round belly, had no mind--he had no memory. He had tried everything in
the world almost, and always had failed. He had come to never expect
anything else. When he rose up to make a speech of thanks to the "boys"
for the "unexpected honor," and broke flat down after two or three
allusions to the "wonderful climate of Californy," he was perfectly
serene, perfectly content. He had got used to breaking down, and it
didn't hurt him.

He used to say to his friends in confidence that he certainly would have
made a great poet had he begun in his youth. And perhaps he would, for
he was certainly fit for nothing else under the sun.

The Forks was the wildest and the freshest bit of the black-white,
fir-set, and snow-crowned Sierras that ever the Creator gave, new from
His hand, to man.

One thousand men! Not a woman, not a child, down in that canon of
theirs, so deep that the sun never reached them in the Winter and but a
little portion of the day in Summer.

Forests, fir and pine, in the canon, and out of the canon, up the hills
and up the mountains, black and dense, till they broke against the
colossal granite peaks far above and crowned in everlasting snow.

Three little streams came tumbling down here from the snow peaks in
different directions, meeting with a precision which showed that they
knew their ways perfectly through the woods; and from this little union
of waters the camp had taken the name of "The Forks."

They had no law, no religion; but, for all that, the men were not bad.
It is true they shot and stabbed each other in a rather reckless manner;
but then they did it in such a manly sort of a way that but little of
the curse of Cain was supposed to follow.

Maybe it was because life was so desolate and dreary that these men
threw it away so frequently, and with such refreshing indifference, in
the misunderstandings at the Forks; for, after all, they led but
wretched lives. That vast freedom of theirs became a sort of desolation.

This was the new Eden. It was so new, it was still damp. You could smell
the paint, as it were. Man had just arrived. He had not yet slept. The
rib had not yet been taken from his side. He was alone. Behold, these
men went up and down the earth, naming new things and possessing them.

Strong, strange men met there from the farthest parts of the world.

Men were grandly honest there. They invariably left gold in their
gold-pans from day to day open in the claim--ounces, pounds o