get a sufficient though
a lonely living in this little cabaret in the mountains.
In my solitude I fell into many of the ways of a savage.
Like an Eskimo, I was shapeless in winter; like a Red Indian, I wore
in hot summers nothing but a pair of leather trousers, with a
great straw hat as big as a parasol to defend me from the sun.
I had a bowie knife at my belt and a long gun under my arm;
and I dare say I produced a pretty wild impression on the few
peaceable travellers that could climb up to my place.
But I promise you I never looked as mad as that man did.
Compared with him I was Fifth Avenue.

"I dare say that living under the very top of the Sierras has an odd
effect on the mind; one tends to think of those lonely rocks not as peaks
coming to a point, but rather as pillars holding up heaven itself.
Straight cliffs sail up and away beyond the hope of the eagles;
cliffs so tall that they seem to attract the stars and collect them as
sea-crags collect a mere glitter of phosphorous. These terraces and towers
of rock do not, like smaller crests, seem to be the end of the world.
Rather they seem to be its awful beginning: its huge foundations.
We could almost fancy the mountain branching out above us like a tree
of stone, and carrying all those cosmic lights like a candelabrum.
For just as the peaks failed us, soaring impossibly far,
so the stars crowded us (as it seemed), coming impossibly near.
The spheres burst about us more like thunderbolts hurled at the earth
than planets circling placidly about it.

"All this may have driven me mad; I am not sure. I know there is one
angle of the road down the pass where the rock leans out a little,
and on windy nights I seem to hear it clashing overhead with other rocks--
yes, city against city and citadel against citadel, far up into the night.
It was on such an evening that the strange man struggled up the pass.
Broadly speaking, only strange men did struggle up the pass.
But I had never seen one like this one before.

"He carried (I cannot conceive why) a long, dilapidated
garden rake, all bearded and bedraggled with grasses,
so that it looked like the ensign of some old barbarian tribe.
His hair, which was as long and rank as the grass, hung down
below his huge shoulders; and such clothes as clung about him
were rags and tongues of red and yellow, so that he had the air
of being dressed like an Indian in feathers or autumn leaves.
The rake or pitchfork, or whatever it