ir, and red whiskers. Moreover, when he landed in San
Francisco, he wore a blue coat, with clear brass buttons, blue vest,
blue trousers, and a glazed straw hat; but in the course of a week he
effected such a change in his outward man, that his most intimate friend
would have failed to recognise him.

No brigand of the Pyrenees ever looked more savage--no robber of the
stage ever appeared more outrageously fierce. We do not mean to say
that Captain Bunting "got himself up" for the purpose of making himself
conspicuous. He merely donned the usual habiliments of a miner; but
these habiliments were curious, and the captain's figure in them was
unusually remarkable.

In order that the reader may have a satisfactory view of the captain, we
will change the scene, and proceed at once to that part of the road to
the gold-fields which has now been reached by our adventurers.

It is a wide plain, or prairie, on which the grass waves like the waters
of the sea. On one side it meets the horizon, on another it is bounded
by the faint and far-distant range of the Sierra Nevada. Thousands of
millions of beautiful wild-flowers spangle and beautify the soft green
carpet, over which spreads a cloudless sky, not a whit less blue and
soft than the vaunted sky of Italy. Herds of deer are grazing over the
vast plain, like tame cattle. Wild geese and other water-fowl wing
their way through the soft atmosphere, and little birds twitter joyously
among the flowers. Everything is bright, and green, and beautiful; for
it is spring, and the sun has not yet scorched the grass to a
russet-brown, and parched and cracked the thirsty ground, and banished
animal and vegetable life away, as it will yet do, ere the hot summer of
those regions is past and gone.

There is but one tree in all that vast plain. It is a sturdy oak, and
near it bubbles a cool, refreshing spring, over which, one could fancy,
it had been appointed guardian. The spot is hundreds of miles from San
Francisco, on the road to the gold-mines of California. Beneath that
solitary oak a party of weary travellers have halted, to rest and
refresh themselves and their animals; or, as the diggers have it, to
take their "nooning." In the midst of that party sits our captain, on
the back of a long-legged mule.

On his head is, or, rather, was--for he has just removed it, in order to
wipe the perspiration from his forehead--a brown felt wide-awake, very
much battered in appearance