. Long stretches there are, crowded and jammed and
drifted with ghostly white stones that stand up like fossils of a
prehistoric life--the earth deposit which once covered them entirely
washed away, every particle of it removed by the greedy hordes, leaving
only this vast bleaching drift, literally the "picked bones of the
land." At one place stands Columbia, regarded once as a rival to
Sacramento, a possible State capital--a few tumbling shanties now--and a
ruined church.

It was the 4th of December, 1864, when Mark Twain arrived at Jim
Gillis's cabin. He found it a humble habitation made of logs and slabs,
partly sheltered by a great live-oak tree, surrounded by a stretch of
grass. It had not much in the way of pretentious furniture, but there
was a large fireplace, and a library which included the standard
authors. A younger Gillis boy, William, was there at this time, so that
the family numbered five in all, including Tom Quartz, the cat. On rainy
days they would gather about the big, open fire and Jim Gillis, with his
back to the warmth, would relate diverting yarns, creations of his
own, turned out hot from the anvil, forged as he went along. He had a
startling imagination, and he had fostered it in that secluded place.
His stories usually consisted of wonderful adventures of his companion,
Dick Stoker, portrayed with humor and that serene and vagrant fancy
which builds as it goes, careless as to whither it is proceeding and
whether the story shall end well or ill, soon or late, if ever. He
always pretended that these extravagant tales of Stoker were strictly
true; and Stoker--"forty-six and gray as a rat"--earnest, thoughtful,
and tranquilly serene, would smoke and look into the fire and listen to
those astonishing things of himself, smiling a little now and then but
saying never a word. What did it matter to him? He had no world outside
of the cabin and the hills, no affairs; he would live and die there;
his affairs all had ended long ago. A number of the stories used in Mark
Twain's books were first told by Jim Gillis, standing with his hands
crossed behind him, back to the fire, in the cabin on jackass Hill. The
story of Dick Baker's cat was one of these; the jaybird and Acorn story
of 'A Tramp Abroad' was another; also the story of the "Burning Shame,"
and there are others. Mark Twain had little to add to these stories;
in fact, he never could get them to sound as well, he said, as when Jim
Gillis had told th