, in an unassertive way, they contained much of calm
self-reliance and strength of purpose founded upon self-experience and
experience of the world.

From out the screen of vines and creepers he flung ahead of him a
miner's pick and shovel and gold-pan. Then he crawled out himself into
the open. He was clad in faded overalls and black cotton shirt, with
hobnailed brogans on his feet, and on his head a hat whose shapelessness
and stains advertised the rough usage of wind and rain and sun and
camp-smoke. He stood erect, seeing wide-eyed the secrecy of the scene
and sensuously inhaling the warm, sweet breath of the canyon-garden
through nostrils that dilated and quivered with delight. His eyes
narrowed to laughing slits of blue, his face wreathed itself in joy, and
his mouth curled in a smile as he cried aloud:

"Jumping dandelions and happy hollyhocks, but that smells good to me!
Talk about your attar o' roses an' cologne factories! They ain't in it!"

He had the habit of soliloquy. His quick-changing facial expressions
might tell every thought and mood, but the tongue, perforce, ran hard
after, repeating, like a second Boswell.

The man lay down on the lip of the pool and drank long and deep of its
water. "Tastes good to me," he murmured, lifting his head and gazing
across the pool at the side-hill, while he wiped his mouth with the back
of his hand. The side-hill attracted his attention. Still lying on his
stomach, he studied the hill formation long and carefully. It was a
practised eye that travelled up the slope to the crumbling canyon-wall
and back and down again to the edge of the pool. He scrambled to his
feet and favored the side-hill with a second survey.

"Looks good to me," he concluded, picking up his pick and shovel and
gold-pan.

He crossed the stream below the pool, stepping agilely from stone to
stone. Where the sidehill touched the water he dug up a shovelful of
dirt and put it into the gold-pan. He squatted down, holding the pan in
his two hands, and partly immersing it in the stream. Then he imparted
to the pan a deft circular motion that sent the water sluicing in and
out through the dirt and gravel. The larger and the lighter particles
worked to the surface, and these, by a skilful dipping movement of
the pan, he spilled out and over the edge. Occasionally, to expedite
matters, he rested the pan and with his fingers raked out the large
pebbles and pieces of rock.

The contents of the pan dimin