ts were well filled with the same heterogeneous mingling she had
seen in the dining-room at the Placer Hotel, but in the parquet were
some fashionable costumes and cultivated faces. Mr. Hopkins was not
altogether so sure that Jim had been "only gassing." But the gorgeous
drop curtain, representing an allegory of Californian prosperity and
abundance, presently uprolled upon a scene of Western life almost as
striking in its glaring unreality. From a rose-clad English cottage in
a subtropical landscape skipped "Rosalie, the Prairie Flower." The
briefest of skirts, the most unsullied of stockings, the tiniest of
slippers, and the few diamonds that glittered on her fair neck and
fingers, revealed at once the simple and unpretending daughter of the
American backwoodsman. A tumult of delighted greeting broke from the
audience. The bright color came to the pink, girlish cheeks, gratified
vanity danced in her violet eyes, and as she piquantly bowed her
acknowledgments, this great breath of praise seemed to transfigure and
possess her. A very young actor who represented the giddy world in
a straw hat and with an effeminate manner was alternately petted and
girded at by her during the opening exposition of the plot, until the
statement that a "dark destiny" obliged her to follow her uncle in an
emigrant train across the plains closed the act, apparently extinguished
him, and left HER the central figure. So far, she evidently was the
favorite. A singular aversion to her crept into the heart of Phoebe.

But the second act brought an Indian attack upon the emigrant train, and
here "Rosalie" displayed the archest heroism and the pinkest and most
distracting self-possession, in marked contrast to the giddy worldling
who, having accompanied her apparently for comic purposes best known to
himself, cowered abjectly under wagons, and was pulled ignominiously out
of straw, until Red Dick swept out of the wings with a chosen band and
a burst of revolvers and turned the tide of victory. Attired as a
picturesque combination of the Neapolitan smuggler, river-bar miner,
and Mexican vacquero, Jim Hooker instantly began to justify the plaudits
that greeted him and the most sanguinary hopes of the audience. A gloomy
but fascinating cloud of gunpowder and dark intrigue from that moment
hung about the stage.

Yet in this sombre obscuration Rosalie had passed a happy six months,
coming out with her character and stockings equally unchanged and
unblem