that when not in use it will occupy small space and shut out very
little air.

There is little more to say about this house. I am to build seven or ten
years from now. There is plenty of time in which to work up all the
details in accord with the general principles I have laid down. It will
be a usable house and a beautiful house, wherein the aesthetic guest can
find comfort for his eyes as well as for his body. It will be a happy
house--or else I'll burn it down. It will be a house of air and sunshine
and laughter. These three cannot be divorced. Laughter without air and
sunshine becomes morbid, decadent, demoniac. I have in me a thousand
generations. Laughter that is decadent is not good for these thousand
generations.

GLEN ELLEN, CALIFORNIA.
_July_ 1906.

THE GOLD HUNTERS OF THE NORTH

"Where the Northern Lights come down a' nights to dance on the
houseless snow."

"Ivan, I forbid you to go farther in this undertaking. Not a word about
this, or we are all undone. Let the Americans and the English know that
we have gold in these mountains, then we are ruined. They will rush in
on us by thousands, and crowd us to the wall--to the death."

So spoke the old Russian governor, Baranov, at Sitka, in 1804, to one of
his Slavonian hunters, who had just drawn from his pocket a handful of
golden nuggets. Full well Baranov, fur trader and autocrat, understood
and feared the coming of the sturdy, indomitable gold hunters of
Anglo-Saxon stock. And thus he suppressed the news, as did the governors
that followed him, so that when the United States bought Alaska in 1867,
she bought it for its furs and fisheries, without a thought of its
treasures underground.

No sooner, however, had Alaska become American soil than thousands of our
adventurers were afoot and afloat for the north. They were the men of
"the days of gold," the men of California, Fraser, Cassiar, and Cariboo.
With the mysterious, infinite faith of the prospector, they believed that
the gold streak, which ran through the Americas from Cape Horn to
California, did not "peter out" in British Columbia. That it extended
farther north, was their creed, and "Farther North" became their cry. No
time was lost, and in the early seventies, leaving the Treadwell and the
Silver Bow Basin to be discovered by those who came after, they went
plunging on into the white unknown. North, farther north, they
struggled, till their picks rang in th