Roughing It quotes

information appears to stew out of me naturally, like the precious ottar of roses out of the otter. Sometimes it has seemed to me that I would give worlds if I could retain my facts; but it cannot be.

The more I calk up the sources, and the tighter I get, the more I leak wisdom.

Therefore, I can only claim indulgence at the hands of the reader, not justification.

Yes, take it all around, there is quite a good deal of information in the book.

I regret this very much; but really it could not be helped: information appears to stew out of me naturally, like the precious ottar of roses out of the otter.

Sometimes it has seemed to me that I would give worlds if I could retain my facts; but it cannot be. The more I calk up the sources, and the tighter I get, the more I leak wisdom.

I only proposed to stay in Nevada three months—I had no thought of staying longer than that. I meant to see all I could that was new and strange, and then hurry home to business.

I little thought that I would not see the end of that three-month pleasure excursion for six or seven uncommonly long years!

I dreamed all night about Indians, deserts, and silver bars, and in due time, next day, we took shipping at the St. Louis wharf on board a steamboat bound up the Missouri River.

Jo. by land, for she was walking most of the time, anyhow—climbing over reefs and clambering over snags patiently and laboriously all day long. The captain said she was a “bully” boat, and all she wanted was more “shear” and a bigger wheel.

I thought she wanted a pair of stilts, but I had the deep sagacity not to say so.

But I thought it was grand. It appeared to me to be a dangerous weapon.

It only had one fault⁠—you could not hit anything with it.

One of our “conductors” practiced awhile on a cow with it, and as long as she stood still and behaved herself she was safe; but as soon as she went to moving about, and he got to shooting at other things, she came to grief.

Bemis did not want the mule; but the owner came out with a double-barreled shotgun and persuaded him to buy it, anyhow. It was a cheerful weapon—the “Allen.”

Sometimes all its six barrels would go off at once, and then there was no safe place in all the region round about, but behind it.

We took two or three blankets for protection against frosty weather in the mountains. In the matter of luxuries we were modest—we took none along but some pipes and five pounds of smoking tobacco.

and after that she would sit and contemplate the corpse with tranquil satisfaction—for she never missed her mosquito; she was a dead shot at short range.

She never removed a carcase, but left them there for bait.

I sat by this grim Sphynx and watched her kill thirty or forty mosquitoes—watched her, and waited for her to say something, but she never did. So I finally opened the conversation myself. I said:

He dropped his ears, set up his tail, and left for San Francisco at a speed which can only be described as a flash and a vanish!

Long after he was out of sight we could hear him whiz.

I do not remember where we first came across “sagebrush,” but as I have been speaking of it I may as well describe it.

Then the cooking begins, and there is no smoke, and consequently no swearing. Such a fire will keep all night, with very little replenishing; and it makes a very sociable campfire, and one around which the most impossible reminiscences sound plausible, instructive, and profoundly entertaining.

Sagebrush is very fair fuel, but as a vegetable it is a distinguished failure.

Nothing can abide the taste of it but the jackass and his illegitimate child the mule.

The latter would not, from a sense of decency; the former would not, because he did not choose to encourage the advances of a station-keeper.

We had towels⁠—in the valise; they might as well have been in Sodom and Gomorrah.

We (and the conductor) used our handkerchiefs, and the driver his pantaloons and sleeves. By the door, inside, was fastened a small old-fashioned looking-glass frame, with two little fragments of the original mirror lodged down in one corner of it.

“Oh—then help yourself to the mustard.”

In other days I had considered it a good, a very good, anecdote, but there was a dismal plausibility about it, here, that took all the humor out of it.

Our breakfast was before us, but our teeth were idle.

In other days I had considered it a good, a very good, anecdote, but there was a dismal plausibility about it, here, that took all the humor out of it.

Our breakfast was before us, but our teeth were idle.

I tasted and smelt, and said I would take coffee, I believed. The station-boss stopped dead still, and glared at me speechless.

He has a general slinking expression all over.

The coyote is a living, breathing allegory of Want. He is always hungry.

He is always poor, out of luck and friendless. The meanest creatures despise him, and even the fleas would desert him for a velocipede.

He has a general slinking expression all over. The coyote is a living, breathing allegory of Want. He is always hungry. He is always poor, out of luck and friendless.

The meanest creatures despise him, and even the fleas would desert him for a velocipede.

He is so spiritless and cowardly that even while his exposed teeth are pretending a threat, the rest of his face is apologizing for it. And he is so homely!—so scrawny, and ribby, and coarse-haired, and pitiful.

He has a general slinking expression all over. The coyote is a living, breathing allegory of Want. He is always hungry. He is always poor, out of luck and friendless. The meanest creatures despise him, and even the fleas would desert him for a velocipede.

He is so spiritless and cowardly that even while his exposed teeth are pretending a threat, the rest of his face is apologizing for it.

And he is so homely!—so scrawny, and ribby, and coarse-haired, and pitiful.

And for as much as a year after that, whenever there is a great hue and cry after a coyote, that dog will merely glance in that direction without emotion, and apparently observe to himself, “

I believe I do not wish any of the pie.

”

“Did you ever see the bull again?”

“Well, then, what more do you want? I never saw anybody as particular as you are about a little thing like that.”

I made up my mind that if this man was not a liar he only missed it by the skin of his teeth. This episode reminds me of an incident of my brief sojourn in Siam, years afterward.

“Well, then, what more do you want? I never saw anybody as particular as you are about a little thing like that.”

I made up my mind that if this man was not a liar he only missed it by the skin of his teeth.

This episode reminds me of an incident of my brief sojourn in Siam, years afterward.

And we theorized, too, but there was never a theory that would account for our driver’s voice being out there, nor yet account for his Indian murderers talking such good English, if they were Indians.

So we chatted and smoked the rest of the night comfortably away, our boding anxiety being somehow marvelously dissipated by the real presence of something to be anxious about.

We never did get much satisfaction about that dark occurrence. All that we could make out of the odds and ends of the information we gathered in the morning, was that the disturbance occurred at a station;

Which he did.

The bystanders all admired it. And they all attended the funeral, too.

On one occasion a man who kept a little whisky-shelf at the station did something which angered Slade—and went and made his will. A day or two afterward Slade came in and called for some brandy.

The most gentlemanly-appearing, quiet and affable officer we had yet found along the road in the Overland Company’s service was the person who sat at the head of the table, at my elbow.

Never youth stared and shivered as I did when I heard them call him Slade!

Here was romance, and I sitting face to face with it!—looking upon it—touching it—hobnobbing with it, as it were!

The coffee ran out. At least it was reduced to one tin-cupful, and Slade was about to take it when he saw that my cup was empty. He politely offered to fill it, but although I wanted it, I politely declined.

I was afraid he had not killed anybody that morning, and might be needing diversion.

But still with firm politeness he insisted on filling my cup, and said I had traveled all night and better deserved it than he—and while he talked he placidly poured the fluid, to the last drop.

on the contrary, those who met him when maddened with liquor and surrounded by a gang of armed roughs, would pronounce him a fiend incarnate.” And this:

“From Fort Kearney, west, he was feared a great deal more than the Almighty.”

For compactness, simplicity and vigor of expression, I will “back” that sentence against anything in literature. Mr. Dimsdale’s narrative is as follows. In all places where italics occur, they are mine:

Think of hotelkeeper, postmaster, blacksmith, mayor, constable, city marshal and principal citizen all condensed into one person and crammed into one skin.

Bemis said he was “a perfect Allen’s revolver of dignities.”

And he said that if he were to die as postmaster, or as blacksmith, or as postmaster and blacksmith both, the people might stand it; but if he were to die all over, it would be a frightful loss to the community.

The conductor was more than an hour finding the road—a matter which showed us how far we had wandered and what chances we had been taking. He traced our wheel-tracks to the imminent verge of danger, in two places.

I have always been glad that we were not killed that night. I do not know any particular reason, but I have always been glad.

In the morning, the tenth day out, we crossed Green River, a fine, large, limpid stream—stuck in it with the water just up to the top of our mail-bed, and waited till extra teams were put on to haul us up the steep bank.

He was murderous enough, possibly, to fill the bill of a Destroyer, but would you have any kind of an Angel devoid of dignity? Could you abide an Angel in an unclean shirt and no suspenders?

Could you respect an Angel with a horselaugh and a swagger like a buccaneer?

There were other blackguards present—comrades of this one. And there was one person that looked like a gentleman—Heber C. Kimball’s son, tall and well made, and thirty years old, perhaps.

But he never paid any attention to me, notwithstanding I made several attempts to “draw him out” on federal politics and his high handed attitude toward Congress. I thought some of the things I said were rather fine.

But he merely looked around at me, at distant intervals, something as I have seen a benignant old cat look around to see which kitten was meddling with her tail.

By and by I subsided into an indignant silence, and so sat until the end, hot and flushed, and execrating him in my heart for an ignorant savage. But he was calm.

I brought away a copy from Salt Lake. The book is a curiosity to me, it is such a pretentious affair, and yet so “slow,” so sleepy; such an insipid mess of inspiration.

It is chloroform in print.

If Joseph Smith composed this book, the act was a miracle—keeping awake while he did it was, at any rate.

Whenever he found his speech growing too modern—which was about every sentence or two—he ladled in a few such Scriptural phrases as “exceeding sore,” “and it came to pass,” etc., and made things satisfactory again. “And it came to pass” was his pet.

If he had left that out, his Bible would have been only a pamphlet.

The title-page reads as follows:

And the Lord spake unto Ether, and said unto him, go forth. And he went forth, and beheld that the words of the Lord had all been fulfilled; and he finished his record; and the hundredth part I have not written.

It seems a pity he did not finish, for after all his dreary former chapters of commonplace, he stopped just as he was in danger of becoming interesting.

The Mormon Bible is rather stupid and tiresome to read, but there is nothing vicious in its teachings. Its code of morals is unobjectionable—it is “smouched” from the New Testament and no credit given.

Waite’s book, “The Mormon Prophet,” came out with Judge Cradlebaugh’s trial of the accused parties in it and revealed the truth that the latter version was the correct one and that the Mormons were the assassins.

All our “information” had three sides to it, and so I gave up the idea that I could settle the “Mormon question” in two days. Still I have seen newspaper correspondents do it in one.

I left Great Salt Lake a good deal confused as to what state of things existed there—and sometimes even questioning in my own mind whether a state of things existed there at all or not.

And it was comfort in those succeeding days to sit up and contemplate the majestic panorama of mountains and valleys spread out below us and eat ham and hard boiled eggs while our spiritual natures revelled alternately in rainbows, thunderstorms, and peerless sunsets.

Nothing helps scenery like ham and eggs.

Ham and eggs, and after these a pipe—an old, rank, delicious pipe—ham and eggs and scenery, a “down grade,” a flying coach, a fragrant pipe and a contented heart—these make happiness. It is what all the ages have struggled for.

This enthusiasm, this stern thirst for adventure, wilted under the sultry August sun and did not last above one hour. One poor little hour—and then we were ashamed that we had “gushed” so.

The poetry was all in the anticipation⁠—there is none in the reality.

Imagine a vast, waveless ocean stricken dead and turned to ashes; imagine this solemn waste tufted with ash-dusted sage-bushes; imagine the lifeless silence and solitude that belong to such a place;

You see in me the melancholy wreck of a once stalwart and magnificent manhood. What has brought me to this? That thing which you are about to tell. Gradually but surely, that tiresome old anecdote has sapped my strength, undermined my constitution, withered my life.

Pity my helplessness. Spare me only just this once, and tell me about young George Washington and his little hatchet for a change.

”

We were saved. But not so the invalid.

In trying to retain the anecdote in his system he strained himself and died in our arms.

I am aware, now, that I ought not to have asked of the sturdiest citizen of all that region, what I asked of that mere shadow of a man;

so have Jones, Smith, Johnson, Ross Browne, and every other correspondence-inditing being that ever set his foot upon the great overland road anywhere between Julesburg and San Francisco; and I have heard that it is in the Talmud.

I have seen it in print in nine different foreign languages; I have been told that it is employed in the inquisition in Rome; and I now learn with regret that it is going to be set to music.

I do not think that such things are right.

and tradition says the reason there are so many bald people there, is, that the wind blows the hair off their heads while they are looking skyward after their hats.

Carson streets seldom look inactive on summer afternoons, because there are so many citizens skipping around their escaping hats, like chambermaids trying to head off a spider.

The “Washoe Zephyr” (Washoe is a pet nickname for Nevada) is a peculiar Scriptural wind, in that no man knoweth “whence it cometh.” That is to say, where it originates.

And yet the first complaint a Washoe visitor to San Francisco makes, is that the sea winds blow so, there!

There is a good deal of human nature in that.

We found the state palace of the Governor of Nevada Territory to consist of a white frame one-story house with two small rooms in it and a stanchion supported shed in front—for grandeur—it compelled the respect of the citizen and inspired the Indians with awe.

They made a good many inquiries as to the location of that indefinite “certain point,” but got no information. At last, to a peculiarly urgent inquiry of “How far eastward?” Governor Nye telegraphed back:

“To the Atlantic Ocean, blast you!⁠—and then bridge it and go on!”

This brought back the dusty toilers, who sent in a report and ceased from their labors. The Governor was always comfortable about it; he said Mrs.

If their glass prison-houses were touched ever so lightly they were up and spoiling for a fight in a minute.

Starchy?⁠—proud? Indeed, they would take up a straw and pick their teeth like a member of Congress.

There was as usual a furious “zephyr” blowing the first night of the brigade’s return, and about midnight the roof of an adjoining stable blew off, and a corner of it came crashing through the side of our ranch.

In the midst of the turmoil, Bob H⸺ sprung up out of a sound sleep, and knocked down a shelf with his head. Instantly he shouted:

“Turn out, boys⁠—the tarantulas is loose!”

No warning ever sounded so dreadful. Nobody tried, any longer, to leave the room, lest he might step on a tarantula. Every man groped for a trunk or a bed, and jumped on it.

There were ten or twelve of them. We took candles and hunted the place high and low for them, but with no success. Did we go back to bed then? We did nothing of the kind. Money could not have persuaded us to do it.

We sat up the rest of the night playing cribbage and keeping a sharp lookout for the enemy.

That morning we could have whipped ten such people as we were the day before—sick ones at any rate. But the world is slow, and people will go to “water cures” and “movement cures” and to foreign lands for health.

Three months of camp life on Lake Tahoe would restore an Egyptian mummy to his pristine vigor, and give him an appetite like an alligator.

I do not mean the oldest and driest mummies, of course, but the fresher ones. The air up there in the clouds is very pure and fine, bracing and delicious. And why shouldn’t it be?—it is the same the angels breathe.

Three months of camp life on Lake Tahoe would restore an Egyptian mummy to his pristine vigor, and give him an appetite like an alligator. I do not mean the oldest and driest mummies, of course, but the fresher ones.

The air up there in the clouds is very pure and fine, bracing and delicious. And why shouldn’t it be?⁠—it is the same the angels breathe.

I think that hardly any amount of fatigue can be gathered together that a man cannot sleep off in one night on the sand by its side. Not under a roof, but under the sky; it seldom or never rains there in the summer time.

We never took any paregoric to make us sleep. At the first break of dawn we were always up and running footraces to tone down excess of physical vigor and exuberance of spirits.

That is, Johnny was⁠—but I held his hat.

While smoking the pipe of peace after breakfast we watched the sentinel peaks put on the glory of the sun, and followed the conquering light as it swept down among the shadows, and set the captive crags and forests free.

At night, by the campfire, we played euchre and seven-up to strengthen the mind—and played them with cards so greasy and defaced that only a whole summer’s acquaintance with them could enable the student to tell the ace of clubs from the jack of diamonds.

We never slept in our “house.” It never recurred to us, for one thing; and besides, it was built to hold the ground, and that was enough.

We did not wish to strain it.

Hunger asserted itself now, but there was nothing to eat. The provisions were all cooked, no doubt, but we did not go to see. We were homeless wanderers again, without any property.

Our fence was gone, our house burned down; no insurance.

Our pine forest was well scorched, the dead trees all burned up, and our broad acres of manzanita swept away. Our blankets were on our usual sand-bed, however, and so we lay down and went to sleep.

He hooked his forefinger in the pocket of my army-shirt, led me to one side, and breathed in my ear impressively these words:

“He can out-buck anything in America!”

“Going, going, going—at twent-ty-four dollars and a half, gen—”

And then down he came once more, and began the original exercise of shooting me straight up again. The third time I went up I heard a stranger say:

“Oh, don’t he buck, though!”

While I was up, somebody struck the horse a sounding thwack with a leathern strap, and when I arrived again the Genuine Mexican Plug was not there. A California youth chased him up and caught him, and asked if he might have a ride.

I believe I never appreciated, till then, the poverty of the human machinery—for I still needed a hand or two to place elsewhere.

Pen cannot describe how I was jolted up.

Imagination cannot conceive how disjointed I was—how internally, externally and universally I was unsettled, mixed up and ruptured. There was a sympathetic crowd around me, though.

We tried to trade him off at private vendue next, offering him at a sacrifice for secondhand tombstones, old iron, temperance tracts—any kind of property. But holders were stiff, and we retired from the market again.

I never tried to ride the horse any more. Walking was good enough exercise for a man like me, that had nothing the matter with him except ruptures, internal injuries, and such things.

Finally I tried to give him away. But it was a failure. Parties said earthquakes were handy enough on the Pacific coast—they did not wish to own one. As a last resort I offered him to the Governor for the use of the “Brigade.”

The next day I loaned the animal to the Clerk of the House to go down to the Dana silver mine, six miles, and he walked back for exercise, and got the horse towed.

Everybody I loaned him to always walked back; they never could get enough exercise any other way.

Still, I continued to loan him to anybody who was willing to borrow him, my idea being to get him crippled, and throw him on the borrower’s hands, or killed, and make the borrower pay for him. But somehow nothing ever happened to him.

But somehow nothing ever happened to him. He took chances that no other horse ever took and survived, but he always came out safe.

It was his daily habit to try experiments that had always before been considered impossible, but he always got through.

Sometimes he miscalculated a little, and did not get his rider through intact, but he always got through himself. Of course I had tried to sell him; but that was a stretch of simplicity which met with little sympathy.

Just then the livery stable man brought in his bill for six weeks’ keeping—stall-room for the horse, fifteen dollars; hay for the horse, two hundred and fifty!

The Genuine Mexican Plug had eaten a ton of the article, and the man said he would have eaten a hundred if he had let him.

I will remark here, in all seriousness, that the regular price of hay during that year and a part of the next was really two hundred and fifty dollars a ton.

Carson City was too wary and too wise to open up a credit account with the imported bantling with anything like indecent haste.

There is something solemnly funny about the struggles of a newborn Territorial government to get a start in this world.

Ours had a trying time of it. The Organic Act and the “instructions” from the State Department commanded that a legislature should be elected at such-and-such a time, and its sittings inaugurated at such-and-such a date.

The United States responded by subtracting the printing-bill from the Secretary’s suffering salary—and moreover remarked with dense gravity that he would find nothing in his “instructions” requiring him to purchase hay!

Nothing in this world is palled in such impenetrable obscurity as a U.S. Treasury Comptroller’s understanding.

The very fires of the hereafter could get up nothing more than a fitful glimmer in it.

The United States never said a word. I was sorry I had not made the voucher for a thousand loads of wood instead of one.

The government of my country snubs honest simplicity but fondles artistic villainy, and I think I might have developed into a very capable pickpocket if I had remained in the public service a year or two.

That was a fine collection of sovereigns, that first Nevada legislature. They levied taxes to the amount of thirty or forty thousand dollars and ordered expenditures to the extent of about a million.

That was a fine collection of sovereigns, that first Nevada legislature.

They levied taxes to the amount of thirty or forty thousand dollars and ordered expenditures to the extent of about a million.

Yet they had their little periodical explosions of economy like all other bodies of the kind. A member proposed to save three dollars a day to the nation by dispensing with the Chaplain.

And so on—day in and day out the talk pelted our ears and the excitement waxed hotter and hotter around us.

I would have been more or less than human if I had not gone mad like the rest.

Cartloads of solid silver bricks, as large as pigs of lead, were arriving from the mills every day, and such sights as that gave substance to the wild talk about me. I succumbed and grew as frenzied as the craziest.

… absolutely necessary, that we four, taking turns, two at a time, should put our hands against the end of the wagon and push it through the sand, leaving the feeble horses little to do but keep out of the way and hold up the tongue.

Perhaps it is well for one to know his fate at first, and get reconciled to it.

We had learned ours in one afternoon. It was plain that we had to walk through the sand and shove that wagon and those horses two hundred miles. So we accepted the situation, and from that time forth we never rode.

It is a kind of life that has a potent charm for all men, whether city or country-bred.

We are descended from desert-lounging Arabs, and countless ages of growth toward perfect civilization have failed to root out of us the nomadic instinct.

We all confess to a gratified thrill at the thought of “camping out.”

Once we made twenty-five miles in a day, and once we made forty miles (through the Great American Desert), and ten miles beyond—fifty in all—in twenty-three hours, without halting to eat, drink or rest.

To stretch out and go to sleep, even on stony and frozen ground, after pushing a wagon and two horses fifty miles, is a delight so supreme that for the moment it almost seems cheap at the price.

We camped two days in the neighborhood of the “Sink of the Humboldt.” We tried to use the strong alkaline water of the Sink, but it would not answer. It was like drinking lye, and not weak lye, either.

… on the shores of the Humboldt or the Carson and find that a “river” in Nevada is a sickly rivulet which is just the counterpart of the Erie canal in all respects save that the canal is twice as long and four times as deep.

One of the pleasantest and most invigorating exercises one can contrive is to run and jump across the Humboldt river till he is overheated, and then drink it dry.

On the fifteenth day we completed our march of two hundred miles and entered Unionville, Humboldt county, in the midst of a driving snowstorm. Unionville consisted of eleven cabins and a liberty-pole.

On the fifteenth day we completed our march of two hundred miles and entered Unionville, Humboldt county, in the midst of a driving snowstorm.

Unionville consisted of eleven cabins and a liberty-pole.

Six of the cabins were strung along one side of a deep canyon, and the other five faced them.

Indians brought brush and bushes several miles on their backs; and when we could catch a laden Indian it was well—and when we could not (which was the rule, not the exception), we shivered and bore it.

I confess, without shame, that I expected to find masses of silver lying all about the ground.

I expected to see it glittering in the sun on the mountain summits.

I marked the spot and carried away my specimen. Up and down the rugged mountainside I searched, with always increasing interest and always augmenting gratitude that I had come to Humboldt and come in time.

Of all the experiences of my life, this secret search among the hidden treasures of silver-land was the nearest to unmarred ecstasy.

It was a delirious revel. By and by, in the bed of a shallow rivulet, I found a deposit of shining yellow scales, and my breath almost forsook me! A gold mine, and in my simplicity I had been content with vulgar silver!

So vanished my dream. So melted my wealth away.

So toppled my airy castle to the earth and left me stricken and forlorn.

Moralizing, I observed, then, that “all that glitters is not gold.”

So I learned then, once for all, that gold in its native state is but dull, unornamental stuff, and that only lowborn metals excite the admiration of the ignorant with an ostentatious glitter.

However, like the rest of the world, I still go on underrating men of gold and glorifying men of mica. Commonplace human nature cannot rise above that.

It was the strangest phase of life one can imagine.

It was a beggars’ revel.

There was nothing doing in the district—no mining—no milling—no productive effort—no income—and not enough money in the entire camp to buy a corner lot in an eastern village, hardly; and yet a stranger would have supposed he was walking among bloated millionaires.

… in the night, that since the last faint trace of the wheel-tracks had long ago been buried from sight, we might now be wandering down a mere sagebrush avenue, miles away from the road and diverging further and further away from it all the time.

Having a cake of ice slipped down one’s back is placid comfort compared to it.

There was a sudden leap and stir of blood that had been asleep for an hour, and as sudden a rousing of all the drowsing activities in our minds and bodies. We were alive and awake at once—and shaking and quaking with consternation, too.

This time we gathered sticks with high hopes; and when Mr. Ballou prepared to light the first match, there was an amount of interest centered upon him that pages of writing could not describe. The match burned hopefully a moment, and then went out.

It could not have carried more regret with it if it had been a human life.

The next match simply flashed and died. The wind puffed the third one out just as it was on the imminent verge of success. We gathered together closer than ever, and developed a solicitude that was rapt and painful, as Mr.

Then came a white upheaval at my side, and a voice said, with bitterness:

“Will some gentleman be so good as to kick me behind?”

It was Ballou—at least it was a towzled snow image in a sitting posture, with Ballou’s voice.

I have scarcely exaggerated a detail of this curious and absurd adventure. It occurred almost exactly as I have stated it.

We actually went into camp in a snowdrift in a desert, at midnight in a storm, forlorn and hopeless, within fifteen steps of a comfortable inn.

For two hours we sat apart in the station and ruminated in disgust. The mystery was gone, now, and it was plain enough why the horses had deserted us.

For two hours we sat apart in the station and ruminated in disgust. The mystery was gone, now, and it was plain enough why the horses had deserted us.

Without a doubt they were under that shed a quarter of a minute after they had left us, and they must have overheard and enjoyed all our confessions and lamentations.

After breakfast we felt better, and the zest of life soon came back. The world looked bright again, and existence was as dear to us as ever. Presently an uneasiness came over me—grew upon me—assailed me without ceasing.

As I turned the one corner, smoking, Ollendorff turned the other with his bottle to his lips, and between us sat unconscious Ballou deep in a game of “solitaire” with the old greasy cards!

Absurdity could go no farther.

We shook hands and agreed to say no more about “reform” and “examples to the rising generation.”

But gentlemen, let us beware how we allow mere human testimony, human ingenuity in argument and human ideas of equity, to influence us at a moment so solemn as this.

Gentlemen, it ill becomes us, worms as we are, to meddle with the decrees of Heaven.

It is plain to me that Heaven, in its inscrutable wisdom, has seen fit to move this defendant’s ranch for a purpose. We are but creatures, and we must submit. If Heaven has chosen to favor the defendant Morgan in this marked and wonderful manner;

When we finally left for Esmeralda, horseback, we had an addition to the company in the person of Capt. John Nye, the Governor’s brother.

He had a good memory, and a tongue hung in the middle. This is a combination which gives immortality to conversation.

Capt. John never suffered the talk to flag or falter once during the hundred and twenty miles of the journey. In addition to his conversational powers, he had one or two other endowments of a marked character.

“Well, do you know that you have got one of the most expensive and arduous undertakings before you that was ever conceived by man?”

“Because this hill is only twenty-five feet through from side to side; and so you have got to build two hundred and twenty-five feet of your tunnel on trestlework!”

The ways of silver mining Boards are exceedingly dark and sinuous.

“Because this hill is only twenty-five feet through from side to side; and so you have got to build two hundred and twenty-five feet of your tunnel on trestlework!”

The ways of silver mining Boards are exceedingly dark and sinuous.

We took up various claims, and commenced shafts and tunnels on them, but never finished any of them. We had to do a certain amount of work on each to “hold” it, else other parties could seize our property after the expiration of ten days.

… their precious accumulations—and after all this eternity of trouble one third of the silver and gold in a ton of rock would find its way to the end of the troughs in the ravine at last and have to be worked over again some day.

There is nothing so aggravating as silver milling.

There never was any idle time in that mill. There was always something to do.

There is nothing so aggravating as silver milling. There never was any idle time in that mill. There was always something to do.

It is a pity that Adam could not have gone straight out of Eden into a quartz mill, in order to understand the full force of his doom to “earn his bread by the sweat of his brow.”

Every now and then, during the day, we had to scoop some pulp out of the pans, and tediously “wash” it in a horn spoon—wash it little by little over the edge till at last nothing was left but some little dull globules of quicksilver …

… differed in the various mills, and this included changes in style of pans and other machinery, and a great diversity of opinion existed as to the best in use, but none of the methods employed involved the principle of milling ore without “screening the tailings.”

Of all recreations in the world, screening tailings on a hot day, with a long-handled shovel, is the most undesirable.

At the end of the week the machinery was stopped and we “cleaned up.”

He said he was paying me ten dollars a week, and thought it a good round sum. How much did I want?

I said about four hundred thousand dollars a month, and board, was about all I could reasonably ask, considering the hard times.

I was ordered off the premises! And yet, when I look back to those days and call to mind the exceeding hardness of the labor I performed in that mill, I only regret that I did not ask him seven hundred thousand.

He was not a demonstrative dog, as a general thing, but rather of a grave and serious turn of mind, and I never saw him take so much interest in anything before.

He finally struck out over the mountains, at a gait which we estimated at about two hundred and fifty miles an hour, and he is going yet.

This was about nine years ago. We look for what is left of him along here every day.

A white man cannot drink the water of Mono Lake, for it is nearly pure lye. It is said that the Indians in the vicinity drink it sometimes, though.

It is not improbable, for they are among the purest liars I ever saw.

[There will be no additional charge for this joke, except to parties requiring an explanation of it. This joke has received high commendation from some of the ablest minds of the age.]

The islands in the lake being merely huge masses of lava, coated over with ashes and pumice-stone, and utterly innocent of vegetation or anything that would burn; and seagull’s eggs being entirely useless to anybody unless they be cooked,

Nature has provided an unfailing spring of boiling water on the largest island, and you can put your eggs in there, and in four minutes you can boil them as hard as any statement I have made during the past fifteen years.

Within ten feet of the boiling spring is a spring of pure cold water, sweet and wholesome.

Half a dozen little mountain brooks flow into Mono Lake, but not a stream of any kind flows out of it.

It neither rises nor falls, apparently, and what it does with its surplus water is a dark and bloody mystery.

There are only two seasons in the region round about Mono Lake—and these are, the breaking up of one winter and the beginning of the next.

So uncertain is the climate in summer that a lady who goes out visiting cannot hope to be prepared for all emergencies unless she takes her fan under one arm and her snow shoes under the other.

When they have a Fourth of July procession it generally snows on them, and they do say that as a general thing when a man calls for a brandy toddy there, the bar keeper chops it off with a hatchet and wraps it up in a paper, like maple sugar.

And it is further reported that the old soakers haven’t any teeth—wore them out eating gin cocktails and brandy punches.

its color was a brilliant green, for the steam drifted unceasingly through its branches and kept them always moist. It contrasted strangely enough, did this vigorous and beautiful outcast, with its dead and dismal surroundings.

It was like a cheerful spirit in a mourning household.

We hunted for the spring everywhere, traversing the full length of the island (two or three miles), and crossing it twice—climbing ash-hills patiently, and then sliding down the other side in a sitting posture, plowing up smothering volumes of gray dust.

I was as white as a sheet and as weak as a kitten and speechless. But the Indian betrayed no trepidation, no distress, not even discomfort. He simply stopped washing, leaned forward and surveyed the clean, blank ground a moment, and then remarked:

“Mph! Dam stove heap gone!”

—and resumed his scrubbing as placidly as if it were an entirely customary thing for a stove to do. I will explain, that “heap” is “Injun-English” for “very much.” The reader will perceive the exhaustive expressiveness of it in the present instance.

My ideas were lofty. My figure was a million. Still, I honestly believe that if I had been offered it, it would have had no other effect than to make me hold off for more.

I found abundant enjoyment in being rich.

A man offered me a three-hundred-dollar horse, and wanted to take my simple, unendorsed note for it. That brought the most realizing sense I had yet had that I was actually rich, beyond shadow of doubt.

So much so, indeed, that I determined to go back to Esmeralda. I thought he was able to get along alone, now, since he was on the war path. I took supper, and as soon as the moon rose, began my nine-mile journey, on foot.

Even millionaires needed no horses, in those days, for a mere nine-mile jaunt without baggage.

As I “raised the hill” overlooking the town, it lacked fifteen minutes of twelve.

It reads like a wild fancy sketch, but the evidence of many witnesses, and likewise that of the official records of Esmeralda District, is easily obtainable in proof that it is a true history.

I can always have it to say that I was absolutely and unquestionably worth a million dollars, once, for ten days.

A year ago my esteemed and in every way estimable old millionaire partner, Higbie, wrote me from an obscure little mining camp in California that after nine or ten years of buffetings and hard striving, he was at last in a position where he could …

… obscure little mining camp in California that after nine or ten years of buffetings and hard striving, he was at last in a position where he could command twenty-five hundred dollars, and said he meant to go into the fruit business in a modest way.

How such a thought would have insulted him the night we lay in our cabin planning European trips and brown-stone houses on Russian Hill!

Not much to be proud of, since it is so common—but then it was all I had to be proud of.

So I was scared into being a city editor.

I would have declined, otherwise. Necessity is the mother of “taking chances.”

Not much to be proud of, since it is so common—but then it was all I had to be proud of. So I was scared into being a city editor. I would have declined, otherwise.

Necessity is the mother of “taking chances.”

I do not doubt that if, at that time, I had been offered a salary to translate the Talmud from the original Hebrew, I would have accepted—albeit with diffidence and some misgivings—and thrown as much variety into it as I could for the money.

“Never say ‘We learn’ so-and-so, or ‘It is reported,’ or ‘It is rumored,’ or ‘We understand’ so-and-so, but go to headquarters and get the absolute facts, and then speak out and say ‘It is so-and-so.’ Otherwise, people will not put confidence in your news.

Unassailable certainty is the thing that gives a newspaper the firmest and most valuable reputation.

”

It was the whole thing in a nutshell; and to this day when I find a reporter commencing his article with “We understand,” I gather a suspicion that he has not taken as much pains to inform himself as he ought to have done.

I moralize well, but I did not always practice well when I was a city editor; I let fancy get the upper hand of fact too often when there was a dearth of news.

I can never forget my first day’s experience as a reporter. I wandered about town questioning everybody, boring everybody, and finding out that nobody knew anything. At the end of five hours my notebook was still barren. I spoke to Mr. Goodman. He said:

This was encouraging. Two nonpareil columns had to be filled, and I was getting along.

Presently, when things began to look dismal again, a desperado killed a man in a saloon and joy returned once more.

I never was so glad over any mere trifle before in my life. I said to the murderer:

I struck up friendships with the reporters of the other journals, and we swapped “regulars” with each other and thus economized work. “Regulars” are permanent sources of news, like courts, bullion returns, “cleanups” at the quartz mills, and inquests.

Inasmuch as everybody went armed, we had an inquest about every day, and so this department was naturally set down among the “regulars.”

We had lively papers in those days. My great competitor among the reporters was Boggs of the Union. He was an excellent reporter.

“Regulars” are permanent sources of news, like courts, bullion returns, “cleanups” at the quartz mills, and inquests. Inasmuch as everybody went armed, we had an inquest about every day, and so this department was naturally set down among the “regulars.”

We had lively papers in those days.

My great competitor among the reporters was Boggs of the Union. He was an excellent reporter.

Often we felt our chairs jar, and heard the faint boom of a blast down in the bowels of the earth under the office.

The mountainside was so steep that the entire town had a slant to it like a roof.

Each street was a terrace, and from each to the next street below the descent was forty or fifty feet. The fronts of the houses were level with the street they faced, but their rear first floors were propped on lofty stilts;

To make money, and make it fast, was as easy as it was to eat your dinner. Every man owned “feet” in fifty different wildcat mines and considered his fortune made.

Think of a city with not one solitary poor man in it!

One would suppose that when month after month went by and still not a wildcat mine (by wildcat I mean, in general terms, any claim not located on the mother vein, i.e., the “Comstock”) yielded a ton of rock worth crushing, the people would begin …

[Paper money has never come into use on the Pacific coast.] Reporting was lucrative, and every man in the town was lavish with his money and his “feet.” The city and all the great mountainside were riddled with mining shafts.

There were more mines than miners.

True, not ten of these mines were yielding rock worth hauling to a mill, but everybody said, “Wait till the shaft gets down where the ledge comes in solid, and then you will see!” So nobody was discouraged.

At least half of it was given me by persons who had no thought of such a thing, and looked for nothing more than a simple verbal “thank you”; and you were not even obliged by law to furnish that.

If you are coming up the street with a couple of baskets of apples in your hands, and you meet a friend, you naturally invite him to take a few.

That describes the condition of things in Virginia in the “flush times.” Every man had his pockets full of stock, and it was the actual custom of the country to part with small quantities of it to friends without the asking.

Many a time friends gave us as much as twenty-five feet of stock that was selling at twenty-five dollars a foot, and they thought no more of it than they would of offering a guest a cigar. These were “flush times” indeed!

I thought they were going to last always, but somehow I never was much of a prophet.

To show what a wild spirit possessed the mining brain of the community, I will remark that “claims” were actually “located” in excavations for cellars, where the pick had exposed what seemed to be quartz veins—and not cellars in the suburbs, either, but in the …

The superintendent of another of the great mines traveled in grand state, had a salary of twenty-eight thousand dollars a year, and in a lawsuit in after days claimed that he was to have had one percent on the gross yield of the bullion likewise.

Money was wonderfully plenty.

The trouble was, not how to get it—but how to spend it, how to lavish it, get rid of it, squander it.

It was the wildest mob Virginia had ever seen and the most determined and ungovernable; and when at last it abated its fury and dispersed, it had not a penny in its pocket.

To use its own phraseology, it came there “flush” and went away “busted.”

After that, the Commission got itself into systematic working order, and for weeks the contributions flowed into its treasury in a generous stream.

It was estimated that when the flour sack’s mission was ended it had been sold for a grand total of a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in greenbacks!

This is probably the only instance on record where common family flour brought three thousand dollars a pound in the public market.

It is due to Mr. Gridley’s memory to mention that the expenses of his sanitary flour sack expedition of fifteen thousand miles, going and returning, were paid in large part if not entirely, out of his own pocket.

He was full of wonders of the old world, and advised everybody to travel.

He said a man never imagined what surprising things there were in the world till he had traveled.

One day, on board ship, the passengers made up a pool of $500, which was to be the property of the man who should come nearest to guessing the run of the vessel for the next twenty-four hours.

Mr. Curry owned two-thirds of it—and he said that he sold it out for twenty-five hundred dollars in cash, and an old plug horse that ate up his market value in hay and barley in seventeen days by the watch.

And he said that Gould sold out for a pair of secondhand government blankets and a bottle of whisky that killed nine men in three hours, and that an unoffending stranger that smelt the cork was disabled for life.

Four years afterward the mine thus disposed of was worth in the San Francisco market seven millions six hundred thousand dollars in gold coin.

… shot himself through the body, cut his throat, and jumped out of a four-story window and broken his neck—and after due deliberation, the jury, sad and tearful, but with intelligence unblinded by its sorrow, brought in a verdict of death “by the visitation of God.”

What could the world do without juries?

Prodigious preparations were made for the funeral.

… the slang of his nation or his locality with him, the combination made the slang of Nevada the richest and the most infinitely varied and copious that had ever existed anywhere in the world, perhaps, except in the mines of California in the “early days.”

Slang was the language of Nevada.

It was hard to preach a sermon without it, and be understood. Such phrases as “You bet!” “Oh, no, I reckon not!”

Scotty Briggs, as a pallbearer and a mourner, occupied a prominent place at the funeral, and when the sermon was finished and the last sentence of the prayer for the dead man’s soul ascended, he responded, in a low voice, but with feelings:

“Amen. No Irish need apply.”

As the bulk of the response was without apparent relevancy, it was probably nothing more than a humble tribute to the memory of the friend that was gone; for, as Scotty had once said, it was “his word.”

The first twenty-six graves in the Virginia cemetery were occupied by murdered men.

So everybody said, so everybody believed, and so they will always say and believe.

It was his privilege to say how the elections should go. No great movement could succeed without the countenance and direction of the saloon-keepers. It was a high favor when the chief saloon-keeper consented to serve in the legislature or the board of aldermen.

Youthful ambition hardly aspired so much to the honors of the law, or the army and navy as to the dignity of proprietorship in a saloon.

To be a saloon-keeper and kill a man was to be illustrious.

But of course such men could not be trusted with the case.

Ignoramuses alone could mete out unsullied justice.

When the peremptory challenges were all exhausted, a jury of twelve men was impaneled—a jury who swore they had neither heard, read, talked about nor expressed an opinion concerning a murder which the very cattle in the corrals, the Indians in the sagebrush and the …

The verdict rendered by this jury was, Not Guilty. What else could one expect?

The jury system puts a ban upon intelligence and honesty, and a premium upon ignorance, stupidity and perjury.

It is a shame that we must continue to use a worthless system because it was good a thousand years ago.

Is it right to show the present favoritism to one class of men and inflict a disability on another, in a land whose boast is that all its citizens are free and equal?

I am a candidate for the legislature. I desire to tamper with the jury law.

I wish to so alter it as to put a premium on intelligence and character, and close the jury box against idiots, blacklegs, and people who do not read newspapers.

Reeder—or at least what was left of him—survived his wounds two days! Nothing was ever done with Gumbert.

Trial by jury is the palladium of our liberties. I do not know what a palladium is, having never seen a palladium, but it is a good thing no doubt at any rate.

Not less than a hundred men have been murdered in Nevada—perhaps I would be within bounds if I said three hundred—and as far as I can learn, only two persons have suffered the death penalty there.

No reply—other than a malignant scowl. The captain now read the first and second chapters of Genesis, with deep feeling—paused a moment, closed the book reverently, and said with a perceptible savor of satisfaction:

“There. Four chapters. There’s few that would have took the pains with you that I have.”

Then he swung up the condemned, and made the rope fast; stood by and timed him half an hour with his watch, and then delivered the body to the court.

A little after, as he stood contemplating the motionless figure, a doubt came into his face; evidently he felt a twinge of conscience—a misgiving—and he said with a sigh:

“Well, p’raps I ought to burnt him, maybe. But I was trying to do for the best.”

When the history of this affair reached California (it was in the “early days”) it made a deal of talk, but did not diminish the captain’s popularity in any degree. It increased it, indeed.

“

Give us this day our daily stranger!

”

Twenty ample fortunes would not timber one of the greatest of those silver mines. The Spanish proverb says it requires a gold mine to “run” a silver one, and it is true.

A beggar with a silver mine is a pitiable pauper indeed if he cannot sell.

I spoke of the underground Virginia as a city. The Gould and Curry is only one single mine under there, among a great many others;

… present day some of those populations are at work from twelve to sixteen hundred feet under Virginia and Gold Hill, and the signal-bells that tell them what the superintendent above ground desires them to do are struck by telegraph as we strike a fire alarm.

Sometimes men fall down a shaft, there, a thousand feet deep. In such cases, the usual plan is to hold an inquest.

If you wish to visit one of those mines, you may walk through a tunnel about half a mile long if you prefer it, or you may take the quicker plan of shooting like a dart down a shaft, on a small platform.

The sixth day I labored in anguish till far into the night and brought forth—nothing. The paper went to press without an editorial. The seventh day I resigned. On the eighth, Mr. Goodman returned and found six duels on his hands—my personalities had borne fruit.

Nobody, except he has tried it, knows what it is to be an editor.

It is easy to scribble local rubbish, with the facts all before you; it is easy to clip selections from other papers; it is easy to string out a correspondence from any locality; but it is unspeakable hardship to write editorials.

He was as drunk as a lord all day long, and full of chucklings over his timely ingenuity.

One drunken man necessarily reminds one of another.

I once heard a gentleman tell about an incident which he witnessed in a California barroom. He entitled it “Ye Modest Man Taketh a Drink.”

No land with an unvarying climate can be very beautiful. The tropics are not, for all the sentiment that is wasted on them. They seem beautiful at first, but sameness impairs the charm by and by.

Change is the handmaiden Nature requires to do her miracles with.

The land that has four well-defined seasons cannot lack beauty, or pall with monotony.

… somber California, when that man has seen New England’s meadow-expanses and her maples, oaks and cathedral-windowed elms decked in summer attire, or the opaline splendors of autumn descending upon her forests, comes very near being funny—would be, in fact, but that it is so pathetic.

No land with an unvarying climate can be very beautiful.

The tropics are not, for all the sentiment that is wasted on them. They seem beautiful at first, but sameness impairs the charm by and by. Change is the handmaiden Nature requires to do her miracles with.

… you will wish in your heart the thunder would leap and crash and roar along those drowsy skies once, and make everything alive—you will wish the prisoned lightnings would cleave the dull firmament asunder and light it with a blinding glare for one little instant.

You would give anything to hear the old familiar thunder again and see the lightning strike somebody.

And along in the summer, when you have suffered about four months of lustrous, pitiless sunshine, you are ready to go down on your knees and plead for rain—hail—snow—thunder and lightning—anything to break the monotony—you will take an earthquake, if you cannot do any better.

There is no doubt about the truth of this statement—there can be no doubt about it.

I have seen the place where that soldier used to board.

In Sacramento it is fiery summer always, and you can gather roses, and eat strawberries and ice-cream, and wear white linen clothes, and pant and perspire, at eight or nine o’clock in the morning, and then take the cars, and at noon put on your …

Flowers bloom there, always, the reader can easily believe—people suffer and sweat, and swear, morning, noon and night, and wear out their stanchest energies fanning themselves. It gets hot there, but if you go down to Fort Yuma you will find it hotter.

Fort Yuma is probably the hottest place on earth.

The thermometer stays at one hundred and twenty in the shade there all the time—except when it varies and goes higher. It is a U.S. military post, and its occupants get so used to the terrific heat that they suffer without it.

But see how things change. Sitting at that dinner-table, listening to that anecdote, if I had offered double the money for the privilege of kissing the same child, I would have been refused.

Seventeen added years have far more than doubled the price.

And while upon this subject I will remark that once in Star City, in the Humboldt Mountains, I took my place in a sort of long, post-office single file of miners, to patiently await my chance to peep through a crack in the cabin and …

Gould and Curry soared to six thousand three hundred dollars a foot! And then—all of a sudden, out went the bottom and everything and everybody went to ruin and destruction! The wreck was complete. The bubble scarcely left a microscopic moisture behind it.

I was an early beggar and a thorough one.

My hoarded stocks were not worth the paper they were printed on. I threw them all away.

and almost before one could execute a wink and begin another, there was a massed multitude of people stretching in endless procession down every street my position commanded.

Never was solemn solitude turned into teeming life quicker.

Of the wonders wrought by “the great earthquake,” these were all that came under my eye; but the tricks it did, elsewhere, and far and wide over the town, made toothsome gossip for nine days.

She responded with naive serenity:

“If you have no choice, you might try a clothing store!”

A certain foreign consul’s lady was the acknowledged leader of fashion, and every time she appeared in anything new or extraordinary, the ladies in the vicinity made a raid on their husbands’ purses and arrayed themselves similarly.

Four feet of the tops of three chimneys on one house were broken square off and turned around in such a way as to completely stop the draft.

A crack a hundred feet long gaped open six inches wide in the middle of one street and then shut together again with such force, as to ridge up the meeting earth like a slender grave.

A lady sitting in her rocking and quaking parlor, saw the wall part at the ceiling, open and shut twice, like a mouth, and then drop the end of a brick on the floor like a tooth.

A crack a hundred feet long gaped open six inches wide in the middle of one street and then shut together again with such force, as to ridge up the meeting earth like a slender grave.

A lady sitting in her rocking and quaking parlor, saw the wall part at the ceiling, open and shut twice, like a mouth, and then drop the end of a brick on the floor like a tooth.

She was a woman easily disgusted with foolishness, and she arose and went out of there. One lady who was coming downstairs was astonished to see a bronze Hercules lean forward on its pedestal as if to strike her with its club.

A lady sitting in her rocking and quaking parlor, saw the wall part at the ceiling, open and shut twice, like a mouth, and then drop the end of a brick on the floor like a tooth.

She was a woman easily disgusted with foolishness, and she arose and went out of there.

One lady who was coming downstairs was astonished to see a bronze Hercules lean forward on its pedestal as if to strike her with its club. They both reached the bottom of the flight at the same time—the woman insensible from the fright.

The first shock brought down two or three huge organ-pipes in one of the churches. The minister, with uplifted hands, was just closing the services. He glanced up, hesitated, and said:

“However, we will omit the benediction!”

—and the next instant there was a vacancy in the atmosphere where he had stood.

… faces that looked familiar, I slunk to my meals, ate them humbly and with a mute apology for every mouthful I robbed my generous landlady of, and at midnight, after wanderings that were but slinkings away from cheerfulness and light, I slunk to my bed.

I felt meaner, and lowlier and more despicable than the worms.

During all this time I had but one piece of money—a silver ten-cent piece—and I held to it and would not spend it on any account, lest the consciousness coming strong upon me that I was entirely penniless, might suggest suicide.

But he never collected that bill, at last, nor any part of it. I lived to pay it to the banker myself.

Misery loves company.

Now and then at night, in out-of-the-way, dimly lighted places, I found myself happening on another child of misfortune. He looked so seedy and forlorn, so homeless and friendless and forsaken, that I yearned toward him as a brother.

And the next day he bought his groceries on credit as usual, and shouldered his pan and shovel and went off to the hills hunting pockets again happy and content.

This is the most fascinating of all the different kinds of mining, and furnishes a very handsome percentage of victims to the lunatic asylum.

Pocket-hunting is an ingenious process. You take a spadeful of earth from the hillside and put it in a large tin pan and dissolve and wash it gradually away till nothing is left but a teaspoonful of fine sediment.

for the rains beat upon these little piles and wash them down and expose the gold, possibly right over a pocket. Two pockets were found in this way by the same man in one day. One had $5,000 in it and the other $8,000.

That man could appreciate it, for he hadn’t had a cent for about a year.

In Tuolumne lived two miners who used to go to the neighboring village in the afternoon and return every night with household supplies.

‘Well, I’ll have to git you to excuse me,’ an’ it was surpris’n’ the way he’d shin out of that hole ’n’ go f’r a tree.

Sagacity? It ain’t no name for it. ’Twas inspiration!

”

And then there was “the old Admiral—” a retired whaleman. He was a roaring, terrific combination of wind and lightning and thunder, and earnest, whole-souled profanity. But nevertheless he was tenderhearted as a girl.

He was a raving, deafening, devastating typhoon, laying waste the cowering seas but with an unvexed refuge in the center where all comers were safe and at rest.

Nobody could know the “Admiral” without liking him; and in a sudden and dire emergency I think no friend of his would know which to choose—to be cursed by him or prayed for by a less efficient person.

We had an abundance of fruit in Honolulu, of course. Oranges, pineapples, bananas, strawberries, lemons, limes, mangoes, guavas, melons, and a rare and curious luxury called the chirimoya, which is deliciousness itself. Then there is the tamarind.

I thought tamarinds were made to eat, but that was probably not the idea.

I ate several, and it seemed to me that they were rather sour that year. They pursed up my lips, till they resembled the stem-end of a tomato, and I had to take my sustenance through a quill for twenty-four hours.

When we came to anchor at last, and Captain Phillips looked at his watch and said, “Sixteen minutes—I told you it was in her! that’s over three miles an hour!” I could see he felt entitled to a compliment, and so

I said I had never seen lightning go like that horse. And I never had.

The landlord of the American said the party had been gone nearly an hour, but that he could give me my choice of several horses that could overtake them.

I named him after this island, “Oahu” (pronounced O-waw-hee). The first gate he came to he started in; I had neither whip nor spur, and so I simply argued the case with him.

He resisted argument, but ultimately yielded to insult and abuse.

He backed out of that gate and steered for another one on the other side of the street. I triumphed by my former process.

… of tall coconut trees, with clean, branchless stems reaching straight up sixty or seventy feet and topped with a spray of green foliage sheltering clusters of coconuts—not more picturesque than a forest of collossal ragged parasols, with bunches of magnified grapes under them, would be.

I once heard a gouty Northern invalid say that a coconut tree might be poetical, possibly it was; but it looked like a feather-duster struck by lightning.

I think that describes it better than a picture—and yet, without any question, there is something fascinating about a coconut tree—and graceful, too.

… what rapture it is to work all day long for fifty cents to buy food for next day with, as compared with fishing for pastime and lolling in the shade through eternal summer, and eating of the bounty that nobody labored to provide but Nature.

How sad it is to think of the multitudes who have gone to their graves in this beautiful island and never knew there was a hell.

This ancient temple was built of rough blocks of lava, and was simply a roofless enclosure a hundred and thirty feet long and seventy wide—nothing but naked walls, very thick, but not much higher than a man’s head.

What a grand pyramid of billowy clouds towers above the storied Pari! How the grim warriors of the past seem flocking in ghostly squadrons to their ancient battlefield again—how the wails of the dying well up from the—”

At this point the horse called Oahu sat down in the sand. Sat down to listen, I suppose.

Never mind what he heard, I stopped apostrophizing and convinced him that I was not a man to allow contempt of court on the part of a horse.

while saloon-keepers, who pay a thousand dollars a year for the privilege of retailing whiskey, etc., only make a bare living.

We found the fish market crowded; for the native is very fond of fish, and eats the article raw and alive! Let us change the subject.

In old times here Saturday was a grand gala day indeed. All the native population of the town forsook their labors, and those of the surrounding country journeyed to the city.

The captains and ministers form one-half of the population; the third fourth is composed of common Kanakas and mercantile foreigners and their families, and the final fourth is made up of high officers of the Hawaiian government.

And there are just about cats enough for three apiece all around.

A solemn stranger met me in the suburbs the other day, and said:

Here his feelings were too much for him, and he swooned away. I pitied this poor creature from the bottom of my heart. I was deeply moved.

I shed a few tears on him and kissed him for his mother. I then took what small change he had and “shoved.”

Therefore many a native gives up and dies merely because he imagines that some enemy is putting him through a course of damaging prayer.

This praying an individual to death seems absurd enough at a first glance, but then when we call to mind some of the pulpit efforts of certain of our own ministers the thing looks plausible.

In former times, among the Islanders, not only a plurality of wives was customary, but a plurality of husbands likewise. Some native women of noble rank had as many as six husbands.

Some native women of noble rank had as many as six husbands. A woman thus supplied did not reside with all her husbands at once, but lived several months with each in turn.

An understood sign hung at her door during these months. When the sign was taken down, it meant “Next.”

In those days woman was rigidly taught to “know her place.” Her place was to do all the work, take all the cuffs, provide all the food, and content herself with what was left after her lord had finished his dinner.

her British Majesty’s Minister; the Minister Resident, of the United States; and some six or eight representatives of other foreign nations, all with sounding titles, imposing dignity and prodigious but economical state.

Imagine all this grandeur in a playhouse “kingdom” whose population falls absolutely short of sixty thousand souls!

The people are so accustomed to nine-jointed titles and colossal magnates that a foreign prince makes very little more stir in Honolulu than a Western Congressman does in New York.

And after it all, came a torpor from which the nation slowly emerged bewildered and dazed, as if from a hideous half-remembered nightmare.

They were not the salt of the earth, those “gentle children of the sun.”

The natives still keep up an old custom of theirs which cannot be comforting to an invalid.

Bound for Hawaii (a hundred and fifty miles distant,) to visit the great volcano and behold the other notable things which distinguish that island above the remainder of the group, we sailed from Honolulu on a certain Saturday afternoon, in the good schooner Boomerang.

The Boomerang was about as long as two street-cars, and about as wide as one.

She was so small (though she was larger than the majority of the inter-island coasters) that when I stood on her deck I felt but little smaller than the Colossus of Rhodes must have felt when he had a man-of-war under him.

A small table, capable of accommodating three persons at dinner, stood against the forward bulkhead, and over it hung the dingiest whale oil lantern that ever peopled the obscurity of a dungeon with ghostly shapes. The floor room unoccupied was not extensive.

One might swing a cat in it, perhaps, but not a long cat.

The hold forward of the bulkhead had but little freight in it, and from morning till night a portly old rooster, with a voice like Baalam’s ass, and the same disposition to use it, strutted up and down in that part of the vessel and …

Sleeping was out of the question when he was on watch.

He was a source of genuine aggravation and annoyance. It was worse than useless to shout at him or apply offensive epithets to him⁠—he only took these things for applause, and strained himself to make more noise.

Occasionally, during the day, I threw potatoes at him through an aperture in the bulkhead, but he only dodged and went on crowing.

The above is not overdrawn; it is a truthful sketch of inter-island schooner life.

There is no such thing as keeping a vessel in elegant condition, when she carries molasses and Kanakas.

It was compensation for my sufferings to come unexpectedly upon so beautiful a scene as met my eye—to step suddenly out of the sepulchral gloom of the cabin and stand under the strong light of the moon—in the center, as it were, of a glittering …

“But alas, it was too late, gentlemen—too late. The criminal delay had done its work—young Beazely was no more. His spirit had taken its flight to a land where all anxieties shall be charmed away, all desires gratified, all ambitions realized.

Poor lad, they laid him to his rest with a turnip in each hand.

”

Two men who were in advance of us rode through one of these and for a moment their garments shone with a more than regal splendor.

Why did not Captain Cook have taste enough to call his great discovery the Rainbow Islands?

These charming spectacles are present to you at every turn; they are common in all the islands;

There was a temple devoted to prayers for rain—and with fine sagacity it was placed at a point so well up on the mountainside that if you prayed there twenty-four times a day for rain you would be likely to get it every time.

You would seldom get to your Amen before you would have to hoist your umbrella.

And there was a large temple near at hand which was built in a single night, in the midst of storm and thunder and rain, by the ghastly hands of dead men!

And they tell of a native diver who went down in thirty or forty-foot waters and brought up an anvil!

I think he swallowed the anvil afterward, if my memory serves me.

However I will not urge this point.

So the case stood. Liholiho had half a mind to put his foot down, Kaahumahu had a whole mind to badger him into doing it, and whiskey did the rest. It was probably the rest.

It was probably the first time whiskey ever prominently figured as an aid to civilization.

Liholiho came up to Kailua as drunk as a piper, and attended a great feast;

Then conviction came like a revelation—the superstitions of a hundred generations passed from before the people like a cloud, and a shout went up, “The tabu is broken! The tabu is broken!”

Thus did King Liholiho and his dreadful whiskey preach the first sermon and prepare the way for the new gospel that was speeding southward over the waves of the Atlantic.

The tabu broken and destruction failing to follow the awful sacrilege, the people, with that childlike precipitancy which has always characterized them, jumped to the conclusion that their gods were a weak and wretched swindle, just as they formerly jumped to the conclusion that Captain …

And no doubt there was not any done to speak of, because he was a man of that sort of build that incites to attention to business on the part of an employee.

He was fourteen or fifteen feet high. When he stretched himself at full length on his lounge, his legs hung down over the end, and when he snored he woke the dead.

These facts are all attested by irrefragable tradition.

Shortly the crater came into view.

I have seen Vesuvius since, but it was a mere toy, a child’s volcano, a soup-kettle, compared to this.

Mount Vesuvius is a shapely cone thirty-six hundred feet high; its crater an inverted cone only three hundred feet deep, and not more than a thousand feet in diameter, if as much as that; its fires meager, modest, and docile.

its fires meager, modest, and docile. But here was a vast, perpendicular, walled cellar, nine hundred feet deep in some places, thirteen hundred in others, level-floored, and ten miles in circumference!

Here was a yawning pit upon whose floor the armies of Russia could camp, and have room to spare.

Perched upon the edge of the crater, at the opposite end from where we stood, was a small lookout-house—say three miles away.

In the strong light every countenance glowed like red-hot iron, every shoulder was suffused with crimson and shaded rearward into dingy, shapeless obscurity!

The place below looked like the infernal regions and these men like half-cooled devils just come up on a furlough.

I turned my eyes upon the volcano again. The “cellar” was tolerably well lighted up. For a mile and a half in front of us and half a mile on either side, the floor of the abyss was magnificently illuminated;

You could imagine those lights the width of a continent away—and that hidden under the intervening darkness were hills, and winding rivers, and weary wastes of plain and desert—and even then the tremendous vista stretched on, and on, and on!—to the fires and far beyond!

You could not compass it⁠—it was the idea of eternity made tangible⁠—and the longest end of it made visible to the naked eye!

The greater part of the vast floor of the desert under us was as black as ink, and apparently smooth and level;

but over a mile square of it was ringed and streaked and striped with a thousand branching streams of liquid and gorgeously brilliant fire!

It looked like a colossal railroad map of the state of Massachusetts done in chain lightning on a midnight sky.

Imagine it—imagine a coal-black sky shivered into a tangled network of angry fire!

… no trick at all to imagine that you are sweeping down a river on a large low-pressure steamer, and that you hear the hissing of the steam about her boilers, the puffing from her escape-pipes and the churning rush of the water abaft her wheels.

The smell of sulphur is strong, but not unpleasant to a sinner.

We left the lookout-house at ten o’clock in a half-cooked condition, because of the heat from Pele’s furnaces, and wrapping up in blankets, for the night was cold, we returned to our hotel.

There was little conversation, for the impressive scene overawed speech.

I felt like the Last Man, neglected of the judgment, and left pinnacled in mid-heaven, a forgotten relic of a vanished world.

While the hush yet brooded, the messengers of the coming resurrection appeared in the east.

… emerged and looked out over the cloud-waste, flinging bars of ruddy light across it, staining its folds and billow-caps with blushes, purpling the shaded troughs between, and glorifying the massy vapor-palaces and cathedrals with a wasteful splendor of all blendings and combinations of rich coloring.

It was the sublimest spectacle I ever witnessed, and I think the memory of it will remain with me always.

He occupied a chair at the opposite side of the apartment, and sat eying our party with interest for some minutes, and listening as critically to what we were saying as if he fancied we were talking to him and expecting him to reply.

I thought it very sociable in a stranger.

Presently, in the course of conversation, I made a statement bearing upon the subject under discussion—and I made it with due modesty, for there was nothing extraordinary about it, and it was only put forth in illustration of a point at issue.

And on my diary I entered “another night spoiled” by this offensive loafer. And a fervent curse was set down with it to keep the item company. And the very next day I packed up, out of all patience, and left the island.

Almost from the very beginning, I regarded that man as a liar.

The line of points represents an interval of years. At the end of which time the opinion hazarded in that last sentence came to be gratifyingly and remarkably endorsed, and by wholly disinterested persons.

and the ladies sat in the shade of the mainsail, and watched the enterprise with absorbing interest.

We were at sea five Sundays; and yet, but for the almanac, we never would have known but that all the other days were Sundays too.

I was home again, in San Francisco, without means and without employment. I tortured my brain for a saving scheme of some kind, and at last a public lecture occurred to me! I sat down and wrote one, in a fever of hopeful anticipation.

“Silence! If you want to be facetious, young man, there are times and places more fitting. This is a serious business.”

“You prick the marrow of my opinion. The funerals I have attended in my time were comedies compared to it. Now, I think⁠—”

“Curse your palaver! Your money!—your money!—your money! Hold!—put up your hands!”

for the chilly exposure on the “divide” while I was in a perspiration gave me a cold which developed itself into a troublesome disease and kept my hands idle some three months, besides costing me quite a sum in doctor’s bills.

Since then I play no practical jokes on people and generally lose my temper when one is played upon me.

When I returned to San Francisco I projected a pleasure journey to Japan and thence westward around the world;

… community on our continent, and came by the way of the Isthmus to New York—a trip that was not much of a picnic excursion, for the cholera broke out among us on the passage and we buried two or three bodies at sea every day.

I found home a dreary place after my long absence; for half the children I had known were now wearing whiskers or waterfalls, and few of the grown people I had been acquainted with remained at their hearthstones prosperous and happy⁠—some of them had wandered to other scenes, some were in jail, and the rest had been hanged.

These changes touched me deeply, and I went away and joined the famous Quaker City European Excursion and carried my tears to foreign lands.

Thus, after seven years of vicissitudes, ended a “pleasure trip” to the silver mines of Nevada which had originally been intended to occupy only three months.

However, I usually miss my calculations further than that.

If the reader thinks he is done, now, and that this book has no moral to it, he is in error. The moral of it is this: If you are of any account, stay at home and make your way by faithful diligence;

If the reader thinks he is done, now, and that this book has no moral to it, he is in error. The moral of it is this:

If you are of any account, stay at home and make your way by faithful diligence; but if you are “no account,” go away from home, and then you will have to work, whether you want to or not.

Thus you become a blessing to your friends by ceasing to be a nuisance to them—if the people you go among suffer by the operation.

The moral of it is this: If you are of any account, stay at home and make your way by faithful diligence; but if you are “no account,” go away from home, and then you will have to work, whether you want to or not.

Thus you become a blessing to your friends by ceasing to be a nuisance to them⁠—if the people you go among suffer by the operation.