contained ninety stanzas, and was continued with conscientious
deliberation to the bitter end,--the lullaby generally had the desired
effect. At such times the men would lie at full length under the trees
in the soft summer twilight, smoking their pipes and drinking in
the melodious utterances. An indistinct idea that this was pastoral
happiness pervaded the camp. "This 'ere kind o' think," said the Cockney
Simmons, meditatively reclining on his elbow, "is 'evingly." It reminded
him of Greenwich.

On the long summer days The Luck was usually carried to the gulch from
whence the golden store of Roaring Camp was taken. There, on a blanket
spread over pine boughs, he would lie while the men were working in the
ditches below. Latterly there was a rude attempt to decorate this bower
with flowers and sweet-smelling shrubs, and generally some one would
bring him a cluster of wild honeysuckles, azaleas, or the painted
blossoms of Las Mariposas. The men had suddenly awakened to the fact
that there were beauty and significance in these trifles, which they
had so long trodden carelessly beneath their feet. A flake of glittering
mica, a fragment of variegated quartz, a bright pebble from the bed of
the creek, became beautiful to eyes thus cleared and strengthened,
and were invariably pat aside for The Luck. It was wonderful how many
treasures the woods and hillsides yielded that "would do for Tommy."
Surrounded by playthings such as never child out of fairyland had
before, it is to be hoped that Tommy was content. He appeared to be
serenely happy, albeit there was an infantine gravity about him, a
contemplative light in his round gray eyes, that sometimes worried
Stumpy. He was always tractable and quiet, and it is recorded that once,
having crept beyond his "corral,"--a hedge of tessellated pine boughs,
which surrounded his bed,--he dropped over the bank on his head in
the soft earth, and remained with his mottled legs in the air in that
position for at least five minutes with unflinching gravity. He was
extricated without a murmur. I hesitate to record the many other
instances of his sagacity, which rest, unfortunately, upon the
statements of prejudiced friends. Some of them were not without a tinge
of superstition. "I crep' up the bank just now," said Kentuck one
day, in a breathless state of excitement "and dern my skin if he was
a-talking to a jay bird as was a-sittin' on his lap. There they was,
just as free and sociable as