broken only by a pleasant dripping from the wooden flume that brought
down the cold waters of some spring hidden in the thick green growth
far up on the mountainside. And such water! He who has once tasted of
the nectar of a California mountain spring "will not ask for wine!" At
the Toll House we had liberal country meals, with venison steaks,
served to us every day. Bear were still killed on the mountain, but I
do not remember having any to eat. From this place we climbed, by way
of a toilsome and stiflingly hot footpath running through a tangle of
thick undergrowth, to the old Silverado mine bunk-house, where the
Stevenson family took up their headquarters. People said there were
many rattlesnakes about, and now and then we saw indubitable evidence
of their presence in a long, spotted body lying in the road, where it
had been killed by some passer-by, but fear of them never troubled our
footsteps. In _The Silverado Squatters_ Mr. Stevenson says, "The place
abounded with rattlesnakes, and the rattles whizzed on every side like
spinning-wheels," but I am inclined to think that he often mistook the
buzzing noise made by locusts, or some other insect, for the rattle of
the snakes.

The old bunk-house seemed to me an incredibly uncomfortable place of
residence. Its situation, on top of the mine-dump piled against the
precipitous mountainside, permitted no chance to take a step except
upon the treacherous rolling stones of the dump; but we bore with its
manifest disadvantages for the sake of its one high redeeming
virtue--its entire freedom from the fog which we dreaded for the sick
man. It was excessively hot there during the day, but there was one
place where coolness always held sway--the mouth of the old tunnel,
from whose dark, mysterious depths, which we never dared explore for
fear of stepping off into some forgotten shaft, a cold, damp wind blew
continuously. Just inside its entrance we established a cold-storage
plant, for there all articles kept delightfully fresh in the hottest
weather. When the coolness of the evening fell, "it was good to gather
stones and send them crashing down the chute," and indeed this was
almost our only pastime in our queer mountain eyrie. The noise made by
these stones as they went bounding down the chute was sent back in
tremendous rolling echoes by the mountains on the opposite side of the
valley, and it pleased us to liken it to the noise heard by Rip Van
Winkle, "like distant peals