utes, or maybe a quarter of an hour, right down
the canyon, fanning it well out, airing it as a mother airs the night
nursery before the children sleep. As far as I could judge, in the clear
darkness of the night, this wind was purely local: perhaps dependent on
the configuration of the glen. At least, it was very welcome to the hot
and weary squatters; and if we were not abed already, the springing up
of this lilliputian valley-wind would often be our signal to retire.

I was the last to go to bed, as I was still the first to rise. Many a
night I have strolled about the platform, taking a bath of darkness
before I slept. The rest would be in bed, and even from the forge I
could hear them talking together from bunk to bunk. A single candle in
the neck of a pint bottle was their only illumination; and yet the old
cracked house seemed literally bursting with the light. It shone keen as
a knife through all the vertical chinks; it struck upward through the
broken shingles; and through the eastern door and window, it fell in a
great splash upon the thicket and the overhanging rock. You would have
said a conflagration, or at the least a roaring forge; and behold, it
was but a candle. Or perhaps it was yet more strange to see the
procession moving bedwards round the corner of the house, and up the
plank that brought us to the bedroom door; under the immense spread of
the starry heavens, down in a crevice of the giant mountain, these few
human shapes, with their unshielded taper, made so disproportionate a
figure in the eye and mind. But the more he is alone with nature, the
greater man and his doings bulk in the consideration of his fellow-men.
Miles and miles away upon the opposite hilltops, if there were any
hunter belated or any traveller who had lost his way, he must have
stood, and watched and wondered, from the time the candle issued from
the door of the assayer's office till it had mounted the plank and
disappeared again into the miners' dormitory.

"VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE"

AND OTHER PAPERS

DEDICATION

MY DEAR WILLIAM ERNEST HENLEY,

We are all busy in this world building Towers of Babel; and the child of
our imaginations is always a changeling when it comes from nurse. This
is not only true in the greatest, as of wars and folios, but in the
least also, like the trifling volume in your hand. Thus I began to write
these pape