strange in those
days, because girls were scarce, don't you see? There was not a girl
within forty miles of me; and just the thought of one now, as I was
fixing those nails to hang her garments on; why, it ran just through me
like a shock of electricity!

"Well, as I said, I had about two hundred and fifty head of cattle, a
house with a garden, a young orchard, and vegetables growing; everything
in readiness for the wife I had counted on getting to help me take care
of it. And what do you think happened? There came such a plague of
grasshoppers upon the valley that they destroyed every green thing:
crops, orchard, flowers, grass, everything! My stock died, the greater
portion of them, and _I was ruined_." (Deep bass.) "I considered myself
disappointed in love, too, because, though I hadn't yet found my girl, I
knew she was somewhere in the valley waiting for me; and I felt somehow,
when the grasshoppers ate up every thing, as if I had been jilted.
Actually, it pierces me with a pang now to think of those useless pegs
on which so often my imagination hung a pink calico dress and a girl's
sun-bonnet."

Knitting his brows, and sighing as he shifted his position, Ela once
more pulled the hair over his forehead, in his peculiar fashion, and
went on:

"I became misanthropic; felt myself badly used. Packing up my books and
a few other traps, I started for the mountains with what stock I had
left, built myself a fort, and played hermit."

"A regular fort?"

"A stockade eighteen feet high, with an embankment four feet high around
it, a strong gate, a tent in the middle of the inclosure, all my
property, such as books, feed, arms, etc., inside."

"On account of Indians?"

"Indians and White Men. Yes, I've seen a good many Indians through the
bead of my rifle. They learned to keep away from my fort. There were
mining camps down in the valley, and you know the hangers-on of those
camps? I sold beef to the miners; had plenty of money by me sometimes.
It was necessary to be strongly forted."

"What a strange life for a boy! What did you do? How spend your time?"

"I herded my cattle, drove them to market, cooked, studied, wrote, and
indulged in misanthropy, with a little rifle practice. By the time I had
been one summer in the mountains, I had got my hand in, and knew how to
make money buying up cattle to sell again in the mines."

"So there was method in your madness--misanthropy, I mean?"

"Well, a man cannot resign l