Bret Harte's Forty-Nine.

The wagon-trail felt ever farther and farther into the hills. It had
not been used as a stage-route for years, but the freighting kept it
deep with dust, that writhed and twisted and crawled lazily knee-high
to our horses, like a living creature. We felt the swing and sweep of
the route. The boldness of its stretches, the freedom of its reaches
for the opposite slope, the wide curve of its horseshoes, all filled us
with the breath of an expansion which as yet the broad low country only
suggested.

Everything here was reminiscent of long ago. The very names hinted
stories of the Argonauts. Coarse Gold Gulch, Whiskey Creek, Grub
Gulch, Fine Gold Post-Office in turn we passed. Occasionally, with a
fine round dash into the open, the trail drew one side to a
stage-station. The huge stables, the wide corrals, the low
living-houses, each shut in its dooryard of blazing riotous flowers,
were all familiar. Only lacked the old-fashioned Concord coach, from
which to descend Jack Hamlin or Judge Starbottle. As for M'liss, she
was there, sunbonnet and all.

Down in the gulch bottoms were the old placer diggings. Elaborate
little ditches for the deflection of water, long cradles for the
separation of gold, decayed rockers, and shining in the sun the tons
and tons of pay dirt which had been turned over pound by pound in the
concentrating of its treasure. Some of the old cabins still stood. It
was all deserted now, save for the few who kept trail for the
freighters, or who tilled the restricted bottom-lands of the flats.
Road-runners racked away down the paths; squirrels scurried over
worn-out placers; jays screamed and chattered in and out of the
abandoned cabins. Strange and shy little creatures and birds,
reassured by the silence of many years, had ventured to take to
themselves the engines of man's industry. And the warm California sun
embalmed it all in a peaceful forgetfulness.

Now the trees grew bigger, and the hills more impressive. We should
call them mountains in the East. Pines covered them to the top,
straight slender pines with voices. The little flats were planted with
great oaks. When we rode through them, they shut out the hills, so
that we might have imagined ourselves in the level wooded country.
There insisted the effect of limitless tree-grown plains, which the
warm drowsy sun, the park-like landscape, corroborated. And yet the
contrast of the clear atmosphere and the