment and financial bathos.  Abramina, specially, endeared herself with every word.  She was as simple, natural, and engaging as a kid that should have been brought up to the business of a money-changer.  One touch was so resplendently Hebraic that I cannot pass it over.  When her “old man” wrote home for her from America, her old man’s family would not intrust her with the money for the passage, till she had bound herself by an oath—on her knees, I think she said—not to employ it otherwise.

This had tickled Abramina hugely, but I think it tickled me fully more.

Mrs. Guele told of her home-sickness up here in the long winters; of her honest, country-woman troubles and alarms upon the journey; how in the bank at Frankfort she had feared lest the banker, after having taken her cheque, should deny all knowledge of it—a fear I have myself every time I go to a bank; and how crossing the Luneburger Heath, an old lady, witnessing her trouble and finding whither she was bound, had given her “the blessing of a person eighty years old, which would be sure to bring her safely to the States.  And the first thing I did,” added Mrs. Guele, “was to fall downstairs.”

At length we got out of the house, and some of us into the trap, when—judgment of Heaven!—here came Mr. Guele from his vineyard.  So another quarter of an hour went by; till at length, at our earnest pleading, we set forth again in earnest, Fanny and I white-faced and silent, but the Jews still smiling.  The heart fails me.  There was yet another stoppage!  And we drove at last into Calistoga past two in the afternoon, Fanny and I having breakfasted at six in the morning, eight mortal hours before.  We were a pallid couple; but still the Jews were smiling.

So ended our excursion with the village usurers; and, now that it was done, we had no more idea of the nature of the business, nor of the part we had been playing in it, than the child unborn.  That all the people we had met were the slaves of Kelmar, though in various degrees of servitude; that we ourselves had been sent up the mountain in the interests of none but Kelmar; that the money we laid out, dollar by dollar, cent by cent, and through the hands of various intermediaries, should all hop ultimately into Kelmar’s till;—these were facts that we only grew to recognize in the course of time and by the accumulation of evidence.  At length all doubt was quieted, when one of the kettle-holders confessed.  Stopping his trap in the moonlight, a little way out of Calistoga, he told me, in so many words, that he dare not show face therewith an empty pocket.  “You see, I don’t mind if it was only five dollars, Mr. Stevens,” he said, “but I must give Mr. Kelmar something.”

Even now, when the whole tyranny is plain to me, I cannot find it in my heart to be as angry as perhaps I should be with the Hebrew tyrant.  The whole game of business is beggar my neighbour; and though perhaps that game looks uglier when played at such close quarters and on so small a scale, it is none the more intrinsically inhumane for that.  The village usurer is not so sad a feature of humanity and human progress as the millionaire manufacturer, fattening on the toil and loss of thousands, and yet declaiming from the platform against the greed and dishonesty of landlords.  If it were fair for Cobden to buy up land from owners whom he thought unconscious of its proper value, it was fair enough for my Russian Jew to give credit to his farmers.  Kelmar, if he was unconscious of the beam in his own eye, was at least silent in the matter of his brother’s mote.

There were four of us squatters—myself and my wife, the King and Queen of Silverado; Sam, the Crown Prince; and Chuchu, the Grand Duke.  Chuchu, a setter crossed with spaniel, was the most unsuited for a rough life.  He had been nurtured tenderly in the society of ladies; his heart was large and soft; he regarded the sofa-cushion as a bed-rook necessary of existence.  Though about the size of a sheep, he loved to sit in ladies’ laps; he never said a bad word in all his blameless days; and if he had seen a flute, I am sure he could have played upon it by nature.  It may seem hard to say it of a dog, but Chuchu was a tame cat.

The king and queen, the grand duke, and a basket of cold provender for immediate use, set forth from Calistoga in a double buggy; the crown prince, on horseback, led the way like an outrider.  Bags and boxes and a second-hand stove were to follow close upon our heels by Hanson’s team.

It was a beautiful still day; the sky was one field of azure.  Not a leaf moved, not a speck appeared in heaven.  Only from the summit of the mountain one little snowy wisp of cloud after another kept detaching itself, like smoke from a volcano, and blowing southward in some high stream of air: Mount Saint Helena still at her interminable task, making the weather, like a Lapland witch.

By noon we had come in sight of the mill: a great brown building, half-way up the hill, big as a factory, two stories high, and with tanks and ladders along the roof; which, as a pendicle of Silverado mine, we held to be an outlying province of our own.  Thither, then, we went, crossing the valley by a grassy trail; and there lunched out of the basket, sitting in a kind of portico, and wondering, while we ate, at this great bulk of useless building.  Through a chink we could look far down into the interior, and see sunbeams floating in the dust and striking on tier after tier of silent, rusty machinery.  It cost six thousand dollars, twelve hundred English sovereigns; and now, here it stands deserted, like the temple of a forgotten religion, the busy millers toiling somewhere else.  All the time we were there, mill and mill town showed no sign of life; that part of the mountain-side, which is very open and green, was tenanted by no living creature but ourselves and the insects; and nothing stirred but the cloud manufactory upon the mountain summit.  It was odd to compare this with the former days, when the engine was in fall blast, the mill palpitating to its strokes, and the carts came rattling down from Silverado, charged with ore.

By two we had been landed at the mine, the buggy was gone again, and we were left to our own reflections and the basket of cold provender, until Hanson should arrive.  Hot as it was by the sun, there was something chill in such a home-coming, in that world of wreck and rust, splinter and rolling gravel, where for so many years no fire had smoked.

Silverado platform filled the whole width of the canyon.  Above, as I have said, this was a wild, red, stony gully in the mountains; but below it was a wooded dingle.  And through this, I was told, there had gone a path between the mine and the Toll House—our natural north-west passage to civilization.  I found and followed it, clearing my way as I went through fallen branches and dead trees.  It went straight down that steep canyon, till it brought you out abruptly over the roofs of the hotel.  There was nowhere any break in the descent.  It almost seemed as if, were you to drop a stone down the old iron chute at our platform, it would never rest until it hopped upon the Toll House shingles.  Signs were not wanting of the ancient greatness of Silverado.  The footpath was well marked, and had been well trodden in the old clays by thirsty miners.  And far down, buried in foliage, deep out of sight of Silverado, I came on a last outpost of the mine—a mound of gravel, some wreck of wooden aqueduct, and the mouth of a tunnel, like a treasure grotto in a fairy story.  A stream of water, fed by the invisible leakage from our shaft, and dyed red with cinnabar or iron, ran trippingly forth out of the bowels of the cave; and, looking far under the arch, I could see something like an iron lantern fastened on the rocky wall.  It was a promising spot for the imagination.  No boy could have left it unexplored.

The stream thenceforward stole along the bottom of the dingle, and made, for that dry land, a pleasant warbling in the leaves.  Once, I suppose, it ran splashing down the whole length of the canyon, but now its head waters had been tapped by the shaft at Silverado, and for a great part of its course it wandered sunless among the joints of the mountain.  No wonder that it should better its pace when it sees, far before it, daylight whitening in the arch, or that it should come trotting forth into the sunlight with a song.

The two stages had gone by when I got down, and the Toll House stood, dozing in sun and dust and silence, like a place enchanted.  My mission was after hay for bedding, and that I was readily promised.  But when I mentioned that we were waiting for Rufe, the people shook their heads.  Rufe was not a regular man any way, it seemed; and if he got playing poker—Well, poker was too many for Rufe.  I had not yet heard them bracketted together; but it seemed a natural conjunction, and commended itself swiftly to my fears; and as soon as I returned to Silverado and had told my story, we practically gave Hanson up, and set ourselves to do what we could find do-able in our desert-island state.

The lower room had been the assayer’s office.  The floor was thick with débris—part human, from the former occupants; part natural, sifted in by mountain winds.  In a sea of red dust there swam or floated sticks, boards, hay, straw, stones, and paper; ancient newspapers, above all—for the newspaper, especially when torn, soon becomes an antiquity—and bills of the Silverado boarding-house, some dated Silverado, some Calistoga Mine.  Here is one, verbatim; and if any one can calculate the scale of charges, he has my envious admiration.

Where is John Stanley mining now?  Where is S. Chapman, within whose hospitable walls we were to lodge?  The date was but five years old, but in that time the world had changed for Silverado; like Palmyra in the desert, it had outlived its people and its purpose; we camped, like Layard, amid ruins, and these names spoke to us of prehistoric time.  A boot-jack, a pair of boots, a dog-hutch, and these bills of Mr. Chapman’s were the only speaking relics that we disinterred from all that vast Silverado rubbish-heap; but what would I not have given to unearth a letter, a pocket-book, a diary, only a ledger, or a roll of names, to take me back, in a more personal manner, to the past?  It pleases me, besides, to fancy that Stanley or Chapman, or one of their companions, may light upon this chronicle, and be struck by the name, and read some news of their anterior home, coming, as it were, out of a subsequent epoch of history in that quarter of the world.

As we were tumbling the mingled rubbish on the floor, kicking it with our feet, and groping for these written evidences of the past, Sam, with a somewhat whitened face, produced a paper bag.  “What’s this?” said he.  It contained a granulated powder, something the colour of Gregory’s Mixture, but rosier; and as there were several of the bags, and each more or less broken, the powder was spread widely on the floor.  Had any of us ever seen giant powder?  No, nobody had; and instantly there grew up in my mind a shadowy belief, verging with every moment nearer to certitude, that I had somewhere heard somebody describe it as just such a powder as the one around us.  I have learnt since that it is a substance not unlike tallow, and is made up in rolls for all the world like tallow candles.

Fanny, to add to our happiness, told us a story of a gentleman who had camped one night, like ourselves, by a deserted mine.  He was a handy, thrifty fellow, and looked right and left for plunder, but all he could lay his hands on was a can of oil.  After dark he had to see to the horses with a lantern; and not to miss an opportunity, filled up his lamp from the oil can.  Thus equipped, he set forth into the forest.  A little while after, his friends heard a loud explosion; the mountain echoes bellowed, and then all was still.  On examination, the can proved to contain oil, with the trifling addition of nitro-glycerine; but no research disclosed a trace of either man or lantern.

It was a pretty sight, after this anecdote, to see us sweeping out the giant powder.  It seemed never to be far enough away.  And, after all, it was only some rock pounded for assay.

So much for the lower room.  We scraped some of the rougher dirt off the floor, and left it.  That was our sitting-room and kitchen, though there was nothing to sit upon but the table, and no provision for a fire except a hole in the roof of the room above, which had once contained the chimney of a stove.

To that upper room we now proceeded.  There were the eighteen bunks in a double tier, nine on either hand, where from eighteen to thirty-six miners had once snored together all night long, John Stanley, perhaps, snoring loudest.  There was the roof, with a hole in it through which the sun now shot an arrow.  There was the floor, in much the same state as the one below, though, perhaps, there was more hay, and certainly there was the added ingredient of broken glass, the man who stole the window-frames having apparently made a miscarriage with this one.  Without a broom, without hay or bedding, we could but look about us with a beginning of despair.  The one bright arrow of day, in that gaunt and shattered barrack, made the rest look dirtier and darker, and the sight drove us at last into the open.

Here, also, the handiwork of man lay ruined: but the plants were all alive and thriving; the view below was fresh with the colours of nature; and we had exchanged a dim, human garret for a corner, even although it were untidy, of the blue hall of heaven.  Not a bird, not a beast, not a reptile.  There was no noise in that part of the world, save when we passed beside the staging, and heard the water musically falling in the shaft.

We wandered to and fro.  We searched among that drift of lumber-wood and iron, nails and rails, and sleepers and the wheels of tracks.  We gazed up the cleft into the bosom of the mountain.  We sat by the margin of the dump and saw, far below us, the green treetops standing still in the clear air.  Beautiful perfumes, breaths of bay, resin, and nutmeg, came to us more often and grew sweeter and sharper as the afternoon declined.  But still there was no word of Hanson.

I set to with pick and shovel, and deepened the pool behind the shaft, till we were sure of sufficient water for the morning; and by the time I had finished, the sun had begun to go down behind the mountain shoulder, the platform was plunged in quiet shadow, and a chill descended from the sky.  Night began early in our cleft.  Before us, over the margin of the dump, we could see the sun still striking aslant into the wooded nick below, and on the battlemented, pine-bescattered ridges on the farther side.

There was no stove, of course, and no hearth in our lodging, so we betook ourselves to the blacksmith’s forge across the platform.  If the platform be taken as a stage, and the out-curving margin of the dump to represent the line of the foot-lights, then our house would be the first wing on the actor’s left, and this blacksmith’s forge, although no match for it in size, the foremost on the right.  It was a low, brown cottage, planted close against the hill, and overhung by the foliage and peeling boughs of a madrona thicket.  Within it was full of dead leaves and mountain dust, and rubbish from the mine.  But we soon had a good fire brightly blazing, and sat close about it on impromptu seats.  Chuchu, the slave of sofa-cushions, whimpered for a softer bed; but the rest of us were greatly revived and comforted by that good creature-fire, which gives us warmth and light and companionable sounds, and colours up the emptiest building with better than frescoes.  For a while it was even pleasant in the forge, with the blaze in the midst, and a look over our shoulders on the woods and mountains where the day was dying like a dolphin.

It was between seven and eight before Hanson arrived, with a waggonful of our effects and two of his wife’s relatives to lend him a hand.  The elder showed surprising strength.  He would pick up a huge packing-case, full of books of all things, swing it on his shoulder, and away up the two crazy ladders and the breakneck spout of rolling mineral, familiarly termed a path, that led from the cart-track to our house.  Even for a man unburthened, the ascent was toilsome and precarious; but Irvine sealed it with a light foot, carrying box after box, as the hero whisks the stage child up the practicable footway beside the waterfall of the fifth act.  With so strong a helper, the business was speedily transacted.  Soon the assayer’s office was thronged with our belongings, piled higgledy-piggledy, and upside down, about the floor.  There were our boxes, indeed, but my wife had left her keys in Calistoga.  There was the stove, but, alas! our carriers had forgot the chimney, and lost one of the plates along the road.  The Silverado problem was scarce solved.

Rufe himself was grave and good-natured over his share of blame; he even, if I remember right, expressed regret.  But his crew, to my astonishment and anger, grinned from ear to ear, and laughed aloud at our distress.  They thought it “real funny” about the stove-pipe they had forgotten; “real funny” that they should have lost a plate.  As for hay, the whole party refused to bring us any till they should have supped.  See how late they were!  Never had there been such a job as coming up that grade!  Nor often, I suspect, such a game of poker as that before they started.  But about nine, as a particular favour, we should have some hay.

So they took their departure, leaving me still staring, and we resigned ourselves to wait for their return.  The fire in the forge had been suffered to go out, and we were one and all too weary to kindle another.  We dined, or, not to take that word in vain, we ate after a fashion, in the nightmare disorder of the assayer’s office, perched among boxes.  A single candle lighted us.  It could scarce be called a housewarming; for there was, of course, no fire, and with the two open doors and the open window gaping on the night, like breaches in a fortress, it began to grow rapidly chill.  Talk ceased; nobody moved but the unhappy Chuchu, still in quest of sofa-cushions, who tumbled complainingly among the trunks.  It required a certain happiness of disposition to look forward hopefully, from so dismal a beginning, across the brief hours of night, to the warm shining of to-morrow’s sun.

But the hay arrived at last, and we turned, with our last spark of courage, to the bedroom.  We had improved the entrance, but it was still a kind of rope-walking; and it would have been droll to see us mounting, one after another, by candle-light, under the open stars.

The western door—that which looked up the canyon, and through which we entered by our bridge of flying plank—was still entire, a handsome, panelled door, the most finished piece of carpentry in Silverado.  And the two lowest bunks next to this we roughly filled with hay for that night’s use.  Through the opposite, or eastern-looking gable, with its open door and window, a faint, disused starshine came into the room like mist; and when we were once in bed, we lay, awaiting sleep, in a haunted, incomplete obscurity.  At first the silence of the night was utter.  Then a high wind began in the distance among the treetops, and for hours continued to grow higher.  It seemed to me much such a wind as we had found on our visit; yet here in our open chamber we were fanned only by gentle and refreshing draughts, so deep was the canyon, so close our house was planted under the overhanging rock.

There is quite a large race or class of people in America, for whom we scarcely seem to have a parallel in England.  Of pure white blood, they are unknown or unrecognizable in towns; inhabit the fringe of settlements and the deep, quiet places of the country; rebellious to all labour, and pettily thievish, like the English gipsies; rustically ignorant, but with a touch of wood-lore and the dexterity of the savage.  Whence they came is a moot point.  At the time of the war, they poured north in crowds to escape the conscription; lived during summer on fruits, wild animals, and petty theft; and at the approach of winter, when these supplies failed, built great fires in the forest, and there died stoically by starvation.  They are widely scattered, however, and easily recognized.  Loutish, but not ill-looking, they will sit all day, swinging their legs on a field fence, the mind seemingly as devoid of all reflection as a Suffolk peasant’s, careless of politics, for the most part incapable of reading, but with a rebellious vanity and a strong sense of independence.  Hunting is their most congenial business, or, if the occasion offers, a little amateur detection.  In tracking a criminal, following a particular horse along a beaten highway, and drawing inductions from a hair or a footprint, one of those somnolent, grinning Hodges will suddenly display activity of body and finesse of mind.  By their names ye may know them, the women figuring as Loveina, Larsenia, Serena, Leanna, Orreana; the men answering to Alvin, Alva, or Orion, pronounced Orrion, with the accent on the first.  Whether they are indeed a race, or whether this is the form of degeneracy common to all back-woodsmen, they are at least known by a generic byword, as Poor Whites or Low-downers.

I will not say that the Hanson family was Poor White, because the name savours of offence; but I may go as far as this—they were, in many points, not unsimilar to the people usually so-cared.  Rufe himself combined two of the qualifications, for he was both a hunter and an amateur detective.  It was he who pursued Russel and Dollar, the robbers of the Lake Port stage, and captured them the very morning after the exploit, while they were still sleeping in a hayfield.  Russel, a drunken Scotch carpenter, was even an acquaintance of his own, and he expressed much grave commiseration for his fate.  In all that he said and did, Rufe was grave.  I never saw him hurried.  When he spoke, he took out his pipe with ceremonial deliberation, looked east and west, and then, in quiet tones and few words, stated his business or told his story.  His gait was to match; it would never have surprised you if, at any step, he had turned round and walked away again, so warily and slowly, and with so much seeming hesitation did he go about.  He lay long in bed in the morning—rarely indeed, rose before noon; he loved all games, from poker to clerical croquet; and in the Toll House croquet ground I have seen him toiling at the latter with the devotion of a curate.  He took an interest in education, was an active member of the local school-board, and when I was there, he had recently lost the schoolhouse key.  His waggon was broken, but it never seemed to occur to him to mend it.  Like all truly idle people, he had an artistic eye.  He chose the print stuff for his wife’s dresses, and counselled her in the making of a patchwork quilt, always, as she thought, wrongly, but to the more educated eye, always with bizarre and admirable taste—the taste of an Indian.  With all this, he was a perfect, unoffending gentleman in word and act.  Take his clay pipe from him, and he was fit for any society but that of fools.  Quiet as he was, there burned a deep, permanent excitement in his dark blue eyes; and when this grave man smiled, it was like sunshine in a shady place.

Mrs. Hanson (née, if you please, Lovelands) was more commonplace than her lord.  She was a comely woman, too, plump, fair-coloured, with wonderful white teeth; and in her print dresses (chosen by Rufe) and with a large sun-bonnet shading her valued complexion, made, I assure you, a very agreeable figure.  But she was on the surface, what there was of her, out-spoken and loud-spoken.  Her noisy laughter had none of the charm of one of Hanson’s rare, slow-spreading smiles; there was no reticence, no mystery, no manner about the woman: she was a first-class dairymaid, but her husband was an unknown quantity between the savage and the nobleman.  She was often in and out with us, merry, and healthy, and fair; he came far seldomer—only, indeed, when there was business, or now and again, to pay a visit of ceremony, brushed up for the occasion, with his wife on his arm, and a clean clay pipe in his teeth.  These visits, in our forest state, had quite the air of an event, and turned our red canyon into a salon.

Such was the pair who ruled in the old Silverado Hotel, among the windy trees, on the mountain shoulder overlooking the whole length of Napa Valley, as the man aloft looks down on the ship’s deck.  There they kept house, with sundry horses and fowls, and a family of sons, Daniel Webster, and I think George Washington, among the number.  Nor did they want visitors.  An old gentleman, of singular stolidity, and called Breedlove—I think he had crossed the plains in the same caravan with Rufe—housed with them for awhile during our stay; and they had besides a permanent lodger, in the form of Mrs. Hanson’s brother, Irvine Lovelands.  I spell Irvine by guess; for I could get no information on the subject, just as I could never find out, in spite of many inquiries, whether or not Rufe was a contraction for Rufus.  They were all cheerfully at sea about their names in that generation.  And this is surely the more notable where the names are all so strange, and even the family names appear to have been coined.  At one time, at least, the ancestors of all these Alvins and Alvas, Loveinas, Lovelands, and Breedloves, must have taken serious council and found a certain poetry in these denominations; that must have been, then, their form of literature.  But still times change; and their next descendants, the George Washingtons and Daniel Websters, will at least be clear upon the point.  And anyway, and however his name should be spelt, this Irvine Lovelands was the most unmitigated Caliban I ever knew.

Our very first morning at Silverado, when we were full of business, patching up doors and windows, making beds and seats, and getting our rough lodging into shape, Irvine and his sister made their appearance together, she for neighbourliness and general curiosity; he, because he was working for me, to my sorrow, cutting firewood at I forget how much a day.  The way that he set about cutting wood was characteristic.  We were at that moment patching up and unpacking in the kitchen.  Down he sat on one side, and down sat his sister on the other.  Both were chewing pine-tree gum, and he, to my annoyance, accompanied that simple pleasure with profuse expectoration.  She rattled away, talking up hill and down dale, laughing, tossing her head, showing her brilliant teeth.  He looked on in silence, now spitting heavily on the floor, now putting his head back and uttering a loud, discordant, joyless laugh.  He had a tangle of shock hair, the colour of wool; his mouth was a grin; although as strong as a horse, he looked neither heavy nor yet adroit, only leggy, coltish, and in the road.  But it was plain he was in high spirits, thoroughly enjoying his visit; and he laughed frankly whenever we failed to accomplish what we were about.  This was scarcely helpful: it was even, to amateur carpenters, embarrassing; but it lasted until we knocked off work and began to get dinner.  Then Mrs. Hanson remembered she should have been gone an hour ago; and the pair retired, and the lady’s laughter died away among the nutmegs down the path.  That was Irvine’s first day’s work in my employment—the devil take him!

The next morning he returned and, as he was this time alone, he bestowed his conversation upon us with great liberality.  He prided himself on his intelligence; asked us if we knew the school ma’am.  He didn’t think much of her, anyway.  He had tried her, he had.  He had put a question to her.  If a tree a hundred feet high were to fall a foot a day, how long would it take to fall right down?  She had not been able to solve the problem.  “She don’t know nothing,” he opined.  He told us how a friend of his kept a school with a revolver, and chuckled mightily over that; his friend could teach school, he could.  All the time he kept chewing gum and spitting.  He would stand a while looking down; and then he would toss back his shock of hair, and laugh hoarsely, and spit, and bring forward a new subject.  A man, he told us, who bore a grudge against him, had poisoned his dog.  “That was a low thing for a man to do now, wasn’t it?  It wasn’t like a man, that, nohow.  But I got even with him: I pisoned his dog.”  His clumsy utterance, his rude embarrassed manner, set a fresh value on the stupidity of his remarks.  I do not think I ever appreciated the meaning of two words until I knew Irvine—the verb, loaf, and the noun, oaf; between them, they complete his portrait.  He could lounge, and wriggle, and rub himself against the wall, and grin, and be more in everybody’s way than any other two people that I ever set my eyes on.  Nothing that he did became him; and yet you were conscious that he was one of your own race, that his mind was cumbrously at work, revolving the problem of existence like a quid of gum, and in his own cloudy manner enjoying life, and passing judgment on his fellows.  Above all things, he was delighted with himself.  You would not have thought it, from his uneasy manners and troubled, struggling utterance; but he loved himself to the marrow, and was happy and proud like a peacock on a rail.

His self-esteem was, indeed, the one joint in his harness.  He could be got to work, and even kept at work, by flattery.  As long as my wife stood over him, crying out how strong he was, so long exactly he would stick to the matter in hand; and the moment she turned her back, or ceased to praise him, he would stop.  His physical strength was wonderful; and to have a woman stand by and admire his achievements, warmed his heart like sunshine.  Yet he was as cowardly as he was powerful, and felt no shame in owning to the weakness.  Something was once wanted from the crazy platform over the shaft, and he at once refused to venture there—“did not like,” as he said, “foolen’ round them kind o’ places,” and let my wife go instead of him, looking on with a grin.  Vanity, where it rules, is usually more heroic: but Irvine steadily approved himself, and expected others to approve him; rather looked down upon my wife, and decidedly expected her to look up to him, on the strength of his superior prudence.

Yet the strangest part of the whole matter was perhaps this, that Irvine was as beautiful as a statue.  His features were, in themselves, perfect; it was only his cloudy, uncouth, and coarse expression that disfigured them.  So much strength residing in so spare a frame was proof sufficient of the accuracy of his shape.  He must have been built somewhat after the pattern of Jack Sheppard; but the famous housebreaker, we may be certain, was no lout.  It was by the extraordinary powers of his mind no less than by the vigour of his body, that he broke his strong prison with such imperfect implements, turning the very obstacles to service.  Irvine, in the same case, would have sat down and spat, and grumbled curses.  He had the soul of a fat sheep, but, regarded as an artist’s model, the exterior of a Greek God.  It was a cruel thought to persons less favoured in their birth, that this creature, endowed—to use the language of theatres—with extraordinary “means,” should so manage to misemploy them that he looked ugly and almost deformed.  It was only by an effort of abstraction, and after many days, that you discovered what he was.

By playing on the oaf’s conceit, and standing closely over him, we got a path made round the corner of the dump to our door, so that we could come and go with decent ease; and he even enjoyed the work, for in that there were boulders to be plucked up bodily, bushes to be uprooted, and other occasions for athletic display: but cutting wood was a different matter.  Anybody could cut wood; and, besides, my wife was tired of supervising him, and had other things to attend to.  And, in short, days went by, and Irvine came daily, and talked and lounged and spat; but the firewood remained intact as sleepers on the platform or growing trees upon the mountainside.  Irvine, as a woodcutter, we could tolerate; but Irvine as a friend of the family, at so much a day, was too bald an imposition, and at length, on the afternoon of the fourth or fifth day of our connection, I explained to him, as clearly as I could, the light in which I had grown to regard his presence.  I pointed out to him that I could not continue to give him a salary for spitting on the floor; and this expression, which came after a good many others, at last penetrated his obdurate wits.  He rose at once, and said if that was the way he was going to be spoke to, he reckoned he would quit.  And, no one interposing, he departed.

So far, so good.  But we had no firewood.  The next afternoon, I strolled down to Rufe’s and consulted him on the subject.  It was a very droll interview, in the large, bare north room of the Silverado Hotel, Mrs. Hanson’s patchwork on a frame, and Rufe, and his wife, and I, and the oaf himself, all more or less embarrassed.  Rufe announced there was nobody in the neighbourhood but Irvine who could do a day’s work for anybody.  Irvine, thereupon, refused to have any more to do with my service; he “wouldn’t work no more for a man as had spoke to him’s I had done.”  I found myself on the point of the last humiliation—driven to beseech the creature whom I had just dismissed with insult: but I took the high hand in despair, said there must be no talk of Irvine coming back unless matters were to be differently managed; that I would rather chop firewood for myself than be fooled; and, in short, the Hansons being eager for the lad’s hire, I so imposed upon them with merely affected resolution, that they ended by begging me to re-employ him again, on a solemn promise that he should be more industrious.  The promise, I am bound to say, was kept.  We soon had a fine pile of firewood at our door; and if Caliban gave me the cold shoulder and spared me his conversation, I thought none the worse of him for that, nor did I find my days much longer for the deprivation.

The leading spirit of the family was, I am inclined to fancy, Mrs. Hanson.  Her social brilliancy somewhat dazzled the others, and she had more of the small change of sense.  It was she who faced Kelmar, for instance; and perhaps, if she had been alone, Kelmar would have had no rule within her doors.  Rufe, to be sure, had a fine, sober, open-air attitude of mind, seeing the world without exaggeration—perhaps, we may even say, without enough; for he lacked, along with the others, that commercial idealism which puts so high a value on time and money.  Sanity itself is a kind of convention.  Perhaps Rufe was wrong; but, looking on life plainly, he was unable to perceive that croquet or poker were in any way less important than, for instance, mending his waggon.  Even his own profession, hunting, was dear to him mainly as a sort of play; even that he would have neglected, had it not appealed to his imagination.  His hunting-suit, for instance, had cost I should be afraid to say how many bucks—the currency in which he paid his way: it was all befringed, after the Indian fashion, and it was dear to his heart.  The pictorial side of his daily business was never forgotten.  He was even anxious to stand for his picture in those buckskin hunting clothes; and I remember how he once warmed almost into enthusiasm, his dark blue eyes growing perceptibly larger, as he planned the composition in which he should appear, “with the horns of some real big bucks, and dogs, and a camp on a crick” (creek, stream).

There was no trace in Irvine of this woodland poetry.  He did not care for hunting, nor yet for buckskin suits.  He had never observed scenery.  The world, as it appeared to him, was almost obliterated by his own great grinning figure in the foreground: Caliban Malvolio.  And it seems to me as if, in the persons of these brothers-in-law, we had the two sides of rusticity fairly well represented: the hunter living really in nature; the clodhopper living merely out of society: the one bent up in every corporal agent to capacity in one pursuit, doing at least one thing keenly and thoughtfully, and thoroughly alive to all that touches it; the other in the inert and bestial state, walking in a faint dream, and taking so dim an impression of the myriad sides of life that he is truly conscious of nothing but himself.  It is only in the fastnesses of nature, forests, mountains, and the back of man’s beyond, that a creature endowed with five senses can grow up into the perfection of this crass and earthy vanity.  In towns or the busier country sides, he is roughly reminded of other men’s existence; and if he learns no more, he learns at least to fear contempt.  But Irvine had come scatheless through life, conscious only of himself, of his great strength and intelligence; and in the silence of the universe, to which he did not listen, dwelling with delight on the sound of his own thoughts.

A change in the colour of the light usually called me in the morning.  By a certain hour, the long, vertical chinks in our western gable, where the boards had shrunk and separated, flashed suddenly into my eyes as stripes of dazzling blue, at once so dark and splendid that I used to marvel how the qualities could be combined.  At an earlier hour, the heavens in that quarter were still quietly coloured, but the shoulder of the mountain which shuts in the canyon already glowed with sunlight in a wonderful compound of gold and rose and green; and this too would kindle, although more mildly and with rainbow tints, the fissures of our crazy gable.  If I were sleeping heavily, it was the bold blue that struck me awake; if more lightly, then I would come to myself in that earlier and fairier fight.

One Sunday morning, about five, the first brightness called me.  I rose and turned to the east, not for my devotions, but for air.  The night had been very still.  The little private gale that blew every evening in our canyon, for ten minutes or perhaps a quarter of an hour, had swiftly blown itself out; in the hours that followed not a sigh of wind had shaken the treetops; and our barrack, for all its breaches, was less fresh that morning than of wont.  But I had no sooner reached the window than I forgot all else in the sight that met my eyes, and I made but two bounds into my clothes, and down the crazy plank to the platform.

The sun was still concealed below the opposite hilltops, though it was shining already, not twenty feet above my head, on our own mountain slope.  But the scene, beyond a few near features, was entirely changed.  Napa valley was gone; gone were all the lower slopes and woody foothills of the range; and in their place, not a thousand feet below me, rolled a great level ocean.  It was as though I had gone to bed the night before, safe in a nook of inland mountains, and had awakened in a bay upon the coast.  I had seen these inundations from below; at Calistoga I had risen and gone abroad in the early morning, coughing and sneezing, under fathoms on fathoms of gray sea vapour, like a cloudy sky—a dull sight for the artist, and a painful experience for the invalid.  But to sit aloft one’s self in the pure air and under the unclouded dome of heaven, and thus look down on the submergence of the valley, was strangely different and even delightful to the eyes.  Far away were hilltops like little islands.  Nearer, a smoky surf beat about the foot of precipices and poured into all the coves of these rough mountains.  The colour of that fog ocean was a thing never to be forgotten.  For an instant, among the Hebrides and just about sundown, I have seen something like it on the sea itself.  But the white was not so opaline; nor was there, what surprisingly increased the effect, that breathless, crystal stillness over all.  Even in its gentlest moods the salt sea travails, moaning among the weeds or lisping on the sand; but that vast fog ocean lay in a trance of silence, nor did the sweet air of the morning tremble with a sound.

As I continued to sit upon the dump, I began to observe that this sea was not so level as at first sight it appeared to be.  Away in the extreme south, a little hill of fog arose against the sky above the general surface, and as it had already caught the sun, it shone on the horizon like the topsails of some giant ship.  There were huge waves, stationary, as it seemed, like waves in a frozen sea; and yet, as I looked again, I was not sure but they were moving after all, with a slow and august advance.  And while I was yet doubting, a promontory of the some four or five miles away, conspicuous by a bouquet of tall pines, was in a single instant overtaken and swallowed up.  It reappeared in a little, with its pines, but this time as an islet, and only to be swallowed up once more and then for good.  This set me looking nearer, and I saw that in every cove along the line of mountains the fog was being piled in higher and higher, as though by some wind that was inaudible to me.  I could trace its progress, one pine tree first growing hazy and then disappearing after another; although sometimes there was none of this fore-running haze, but the whole opaque white ocean gave a start and swallowed a piece of mountain at a gulp.  It was to flee these poisonous fogs that I had left the seaboard, and climbed so high among the mountains.  And now, behold, here came the fog to besiege me in my chosen altitudes, and yet came so beautifully that my first thought was of welcome.

The sun had now gotten much higher, and through all the gaps of the hills it cast long bars of gold across that white ocean.  An eagle, or some other very great bird of the mountain, came wheeling over the nearer pine-tops, and hung, poised and something sideways, as if to look abroad on that unwonted desolation, spying, perhaps with terror, for the eyries of her comrades.  Then, with a long cry, she disappeared again towards Lake County and the clearer air.  At length it seemed to me as if the flood were beginning to subside.  The old landmarks, by whose disappearance I had measured its advance, here a crag, there a brave pine tree, now began, in the inverse order, to make their reappearance into daylight.  I judged all danger of the fog was over.  This was not Noah’s flood; it was but a morning spring, and would now drift out seaward whence it came.  So, mightily relieved, and a good deal exhilarated by the sight, I went into the house to light the fire.

I suppose it was nearly seven when I once more mounted the platform to look abroad.  The fog ocean had swelled up enormously since last I saw it; and a few hundred feet below me, in the deep gap where the Toll House stands and the road runs through into Lake County, it had already topped the slope, and was pouring over and down the other side like driving smoke.  The wind had climbed along with it; and though I was still in calm air, I could see the trees tossing below me, and their long, strident sighing mounted to me where I stood.

Half an hour later, the fog had surmounted all the ridge on the opposite side of the gap, though a shoulder of the mountain still warded it out of our canyon.  Napa valley and its bounding hills were now utterly blotted out.  The fog, sunny white in the sunshine, was pouring over into Lake County in a huge, ragged cataract, tossing treetops appearing and disappearing in the spray.  The air struck with a little chill, and set me coughing.  It smelt strong of the fog, like the smell of a washing-house, but with a shrewd tang of the sea salt.

Had it not been for two things—the sheltering spur which answered as a dyke, and the great valley on the other side which rapidly engulfed whatever mounted—our own little platform in the canyon must have been already buried a hundred feet in salt and poisonous air.  As it was, the interest of the scene entirely occupied our minds.  We were set just out of the wind, and but just above the fog; we could listen to the voice of the one as to music on the stage; we could plunge our eyes down into the other, as into some flowing stream from over the parapet of a bridge; thus we looked on upon a strange, impetuous, silent, shifting exhibition of the powers of nature, and saw the familiar landscape changing from moment to moment like figures in a dream.

The imagination loves to trifle with what is not.  Had this been indeed the deluge, I should have felt more strongly, but the emotion would have been similar in kind.  I played with the idea, as the child flees in delighted terror from the creations of his fancy.  The look of the thing helped me.  And when at last I began to flee up the mountain, it was indeed partly to escape from the raw air that kept me coughing, but it was also part in play.

As I ascended the mountain-side, I came once more to overlook the upper surface of the fog; but it wore a different appearance from what I had beheld at daybreak.  For, first, the sun now fell on it from high overhead, and its surface shone and undulated like a great nor’land moor country, sheeted with untrodden morning snow.  And next the new level must have been a thousand or fifteen hundred feet higher than the old, so that only five or six points of all the broken country below me, still stood out.  Napa valley was now one with Sonoma on the west.  On the hither side, only a thin scattered fringe of bluffs was unsubmerged; and through all the gaps the fog was pouring over, like an ocean, into the blue clear sunny country on the east.  There it was soon lost; for it fell instantly into the bottom of the valleys, following the water-shed; and the hilltops in that quarter were still clear cut upon the eastern sky.

Through the Toll House gap and over the near ridges on the other side, the deluge was immense.  A spray of thin vapour was thrown high above it, rising and falling, and blown into fantastic shapes.  The speed of its course was like a mountain torrent.  Here and there a few treetops were discovered and then whelmed again; and for one second, the bough of a dead pine beckoned out of the spray like the arm of a drowning man.  But still the imagination was dissatisfied, still the ear waited for something more.  Had this indeed been water (as it seemed so, to the eye), with what a plunge of reverberating thunder would it have rolled upon its course, disembowelling mountains and deracinating pines!  And yet water it was, and sea-water at that—true Pacific billows, only somewhat rarefied, rolling in mid air among the hilltops.

I climbed still higher, among the red rattling gravel and dwarf underwood of Mount Saint Helena, until I could look right down upon Silverado, and admire the favoured nook in which it lay.  The sunny plain of fog was several hundred feet higher; behind the protecting spur a gigantic accumulation of cottony vapour threatened, with every second, to blow over and submerge our homestead; but the vortex setting past the Toll House was too strong; and there lay our little platform, in the arms of the deluge, but still enjoying its unbroken sunshine.  About eleven, however, thin spray came flying over the friendly buttress, and I began to think the fog had hunted out its Jonah after all.  But it was the last effort.  The wind veered while we were at dinner, and began to blow squally from the mountain summit; and by half-past one, all that world of sea-fogs was utterly routed and flying here and there into the south in little rags of cloud.  And instead of a lone sea-beach, we found ourselves once more inhabiting a high mountainside, with the clear green country far below us, and the light smoke of Calistoga blowing in the air.

This was the great Russian campaign for that season.  Now and then, in the early morning, a little white lakelet of fog would be seen far down in Napa Valley; but the heights were not again assailed, nor was the surrounding world again shut off from Silverado.

The Toll House, standing alone by the wayside under nodding pines, with its streamlet and water-tank; its backwoods, toll-bar, and well trodden croquet ground; the ostler standing by the stable door, chewing a straw; a glimpse of the Chinese cook in the back parts; and Mr. Hoddy in the bar, gravely alert and serviceable, and equally anxious to lend or borrow books;—dozed all day in the dusty sunshine, more than half asleep.  There were no neighbours, except the Hansons up the hill.  The traffic on the road was infinitesimal; only, at rare intervals, a couple in a waggon, or a dusty farmer on a springboard, toiling over “the grade” to that metropolitan hamlet, Calistoga; and, at the fixed hours, the passage of the stages.

The nearest building was the school-house, down the road; and the school-ma’am boarded at the Toll House, walking thence in the morning to the little brown shanty, where she taught the young ones of the district, and returning thither pretty weary in the afternoon.  She had chosen this outlying situation, I understood, for her health.  Mr. Corwin was consumptive; so was Rufe; so was Mr. Jennings, the engineer.  In short, the place was a kind of small Davos: consumptive folk consorting on a hilltop in the most unbroken idleness.  Jennings never did anything that I could see, except now and then to fish, and generally to sit about in the bar and the verandah, waiting for something to happen.  Corwin and Rufe did as little as possible; and if the school-ma’am, poor lady, had to work pretty hard all morning, she subsided when it was over into much the same dazed beatitude as all the rest.

Her special corner was the parlour—a very genteel room, with Bible prints, a crayon portrait of Mrs. Corwin in the height of fashion, a few years ago, another of her son (Mr. Corwin was not represented), a mirror, and a selection of dried grasses.  A large book was laid religiously on the table—“From Palace to Hovel,” I believe, its name—full of the raciest experiences in England.  The author had mingled freely with all classes, the nobility particularly meeting him with open arms; and I must say that traveller had ill requited his reception.  His book, in short, was a capital instance of the Penny Messalina school of literature; and there arose from it, in that cool parlour, in that silent, wayside, mountain inn, a rank atmosphere of gold and blood and “Jenkins,” and the “Mysteries of London,” and sickening, inverted snobbery, fit to knock you down.  The mention of this book reminds me of another and far racier picture of our island life.  The latter parts of Rocambole are surely too sparingly consulted in the country which they celebrate.  No man’s education can be said to be complete, nor can he pronounce the world yet emptied of enjoyment, till he has made the acquaintance of “the Reverend Patterson, director of the Evangelical Society.”  To follow the evolutions of that reverend gentleman, who goes through scenes in which even Mr. Duffield would hesitate to place a bishop, is to rise to new ideas.  But, alas! there was no Patterson about the Toll House.  Only, alongside of “From Palace to Hovel,” a sixpenny “Ouida” figured.  So literature, you see, was not unrepresented.

The school-ma’am had friends to stay with her, other school-ma’ams enjoying their holidays, quite a bevy of damsels.  They seemed never to go out, or not beyond the verandah, but sat close in the little parlour, quietly talking or listening to the wind among the trees.  Sleep dwelt in the Toll House, like a fixture: summer sleep, shallow, soft, and dreamless.  A cuckoo-clock, a great rarity in such a place, hooted at intervals about the echoing house; and Mr. Jenning would open his eyes for a moment in the bar, and turn the leaf of a newspaper, and the resting school-ma’ams in the parlour would be recalled to the consciousness of their inaction.  Busy Mrs. Corwin and her busy Chinaman might be heard indeed, in the penetralia, pounding dough or rattling dishes; or perhaps Rufe had called up some of the sleepers for a game of croquet, and the hollow strokes of the mallet sounded far away among the woods: but with these exceptions, it was sleep and sunshine and dust, and the wind in the pine trees, all day long.

A little before stage time, that castle of indolence awoke.  The ostler threw his straw away and set to his preparations.  Mr. Jennings rubbed his eyes; happy Mr. Jennings, the something he had been waiting for all day about to happen at last!  The boarders gathered in the verandah, silently giving ear, and gazing down the road with shaded eyes.  And as yet there was no sign for the senses, not a sound, not a tremor of the mountain road.  The birds, to whom the secret of the hooting cuckoo is unknown, must have set down to instinct this premonitory bustle.

And then the first of the two stages swooped upon the Toll House with a roar and in a cloud of dust; and the shock had not yet time to subside, before the second was abreast of it.  Huge concerns they were, well-horsed and loaded, the men in their shirt-sleeves, the women swathed in veils, the long whip cracking like a pistol; and as they charged upon that slumbering hostelry, each shepherding a dust storm, the dead place blossomed into life and talk and clatter.  This the Toll House?—with its city throng, its jostling shoulders, its infinity of instant business in the bar?  The mind would not receive it!  The heartfelt bustle of that hour is hardly credible; the thrill of the great shower of letters from the post-bag, the childish hope and interest with which one gazed in all these strangers’ eyes.  They paused there but to pass: the blue-clad China-boy, the San Francisco magnate, the mystery in the dust coat, the secret memoirs in tweed, the ogling, well-shod lady with her troop of girls; they did but flash and go; they were hull-down for us behind life’s ocean, and we but hailed their topsails on the line.  Yet, out of our great solitude of four and twenty mountain hours, we thrilled to their momentary presence gauged and divined them, loved and hated; and stood light-headed in that storm of human electricity.  Yes, like Piccadilly circus, this is also one of life’s crossing-places.  Here I beheld one man, already famous or infamous, a centre of pistol-shots: and another who, if not yet known to rumour, will fill a column of the Sunday paper when he comes to hang—a burly, thick-set, powerful Chinese desperado, six long bristles upon either lip; redolent of whiskey, playing cards, and pistols; swaggering in the bar with the lowest assumption of the lowest European manners; rapping out blackguard English oaths in his canorous oriental voice; and combining in one person the depravities of two races and two civilizations.  For all his lust and vigour, he seemed to look cold upon me from the valley of the shadow of the gallows.  He imagined a vain thing; and while he drained his cock-tail, Holbein’s death was at his elbow.  Once, too, I fell in talk with another of these flitting strangers—like the rest, in his shirt-sleeves and all begrimed with dust—and the next minute we were discussing Paris and London, theatres and wines.  To him, journeying from one human place to another, this was a trifle; but to me!  No, Mr. Lillie, I have not forgotten it.

And presently the city-tide was at its flood and began to ebb.  Life runs in Piccadilly Circus, say, from nine to one, and then, there also, ebbs into the small hours of the echoing policeman and the lamps and stars.  But the Toll House is far up stream, and near its rural springs; the bubble of the tide but touches it.  Before you had yet grasped your pleasure, the horses were put to, the loud whips volleyed, and the tide was gone.  North and south had the two stages vanished, the towering dust subsided in the woods; but there was still an interval before the flush had fallen on your cheeks, before the ear became once more contented with the silence, or the seven sleepers of the Toll House dozed back to their accustomed corners.  Yet a little, and the ostler would swing round the great barrier across the road; and in the golden evening, that dreamy inn begin to trim its lamps and spread the board for supper.

As I recall the place—the green dell below; the spires of pine; the sun-warm, scented air; that gray, gabled inn, with its faint stirrings of life amid the slumber of the mountains—I slowly awake to a sense of admiration, gratitude, and almost love.  A fine place, after all, for a wasted life to doze away in—the cuckoo clock hooting of its far home country; the croquet mallets, eloquent of English lawns; the stages daily bringing news of—the turbulent world away below there; and perhaps once in the summer, a salt fog pouring overhead with its tale of the Pacific.

In our rule at Silverado, there was a melancholy interregnum.  The queen and the crown prince with one accord fell sick; and, as I was sick to begin with, our lone position on Mount Saint Helena was no longer tenable, and we had to hurry back to Calistoga and a cottage on the green.  By that time we had begun to realize the difficulties of our position.  We had found what an amount of labour it cost to support life in our red canyon; and it was the dearest desire of our hearts to get a China-boy to go along with us when we returned.  We could have given him a whole house to himself, self-contained, as they say in the advertisements; and on the money question we were prepared to go far.  Kong Sam Kee, the Calistoga washerman, was entrusted with the affair; and from day to day it languished on, with protestations on our part and mellifluous excuses on the part of Kong Sam Kee.

At length, about half-past eight of our last evening, with the waggon ready harnessed to convey us up the grade, the washerman, with a somewhat sneering air, produced the boy.  He was a handsome, gentlemanly lad, attired in rich dark blue, and shod with snowy white; but, alas! he had heard rumours of Silverado.  He know it for a lone place on the mountain-side, with no friendly wash-house near by, where he might smoke a pipe of opium o’ nights with other China-boys, and lose his little earnings at the game of tan; and he first backed out for more money; and then, when that demand was satisfied, refused to come point-blank.  He was wedded to his wash-houses; he had no taste for the rural life; and we must go to our mountain servantless.  It must have been near half an hour before we reached that conclusion, standing in the midst of Calistoga high street under the stars, and the China-boy and Kong Sam Kee singing their pigeon English in the sweetest voices and with the most musical inflections.

We were not, however, to return alone; for we brought with us Joe Strong, the painter, a most good-natured comrade and a capital hand at an omelette.  I do not know in which capacity he was most valued—as a cook or a companion; and he did excellently well in both.

The Kong Sam Kee negotiation had delayed us unduly; it must have been half-past nine before we left Calistoga, and night came fully ere we struck the bottom of the grade.  I have never seen such a night.  It seemed to throw calumny in the teeth of all the painters that ever dabbled in starlight.  The sky itself was of a ruddy, powerful, nameless, changing colour, dark and glossy like a serpent’s back.  The stars, by innumerable millions, stuck boldly forth like lamps.  The milky way was bright, like a moonlit cloud; half heaven seemed milky way.  The greater luminaries shone each more clearly than a winter’s moon.  Their light was dyed in every sort of colour—red, like fire; blue, like steel; green, like the tracks of sunset; and so sharply did each stand forth in its own lustre that there was no appearance of that flat, star-spangled arch we know so well in pictures, but all the hollow of heaven was one chaos of contesting luminaries—a hurry-burly of stars.  Against this the hills and rugged treetops stood out redly dark.

As we continued to advance, the lesser lights and milky ways first grew pale, and then vanished; the countless hosts of heaven dwindled in number by successive millions; those that still shone had tempered their exceeding brightness and fallen back into their customary wistful distance; and the sky declined from its first bewildering splendour into the appearance of a common night.  Slowly this change proceeded, and still there was no sign of any cause.  Then a whiteness like mist was thrown over the spurs of the mountain.  Yet a while, and, as we turned a corner, a great leap of silver light and net of forest shadows fell across the road and upon our wondering waggonful; and, swimming low among the trees, we beheld a strange, misshapen, waning moon, half-tilted on her back.

“Where are ye when the moon appears?” so the old poet sang, half-taunting, to the stars, bent upon a courtly purpose.

“As the sunlight round the dim earth’s midnight tower of shadow pours,
   Streaming past the dim, wide portals,
   Viewless to the eyes of mortals,
Till it floods the moon’s pale islet or the morning’s golden shores.”

So sings Mr. Trowbridge, with a noble inspiration.  And so had the sunlight flooded that pale islet of the moon, and her lit face put out, one after another, that galaxy of stars.  The wonder of the drive was over; but, by some nice conjunction of clearness in the air and fit shadow in the valley where we travelled, we had seen for a little while that brave display of the midnight heavens.  It was gone, but it had been; nor shall I ever again behold the stars with the same mind.  He who has seen the sea commoved with a great hurricane, thinks of it very differently from him who has seen it only in a calm.  And the difference between a calm and a hurricane is not greatly more striking than that between the ordinary face of night and the splendour that shone upon us in that drive.  Two in our waggon knew night as she shines upon the tropics, but even that bore no comparison.  The nameless colour of the sky, the hues of the star-fire, and the incredible projection of the stars themselves, starting from their orbits, so that the eye seemed to distinguish their positions in the hollow of space—these were things that we had never seen before and shall never see again.

Meanwhile, in this altered night, we proceeded on our way among the scents and silence of the forest, reached the top of the grade, wound up by Hanson’s, and came at last to a stand under the flying gargoyle of the chute.  Sam, who had been lying back, fast asleep, with the moon on his face, got down, with the remark that it was pleasant “to be home.”  The waggon turned and drove away, the noise gently dying in the woods, and we clambered up the rough path, Caliban’s great feat of engineering, and came home to Silverado.

The moon shone in at the eastern doors and windows, and over the lumber on the platform.  The one tall pine beside the ledge was steeped in silver.  Away up the canyon, a wild cat welcomed us with three discordant squalls.  But once we had lit a candle, and began to review our improvements, homely in either sense, and count our stores, it was wonderful what a feeling of possession and permanence grow up in the hearts of the lords of Silverado.  A bed had still to be made up for Strong, and the morning’s water to be fetched, with clinking pail; and as we set about these household duties, and showed off our wealth and conveniences before the stranger, and had a glass of wine, I think, in honour of our return, and trooped at length one after another up the flying bridge of plank, and lay down to sleep in our shattered, moon-pierced barrack, we were among the happiest sovereigns in the world, and certainly ruled over the most contented people.  Yet, in our absence, the palace had been sacked.  Wild cats, so the Hansons said, had broken in and carried off a side of bacon, a hatchet, and two knives.