seen Charley, when his clothes came home! It had been great fun, buying
at the stores, where "California garments" were going like hot cakes, but
he could scarcely wait until he had tried his things on. When he looked
in the glass, and saw himself in broad slouch hat, and red flannel shirt,
and belted trousers tucked into cowhide boots, with a blue bandanna
handkerchief about his neck, he felt like a real gold-miner. The whitish
cotton suits, for wear on shipboard and on the Isthmus, in the tropics,
did not amount to much in comparison with this garb of a
"Forty-niner"--as the papers were beginning to call the outgoing gold
seekers.

Mr. Adams bought a brand-new Colt's revolving rifle, that shot seven
times, a revolving pistol (as it was termed), and two butcher-knives--one
apiece, to be worn thrust through the belt. Charley donned the knife,
just to see how it looked (and it looked very business-like), but his
father did not allow him to put on the big pistol. Maybe out in the gold
fields he might wear it, though.

Then there were two picks and two spades and two sheet-iron miners' pans.
These pans were round, about six inches deep and fifteen inches across at
the rims, slanting to a foot across at the bottom. They resembled a
milk-pan. They were to be used for "washing out" the gold from the dirt.
Charley had no idea how to do this; neither had his father--and neither
had one in a hundred of the other people who were talking California.
But they all expected to learn, in case it was not possible to scrape the
pure gold up with spades!

"By gracious!" exclaimed Mr. Adams, at the very last moment. "We mustn't
forget the skillet! That's the most important thing yet."

"Of course!" agreed Mrs. Adams. "How'll you fry your meat?"

So a new skillet was added to the outfit. The clothing packed a trunk
jam full. The picks and spades and skillet and rifle and other unwieldy
things were rolled in Mr. Adams's two army blankets and a couple of
quilts. That made a large bundle, and with the picks and spades showing
finely it told exactly where the owners were bound. Charley was proud of
that bundle.

At last, one morning, he donned his miner's costume in earnest, for the
day of the start had come. The trunk and bundle were sent down to the
levee in a wagon. On this day, at ten o'clock, the steamboat _Robert
Burns_ would leave for New Orleans.

Mrs. Adams of course went down to the levee with her two gold seek