cud timorously over a level crossing in the country, here talk dress
and babies under the very nose of the cow-catcher, and little children
dally with the moving car in a manner horrible to behold. We pulled out
at the wholly insignificant speed of twenty-five miles an hour through
the streets of a suburb of fifty thousand, and in our progress among the
carts and the children and the shop fronts slew nobody; at which I was
not a little disappointed.

When the negro porter bedded me up for the night and I had solved the
problem of undressing while lying down,--I was much cheered by the
thought that if anything happened I should have to stay where I was and
wait till the kerosene lamps set the overturned car alight and burned me
to death. It is easier to get out of a full theatre than to leave a
Pullman in haste.

By the time I had discovered that a profusion of nickel-plating, plush,
and damask does not compensate for closeness and dust, the train ran
into the daylight on the banks of the Sacramento River. A few windows
were gingerly opened after the bunks had been reconverted into seats,
but that long coffin-car was by no means ventilated, and we were a
gummy, grimy crew who sat there. At six in the morning the heat was
distinctly unpleasant, but seeing with the eye of the flesh that I was
in Bret Harte's own country, I rejoiced. There were the pines and
madrone-clad hills his miners lived and fought among; there was the
heated red earth that showed whence the gold had been washed; the dry
gulch, the red, dusty road where Hamblin was used to stop the stage in
the intervals of his elegant leisure and superior card-play; there was
the timber felled and sweating resin in the sunshine; and, above all,
there was the quivering pungent heat that Bret Harte drives into your
dull brain with the magic of his pen. When we stopped at a collection of
packing-cases dignified by the name of a town, my felicity was complete.
The name of the place was something offensive,--Amberville or
Jacksonburgh,--but it owned a cast-iron fountain worthy of a town of
thirty thousand. Next to the fountain was a "hotel," at least seventeen
feet high including the chimney, and next to the hotel was the
forest--the pine, the oak, and the untrammelled undergrowth of the
hillside. A cinnamon-bear cub--Baby Sylvester in the very fur--was tied
to the stump of a tree opposite the fountain; a pack-mule dozed in the
dust-haze, a red-shirted miner in a slouch