ient terrace, overgrown with moss and
tradition, that overlooked the sedate glory of an English park. Here he
found himself, restricted painfully by his inconsistent night-clothes,
endeavoring to impress his mother and sisters with the singular
virtues and excellences of his American host and hostesses--virtues and
excellences that he himself was beginning to feel conscious had become
more or less apocryphal in that atmosphere. He heard his mother's voice
saying severely, "When you learn, Francis, to respect the opinions and
prejudices of your family enough to prevent your appearing before them
in this uncivilized aboriginal costume, we will listen to what you have
to say of the friends whose habits you seem to have adopted;" and he
was frantically indignant that his efforts to convince them that his
negligence was a personal oversight, and not a Californian custom,
were utterly futile. But even then this vision was brushed away by the
bewildering sweep of Louise's pretty skirt across the dreamy picture,
and her delicate features and softly-fringed eyes remained the last to
slip from his fading consciousness.

The moon rose higher and higher above the sleeping house and softly
breathing canyon. There was nothing to mar the idyllic repose of the
landscape; only the growing light of the last two hours had brought out
in the far eastern horizon a dim white peak, that gleamed faintly among
the stars, like a bridal couch spread between the hills fringed with
fading nuptial torches. No one would have believed that behind that
impenetrable shadow to the west, in the heart of the forest, the
throbbing saw-mill of James Bradley was even at that moment eating its
destructive way through the conserved growth of Nature and centuries,
and that the refined proprietor of house and greenwood, with the glow of
his furnace fires on his red shirt, and his alert, intelligent eyes, was
the genie of that devastation, and the toiling leader of the shadowy,
toiling figures around him.

CHAPER III.

Amid the beauty of the most uncultivated and untrodden wilderness there
are certain localities where the meaner and mere common processes
of Nature take upon themselves a degrading likeness to the slovenly,
wasteful, and improvident processes of man. The unrecorded land-slip
disintegrating a whole hillside will not only lay bare the delicate
framework of strata and deposit to the vulgar eye, but hurl into the
valley a debris so monstrous