g his harp in the wind
and move down these watered and wooded slopes to conquer the world with
a song for Peace.

Now you would have me say that we never once sinned in this Eden of ours
in the Sierras.

There is an old and a beautiful story. You knew it long before you
learned to read. It was in that other Eden. There the living God spake
face to face with man. He visited him every day in his own form. And yet
he fell. We do not claim to be much better than they were in Eden, even
in the Sierras.

The Forks, like every other place in the world, had its little center of
Aristocracy. There was here, as in any other little community, one
leading woman of fashion; the one tyrant who admitted this or that one
to the Social Center. This woman, an ancient "School-marm," had firmly
set her face against the Widow from the first. From this there was no
appeal. The Widow was in disgrace. Still she refused to banish the
boy-poet from her presence.

The old suspicion hung in the minds of the miners at the Forks. One day
there were two old men, made mellow from the juice of grapes they had
planted and grown on the hill-sides about their cabins, who grimly
wagged their heads and looked wise at the mention of "the Widow," as
she was still called, and sympathized with Sandy.

"Yes, pra'ps it was and pra'ps it wasn't," one would say as he thought
of little "Half-a-pint," now a noisy little tom-boy filling the fir
woods with laughter, "but then her having that 'ere poet about her all
the time, that's what sticks in my crop."

"That's what sticks in my crop," echoes his fellow, as he pushes the
bushy beard from his mouth and lifts his gourd of wine.

"The reputation of this ere camp," says another, as he sets down his
empty gourd and lays his fore-finger in his palm, and settles his head
wisely to one side, "the reputation of this ere camp depends on a havin'
of this ere thing cleared up about the Widder."

"It looks pesky black," put in the other garrulous old woman in duck
breeches, "'Cause why? she still sees him."

"And Sandy?"

Three old heads, helpless, good-natured old women, who had spent their
manhood and their strength long before their grape-vines were growing on
the hill-side, huddled close together in half maudlin conversation.

"Sandy!"

"He's a chuckle-headed old idiart."

"He's a gitten old and he can't help hisself."

"He's a gitten old."

"The chuckle-headed old idiart."

"Lookee here!"

An old fo