t but the one shirt?"

"But the one shirt! No! Do you think a man wants a _thousand_ shirts?"

These men were mostly shy with their letters and their tales of love.
That was sacred ground, upon which no strange, rude feet could pass. No
gold-hunter there, perhaps, but had his love--his one only love, without
a chance or possibility of changing the object of his devotion, even if
he had desired it. Men must love as well as women. It is the most
natural and, consequently, the most proper thing on earth. Imagine how
intensified and how tender a man's devotion would become under
circumstances like these. The one image in his heart, the one hope--HER.
So much time to think, bending to the work in the running water under
the trees, on the narrow trail beneath the shadows of the forest, by the
camp and cabin-fire, her face and hers only, with no new face rising
up, crossing his path, confronting him for days, for months, for
years--see how holy a thing his love would grow to be. This, you
observe, is a new man, a new manner of lover. Love, I say, is a
requirement, a necessity. It is as necessary for a complete man to love
as it is for him to breathe pure air. And it is as natural.

These men, being so far removed from any personal contact with the
objects of their affections, and only now and then at long intervals
receiving letters, all marked and remarked across the backs from the
remailings from camp to camp, of course knew of no interruptions in the
current of their devotion, and loved in a singularly earnest and sincere
way. I doubt if there be anything like it in history.

When men go to war, they have the glory and excitement of battle to
allure them, then the eyes of many women are upon them; they are not
locked up like these men of the Sierras, with only their work and the
one thing to think of. When they go to sea, sailors find new faces in
every port; but these men, from the time they crossed the Missouri or
left the Atlantic coast, had known no strange gods, hardly heard a
woman's voice, till they returned.

But let us return to this one firm first woman, who had come into camp
and taken at once upon her shoulders the task of washing and mending
the miners' clothes.

Men, even the most bloated and besotted, walked as straight as possible
up the trail that led by the Widow's cabin, as they passed that way at
night; and kept back their jokes and war-whoops till far up the creek
and out of her hearing in the pin