We lived in a small cabin on a verdant hillside, and there were not five
other cabins in view over the wide expanse of hill and forest. Yet a
flourishing city of two or three thousand population had occupied this
grassy dead solitude during the flush times of twelve or fifteen years
before, and where our cabin stood had once been the heart of the teaming
hive, the center of the city. When the mines gave out the town fell into
decay, and in a few years wholly disappeared—streets, dwellings, shops,
everything—and left no sign. The grassy slopes were as green and smooth
and desolate of life as if they had never been disturbed. The mere
handful of miners still remaining had seen the town spring up, spread,
grow, and flourish in its pride; and they had seen it sicken and die,
and pass away like a dream. With it their hopes had died, and their zest
of life. They had long ago resigned themselves to their exile, and
ceased to correspond with their distant friends or turn longing eyes
toward their distant homes. They had accepted banishment, forgotten the
world and been forgotten of the world. They were far from telegraphs and
railroads, and they stood, as it were, in a living grave, dead to the
events that stirred the globe’s great populations, dead to the common
interests of men, isolated and outcast from brotherhood with their kind.
It was the most singular, and almost the most touching and melancholy
exile that fancy can imagine.