bitter imaginings to myself, but poured
them forth to Betsy, she merely laughed, and asked me how I could be
such a simpleton. Only to think of my father in such a light was beyond
her patience! Where was my pride, she would like to know, and my birth,
and my family manners? However, she did believe there was something in
my ideas, if you turned them inside out, and took hold of them by the
other end. It was much more likely, to her mind, that the villain, the
unknown villain at the bottom of all the misery, was really the son
born out of wedlock, if any such there were at all, and therefore a wild
harum-scarum fellow like Ishmael in the Book of Genesis. And it would
be just of a piece, she thought, with the old lord's character to drive
such a man to desperation by refusing to give him a farthing.

"All that might very well be," I answered; "but it would in no way serve
to explain my father's conduct, which was the great mystery of all."
Nevertheless, I was glad to accept almost any view of the case rather
than that which had forced itself upon me since the opening of the
locket. Any doubt of that most wretched conclusion was a great relief
while it lasted; and, after so long a time of hope and self-reliance,
should I cast away all courage through a mere suspicion?

While I was thus re-assuring myself, and being re-assured by my faithful
nurse, sad news arrived, and drove my thoughts into another crooked
channel. Mrs. Hockin, to meet my anxiety for some tidings from
California, had promised that if any letter came, she would not even
wait for the post, but forward it by special messenger. And thus, that
very same evening, I received a grimy epistle, in an unknown hand, with
the postmark of Sacramento. Tearing it open, I read as follows:

"MISS 'REMA,--No good luck ever came, since you, to this Blue River
Station, only to be washed away, and robbed by greasers, and shot
through the ribs, and got more work than can do, and find an almighty
nugget sent by Satan. And now the very worst luck of all have come,
wholly and out of all denial, by you and your faces and graces and
French goings on. Not that I do not like you, mind; for you always was
very polite to me, and done your best when you found me trying to put up
with the trials put on me. But now this trial is the worst of all that
ever come to my establishings; and to go away now as I used to think
of doing when tyrannized upon is out of my way altogether, and only