to cajole into buying Mountaineer House. She strolled out into the
garden as Harlan rode up and tied his horse under one of the trees.

A happy pair passed. A delicate girl mounted upon a little mule and a
sturdy youth walking in the dust, his hand upon the beast's shoulder.
With their serene and joy-illumined faces they somehow suggested the
holy family, symbolical of all that was divine in a sordid world.

The girl smiled and waved to Rosa, but the young man doffed his hat
coldly and hastened by.

"The sweet little Elena," said Rosa to herself, "and her lover-husband.
I wear the silken wedding gown which no lover sees, but she travels the
way in calico with the man she loves. May the Blessed Virgin grant that
she shall have no turned down pages in her life," and forcing her proud
and bitter mouth into a provocative smile, she went forward to welcome
Harlan.

The Hanging of Charlie Price

III

"He goes to the well,
And he stands on the brink,
And stops for a spell
Jest to listen and think:
Let's see--well, that forty-foot grave wasn't his, sir,
that day, anyhow."

--Bret Harte.

Everywhere in the foothills of the Sierras there are still evidences of
gold mining. High cliffs face the rivers, all that is left of hills torn
down at the point of the powerful hydraulic nozzles, with great heaps
of cobbles at their base which Mother Nature, even in seventy years has
been unable to change or cover.

At the mouth of nearly every ravine there are countless little mounds
which marked the end, or dump of the sluice-box in the placer mining.
When the mound got the proper height the sluice was simply lengthened,
like putting another joint onto a caterpillar--and there you were! The
sluice-boxes have long since been moved away or rotted to mould but
the little mounds remain, to be mansions for hustling colonies of small
black ants.

The country, in various localities, is pitted with prospect holes, and
the hills are pierced with drift tunnels and abandoned mines. Some of
the prospect holes are mere grassy cups, others are very deep and partly
filled with water.

Some of the most engrossing days of my childhood were spent in exploring
these places with my two boy companions. We would fell an oak sapling
across the mouth of the hole, tie a rope, usually my pony's lariat, to
the tree and slide down it to explore the depths below. If we came to
a side drift we would swing into