had just
ridden, vainly endeavoring to find the settlement of Smith's Pocket.

An observant traveler might have found some compensation for his
disappointment in the weird aspect of that vicinity. There were huge
fissures on the hillside, and displacements of the red soil, resembling
more the chaos of some primary elemental upheaval than the work of
man; while halfway down, a long flume straddled its narrow body and
disproportionate legs over the chasm, like an enormous fossil of some
forgotten antediluvian. At every step smaller ditches crossed the road,
hiding in their sallow depths unlovely streams that crept away to a
clandestine union with the great yellow torrent below, and here and
there were the ruins of some cabin with the chimney alone left intact
and the hearthstone open to the skies.

The settlement of Smith's Pocket owed its origin to the finding of a
"pocket" on its site by a veritable Smith. Five thousand dollars were
taken out of it in one half-hour by Smith. Three thousand dollars were
expended by Smith and others in erecting a flume and in tunneling. And
then Smith's Pocket was found to be only a pocket, and subject like
other pockets to depletion. Although Smith pierced the bowels of the
great red mountain, that five thousand dollars was the first and last
return of his labor. The mountain grew reticent of its golden secrets,
and the flume steadily ebbed away the remainder of Smith's fortune.
Then Smith went into quartz-mining; then into quartz-milling; then into
hydraulics and ditching, and then by easy degrees into saloonkeeping.
Presently it was whispered that Smith was drinking a great deal; then it
was known that Smith was a habitual drunkard, and then people began to
think, as they are apt to, that he had never been anything else. But the
settlement of Smith's Pocket, like that of most discoveries, was happily
not dependent on the fortune of its pioneer, and other parties projected
tunnels and found pockets. So Smith's Pocket became a settlement, with
its two fancy stores, its two hotels, its one express office, and its
two first families. Occasionally its one long straggling street was
overawed by the assumption of the latest San Francisco fashions,
imported per express, exclusively to the first families; making outraged
Nature, in the ragged outline of her furrowed surface, look still more
homely, and putting personal insult on that greater portion of the
population to whom the Sabbath, with