oad to make up the deficiency. It may be imagined
from this and other circumstances that Michael stood a little in awe of
Jinny's superior intellect, and that Jinny occasionally, with the
instinct of her sex, presumed upon it. After the Sunday episode,
already referred to, she was given her liberty on that day, a privilege
she gracefully recognized by somewhat unbending her usual austerity in
the indulgence of a saturnine humor. She would visit the mining camps,
and, grazing lazily and thoughtfully before the cabins, would, by
various artifices and coquetries known to the female heart, induce some
credulous stranger to approach her with the intention of taking a ride.
She would submit hesitatingly to a halter, allow him to mount her back,
and, with every expression of timid and fearful reluctance, at last
permit him to guide her in a laborious trot out of sight of human
habitation. What happened then was never clearly known. In a few
moments the camp would be aroused by shouts and execrations, and the
spectacle of Jinny tearing by at a frightful pace, with the stranger
clinging with his arms around her neck, afraid to slip off, from terror
of her circumvolving heels, and vainly imploring assistance. Again and
again she would dash by the applauding groups, adding the aggravation
of her voice to the danger of her heels, until suddenly wheeling, she
would gallop to Carter's Pond, and deposit her luckless freight in the
muddy ditch. This practical joke was repeated until one Sunday she was
approached by Juan Ramirez, a Mexican vaquero, booted and spurred, and
carrying a riata. A crowd was assembled to see her discomfiture. But,
to the intense disappointment of the camp, Jinny, after quietly
surveying the stranger, uttered a sardonic bray, and ambled away to the
little cemetery on the hill, whose tangled chapparal effectually
prevented all pursuit by her skilled antagonist. From that day she
forsook the camp, and spent her Sabbaths in mortuary reflections among
the pine head-boards and cold "hic jacets" of the dead.

Happy would it have been if this circumstance, which resulted in the
one poetic episode of her life, had occurred earlier; for the cemetery
was the favorite resort of Miss Jessie Lawton, a gentle invalid from
San Francisco, who had sought the foot-hills for the balsam of pine and
fir, and in the faint hope that the freshness of the wild roses might
call back her own. The extended views from the cemeter