le terms in which to express his
emotions, Wade said, with a smile that rather added than detracted
from his seriousness:

"Pards, never again does a drop of that stuff go down my throat! I've
suffered hell, but I've come out of the flames, and the one that
fetched me through is the little gal which lays asleep in the next
room."

He did not attempt to deliver a temperance lecture to his friends, nor
did they trifle with him. They questioned him closely as to how he had
reached this extraordinary decision, and he gave a vivid and truthful
account of his experience. It made several of the men thoughtful, but
most of them felt dubious about his persistence in the new path he had
laid out for himself.

"You know, boys, whether I've got a will of my own," he quietly
replied; "just wait and see how this thing comes out."

It was noticed that Parson Brush was the most interested inquirer,
and, though he had comparatively little to say, he left the Bower
unusually early. He had begun his system of instruction with Nellie
Dawson, and reported that she was making remarkably good progress. Had
the contrary been the fact, it may be doubted whether it would have
been safe for him to proclaim it.

And now the scene changes. It is the close of a radiant summer day in
the Sierras. Far down in the canyon-like chasm between the mountainous
spurs, nestled the little mining settlement, which had been christened
but a short time before, New Constantinople. Here and there tiny
wounds had been gouged into the ribs of the mountain walls, and the
miners were pecking away with pick and shovel, deepening the hurts in
their quest for the yellow atoms or dark ore which had been the means
of bringing every man thousands of miles to the spot.

Far up toward the clouds were the towering, craggy peaks, with many a
rent and yawn and table-land and lesser elevation, until, as if to
check the climbing ambition of the prodigious monster, nature had
flung an immense blanket of snow, whose ragged and torn edges lapped
far down the sides of the crests. Ages ago the chilling blanket was
tucked around the mountain tops, there to remain through the long
stretch of centuries to follow.

Down the valley, at the bottom of the winding canyon, the air
palpitated with the fervor of the torrid zone. He who attempted to
plod forward panted and perspired, but a little way up the mountain
side, the cool breath crept downward from the regions of perpetual ice
an