I will not say that the Hanson family was Poor White, because the name

savours of offence; but I may go as far as this--they were, in many

points, not unsimilar to the people usually so called. Rufe himself

combined two of the qualifications, for he was both a hunter and an

amateur detective. It was he who pursued Russel and Dollar, the robbers

of the Lake Port stage, and captured them the very morning after the

exploit, while they were still sleeping in a hayfield. Russel, a drunken

Scotch carpenter, was even an acquaintance of his own, and he expressed

much grave commiseration for his fate. In all that he said and did, Rufe

was grave. I never saw him hurried. When he spoke, he took out his pipe

with ceremonial deliberation, looked east and west, and then, in quiet

tones and few words, stated his business or told his story. His gait was

to match; it would never have surprised you if, at any step, he had

turned round and walked away again, so warily and slowly, and with so

much seeming hesitation did he go about. He lay long in bed in the

morning--rarely, indeed, rose before noon; he loved all games, from

poker to clerical croquet; and in the Toll House croquet ground I have

seen him toiling at the latter with the devotion of a curate. He took an

interest in education, was an active member of the local school-board,

and when I was there, he had recently lost the schoolhouse key. His

waggon was broken, but it never seemed to occur to him to mend it. Like

all truly idle people, he had an artistic eye. He chose the print stuff

for his wife's dresses, and counselled her in the making of a patch-work

quilt, always, as she thought, wrongly, but to the more educated eye,

always with bizarre and admirable taste--the taste of an Indian. With

all this, he was a perfect, unoffending gentleman in word and act. Take

his clay pipe from him, and he was fit for any society but that of

fools. Quiet as he was, there burned a deep, permanent excitement in his

dark blue eyes; and when this grave man smiled, it was like sunshine in

a shady place.

Mrs. Hanson (_nee_, if you please, Lovelands) was more commonplace than

her lord. She was a comely woman, too, plump, fair-coloured, with

wonderful white teeth; and in her print dresses (chosen by Rufe) and

with a large sunbonnet shading her valued complexion, made, I assure

you, a very agreeable figure. But she was on the surface, what there was

of her, out-spoken and loud-spoken. Her noisy laughter had none of the

charm of one of Hanson's rare, slow-spreading smiles; there was no

reticence, no mystery, no manner about the woman: she was a first-class

dairymaid, but her husband was an unknown quantity between the savage

and the nobleman. She was often in and out with us, merry, and healthy,

and fair; he came far seldomer--only, indeed, when there was business,

or now and again, to pay a visit of ceremony, brushed up for the

occasion, with his wife on his arm, and a clean clay pipe in his teeth.

These visits, in our forest state, had quite the air of an event, and

turned our red canyon into a salon.

Such was the pair who ruled in the old Silverado Hotel, among the windy

trees, on the mountain shoulder overlooking the whole length of Napa

Valley, as the man aloft looks down on the ship's deck. There they kept

house, with sundry horses and fowls, and a family of sons, Daniel

Webster, and I think George Washington, among the number. Nor did they

want visitors. An old gentleman, of singular stolidity, and called

Breedlove--I think he had crossed the plains in the same caravan with

Rufe--housed with them for awhile during our stay; and they had besides

a permanent lodger, in the form of Mrs. Hanson's brother, Irvine

Lovelands. I spell Irvine by guess; for I could get no information on

the subject, just as I could never find out, in spite of many inquiries,

whether or not Rufe was a contraction for Rufus. They were all

cheerfully at sea about their names in that generation. And this is

surely the more notable where the names are all so strange, and even

the family names appear to have been coined. At one time, at least, the

ancestors of all these Alvins and Alvas, Loveinas, Lovelands, and

Breedloves, must have taken serious council and found a certain poetry

in these denominations; that must have been, then, their form of

literature. But still times change; and their next descendants, the

George Washingtons and Daniel Websters, will at least be clear upon the

point. And anyway, and however his name should be spelt, this Irvine

Lovelands was the most unmitigated Caliban I ever knew.

Our very first morning at Silverado, when we were full of business,

patching up doors and windows, making beds and seats, and getting our

rough lodging into shape, Irvine and his sister made their appearance

together, she for neighbourliness and general curiosity; he, because he

was working for me, to my sorrow, cutting firewood at I forget how much

a day. The way that he set about cutting wood was characteristic. We

were at that moment patching up and unpacking in the kitchen. Down he

sat on one side, and down sat his sister on the other. Both were chewing

pine-tree gum, and he, to my annoyance, accompanied that simple pleasure

with profuse expectoration. She rattled away, talking up hill and down

dale, laughing, tossing her head, showing her brilliant teeth. He looked

on in silence, now spitting heavily on the floor, now putting his head

back and uttering a loud, discordant, joyless laugh. He had a tangle of

shock hair, the colour of wool; his mouth was a grin; although as strong

as a horse, he looked neither heavy nor yet adroit, only leggy, coltish,

and in the road. But it was plain he was in high spirits, thoroughly

enjoying his visit; and he laughed frankly whenever we failed to

accomplish what we were about. This was scarcely helpful; it was even,

to amateur carpenters, embarrassing; but it lasted until we knocked off

work and began to get dinner. Then Mrs. Hanson remembered she should

have been gone an hour ago; and the pair retired, and the lady's

laughter died away among the nutmegs down the path. That was Irvine's

first day's work in my employment--the devil take him!

The next morning he returned and, as he was this time alone, he bestowed

his conversation upon us with great liberality. He prided himself on his

intelligence; asked us if we knew the school-ma'am. _He_ didn't think

much of her, anyway. He had tried her, he had. He had put a question to

her. If a tree a hundred feet high were to fall a foot a day, how long

would it take to fall right down? She had not been able to solve the

problem. "She don't know nothing," he opined. He told us how a friend of

his kept a school with a revolver, and chuckled mightily over that; his

friend could teach school, he could. All the time he kept chewing gum

and spitting. He would stand awhile looking down; and then he would toss

back his shock of hair, and laugh hoarsely, and spit, and bring forward

a new subject. A man, he told us, who bore a grudge against him, had

poisoned his dog. "That was a low thing for a man to do now, wasn't it?

It wasn't like a man, that, nohow. But I got even with him: I pisoned

_his_ dog." His clumsy utterance, his rude embarrassed manner, set a

fresh value on the stupidity of his remarks. I do not think I ever

appreciated the meaning of two words until I knew Irvine--the verb,

loaf, and the noun, oaf; between them, they complete his portrait. He

could lounge, and wriggle, and rub himself against the wall, and grin,

and be more in everybody's way than any other two people that I ever set

my eyes on. Nothing that he did became him; and yet you were conscious

that he was one of your own race, that his mind was cumbrously at work,

revolving the problem of existence like a quid of gum, and in his own

cloudy manner enjoying life, and passing judgment on his fellows. Above

all things, he was delighted with himself. You would not have thought

it, from his uneasy manners and troubled, struggling utterance; but he

loved himself to the marrow, and was happy and proud like a peacock on

a rail.

His self-esteem was, indeed, the one joint in his harness. He could be

got to work, and even kept at work, by flattery. As long as my wife

stood over him, crying out how strong he was, so long exactly he would

stick to the matter in hand; and the moment she turned her back, or

ceased to praise him, he would stop. His physical strength was

wonderful; and to have a woman stand by and admire his achievements,

warmed his heart like sunshine. Yet he was as cowardly as he was

powerful, and felt no shame in owning to the weakness. Something was

once wanted from the crazy platform over the shaft, and he at once

refused to venture there--"did not like," as he said, "foolin' round

them kind o' places," and let my wife go instead of him, looking on with

a grin. Vanity, where it rules, is usually more heroic; but Irvine

steadily approved himself, and expected others to approve him; rather

looked down upon my wife, and decidedly expected her to look up to him,

on the strength of his superior prudence.

Yet the strangest part of the whole matter was perhaps this, that Irvine

was as beautiful as a statue. His features were, in themselves, perfect;

it was only his cloudy, uncouth, and coarse expression that disfigured

them. So much strength residing in so spare a frame was proof sufficient

of the accuracy of his shape. He must have been built somewhat after the

pattern of Jack Sheppard; but the famous housebreaker, we may be

certain, was no lout. It was by the extraordinary powers of his mind no

less than by the vigour of his body, that he broke his strong prison

with such imperfect implements, turning the very obstacles to surface.

Irvine, in the same case, would have sat down and spat, and grumbled

curses. He had the soul of a fat sheep; but, regarded as an artist's

model, the exterior of a Greek god. It was a cruel thought to persons

less favoured in their birth, that this creature, endowed--to use the

language of theatres--with extraordinary "means," should so manage to

misemploy them that he looked ugly and almost deformed. It was only by

an effort of abstraction, and after many days, that you discovered what

he was.

By playing on the oaf's conceit, and standing closely over him, we got a

path made round the corner of the dump to our door, so that we could

come and go with decent ease; and he even enjoyed the work, for in that

there were boulders to be plucked up bodily, bushes to be uprooted, and

other occasions for athletic display: but cutting wood was a different

matter. Anybody could cut wood; and, besides, my wife was tired of

supervising him, and had other things to attend to. And in short, days

went by, and Irvine came daily, and talked and lounged and spat; but the

firewood remained intact as sleepers on the platform or growing trees

upon the mountain-side. Irvine, as a woodcutter, we could tolerate; but

Irvine as a friend of the family, at so much a day, was too bald an

imposition, and at length, on the afternoon of the fourth or fifth day

of our connection, I explained to him, as clearly as I could, the light

in which I had grown to regard his presence. I pointed out to him that I

could not continue to give him a salary for spitting on the floor; and

this expression, which came after a good many others, at last penetrated

his obdurate wits. He rose at once, and said if that was the way he was

going to be spoke to, he reckoned he would quit. And, no one

interposing, he departed.

So far, so good. But we had no firewood. The next afternoon, I strolled

down to Rufe's and consulted him on the subject. It was a very droll

interview, in the large, bare north room of the Silverado Hotel, Mrs.

Hanson's patchwork on a frame, and Rufe, and his wife, and I, and the

oaf himself, all more or less embarrassed. Rufe announced there was

nobody in the neighbourhood but Irvine who could do a day's work for

anybody. Irvine, thereupon, refused to have any more to do with my

service; he "wouldn't work no more for a man as had spoke to him 's I

had done." I found myself on the point of the last humiliation--driven

to beseech the creature whom I had just dismissed with insult: but I

took the high hand in despair, said there must be no talk of Irvine

coming back unless matters were to be differently managed; that I would

rather chop firewood for myself than be fooled; and, in short, the

Hansons being eager for the lad's hire, I so imposed upon them with

merely affected resolution, that they ended by begging me to re-employ

him again, on a solemn promise that he should be more industrious. The

promise, I am bound to say, was kept. We soon had a fine pile of

firewood at our door; and if Caliban gave me the cold shoulder and

spared me his conversation, I thought none the worse of him for that,

nor did I find my days much longer for the deprivation.

The leading spirit of the family was, I am inclined to fancy, Mrs.

Hanson. Her social brilliancy somewhat dazzled the others, and she had

more of the small change of sense. It was she who faced Kelmar, for

instance; and perhaps if she had been alone, Kelmar would have had no

rule within her doors. Rufe, to be sure, had a fine, sober, open-air

attitude of mind, seeing the world without exaggeration--perhaps, we may

even say, without enough; for he lacked, along with the others, that

commercial idealism which puts so high a value on time and money. Sanity

itself is a kind of convention. Perhaps Rufe was wrong; but, looking on

life plainly, he was unable to see that croquet or poker were in any way

less important than, for instance, mending his waggon. Even his own

profession, hunting, was dear to him mainly as a sort of play; even that

he would have neglected, had it not appealed to his imagination. His

hunting suit, for instance, had cost I should be afraid to say how many

bucks--the currency in which he paid his way; it was all befringed,

after the Indian fashion, and it was dear to his heart. The pictorial

side of his daily business was never forgotten. He was even anxious to

stand for his picture in those buckskin, hunting clothes; and I remember

how he once warmed almost into enthusiasm, his dark blue eyes growing

perceptibly larger, as he planned the composition in which he should

appear, "with the horns of some real big bucks, and dogs, and a camp on

a crick" (creek, stream).

There was no trace in Irvine of this woodland poetry. He did not care

for hunting, nor yet for buckskin suits. He had never observed scenery.

The world, as it appeared to him, was almost obliterated by his own

great grinning figure in the foreground: Caliban-Malvolio. And it seems

to me as if, in the persons of these brothers-in-law, we had the two

sides of rusticity fairly well represented: the hunter living really in

nature; the clodhopper living merely out of society; the one bent up in

every corporal agent to capacity in one pursuit, doing at least one

thing keenly and thoughtfully, and thoroughly alive to all that touches

it; the other in the inert and bestial state, walking in a faint dream,

and taking so dim an impression of the myriad sides of life that he is

truly conscious of nothing but himself. It is only in the fastnesses of

nature, forests, mountains, and the back of man's beyond, that a

creature endowed with five senses can grow up into the perfection of

this crass and earthly vanity. In towns or the busier country sides, he

is roughly reminded of other men's existence; and if he learns no more,

he learns at least to fear contempt. But Irvine had come scathless

through life, conscious only of himself, of his great strength and

intelligence; and in the silence of the universe, to which he did not

listen, dwelling with delight on the sound of his own thoughts.

THE SEA-FOGS

A change in the colour of the light usually called me in the morning. By

a certain hour, the long, vertical chinks in our western gable, where

the boards had shrunk and separated, flashed suddenly into my eyes as

stripes of dazzling blue, at once so dark and splendid that I used to

marvel how the qualities could be combined. At an earlier hour, the

heavens in that quarter were still quietly coloured, but the shoulder of

the mountain which shuts in the canyon already glowed with sunlight in a

wonderful compound of gold and rose and green; and this too would

kindle, although more mildly and with rainbow tints, the fissures of our

crazy gable. If I were sleeping heavily, it was the bold blue that

struck me awake; if more lightly, then I would come to myself in that

earlier and fairer light.

One Sunday morning, about five, the first brightness called me. I rose

and turned to the east, not for my devotions, but for air. The night had

been very still. The little private gale that blew every evening in our

canyon, for ten minutes or perhaps a quarter of an hour, had swiftly

blown itself out; in the hours that followed not a sigh of wind had

shaken the treetops; and our barracks, for all its breaches, was less

fresh that morning than of wont. But I had no sooner reached the window

than I forgot all else in the sight that met my eyes, and I made but two

bounds into my clothes, and down the crazy plank to the platform.

The sun was still concealed below the opposite hilltops, though it was

shining already, not twenty feet above my head, on our own mountain

slope. But the scene, beyond a few near features, was entirely changed.

Napa Valley was gone; gone were all the lower slopes and woody

foot-hills of the range; and in their place, not a thousand feet below

me, rolled a great level ocean. It was as though I had gone to bed the

night before, safe in a nook of inland mountains, and had awakened in a

bay upon the coast. I had seen these inundations from below; at

Calistoga I had risen and gone abroad in the early morning, coughing and

sneezing, under fathoms on fathoms of grey sea-vapour, like a cloudy

sky--a dull sight for the artist, and a painful experience for the

invalid. But to sit aloft one's self in the pure air and under the

unclouded dome of heaven, and thus look down on the submergence of the

valley, was strangely different and even delightful to the eyes. Far

away were hilltops like little islands. Nearer, a smoky surf beat about

the foot of precipices and poured into all the coves of these rough

mountains. The colour of that fog ocean was a thing never to be

forgotten. For an instant, among the Hebrides and just about sundown, I

have seen something like it on the sea itself. But the white was not so

opaline; nor was there, what surprisingly increased the effect, that

breathless, crystal stillness over all. Even in its gentlest moods the

salt sea travails, moaning among the weeds or lisping on the sand; but

that vast fog ocean lay in a trance of silence, nor did the sweet air of

the morning tremble with a sound.

As I continued to sit upon the dump, I began to observe that this sea

was not so level as at first sight it appeared to be. Away in the

extreme south, a little hill of fog arose against the sky above the

general surface, and as it had already caught the sun, it shone on the

horizon like the topsails of some giant ship. There were huge waves,

stationary, as it seemed, like waves in a frozen sea; and yet, as I

looked again, I was not sure but they were moving after all, with a slow

and august advance. And while I was yet doubting, a promontory of the

hills some four or five miles away, conspicuous by a bouquet of tall

pines, was in a single instant overtaken and swallowed up. It appeared

in a little, with its pines, but this time as an islet, and only to be

swallowed up once more and then for good. This set me looking nearer,

and I saw that in every cove along the line of mountains the fog was

being piled in higher and higher, as though by some wind that was

inaudible to me. I could trace its progress, one pine-tree first growing

hazy and then disappearing after another; although sometimes there was

none of this fore-running haze, but the whole opaque white ocean gave a

start and swallowed a piece of mountain at a gulp. It was to flee these

poisonous fogs that I had left the seaboard, and climbed so high among

the mountains. And now, behold, here came the fog to besiege me in my

chosen altitudes, and yet came so beautifully that my first thought was

of welcome.

The sun had now gotten much higher, and through all the gaps of the

hills it cast long bars of gold across that white ocean. An eagle, or

some other very great bird of the mountain, came wheeling over the

nearer pine-tops, and hung, poised and something sideways, as if to look

abroad on that unwonted desolation, spying, perhaps with terror, for the

eyries of her comrades. Then, with a long cry, she disappeared again

towards Lake County and the clearer air. At length it seemed to me as if

the flood were beginning to subside. The old landmarks, by whose

disappearance I had measured its advance, here a crag, there a brave

pine-tree, now began, in the inverse order, to make their reappearance

into daylight. I judged all danger of the fog was over. This was not

Noah's flood; it was but a morning spring, and would now drift out

seaward whence it came. So, mightily relieved, and a good deal

exhilarated by the sight, I went into the house to light the fire.

I suppose it was nearly seven when I once more mounted the platform to

look abroad. The fog ocean had swelled up enormously since last I saw

it; and a few hundred feet below me, in the deep gap where the Toll

House stands and the road runs through into Lake County, it had already

topped the slope, and was pouring over and down the other side like

driving smoke. The wind had climbed along with it; and though I was

still in calm air, I could see the trees tossing below me, and their

long, strident sighing mounted to me where I stood.

Half an hour later, the fog had surmounted all the ridge on the opposite

side of the gap, though a shoulder of the mountain still warded it out

of our canyon. Napa Valley and its bounding hills were now utterly

blotted out. The fog, sunny white in the sunshine, was pouring over into

Lake County in a huge, ragged cataract, tossing tree-tops appearing and

disappearing in the spray. The air struck with a little chill, and set

me coughing. It smelt strong of the fog, like the smell of a

washing-house, but with a shrewd tang of the sea salt.

Had it not been for two things--the sheltering spur which answered as a

dyke, and the great valley on the other side which rapidly engulfed

whatever mounted--our own little platform in the canyon must have been

already buried a hundred feet in salt and poisonous air. As it was, the

interest of the scene entirely occupied our minds. We were set just out

of the wind, and but just above the fog; we could listen to the voice of

the one as to music on the stage; we could plunge our eyes down into the

other, as into some flowing stream from over the parapet of a bridge;

thus we looked on upon a strange, impetuous, silent, shifting exhibition

of the powers of nature, and saw the familiar landscape changing from

moment to moment like figures in a dream.

The imagination loves to trifle with what is not. Had this been indeed

the deluge, I should have felt more strongly, but the emotion would have

been similar in kind. I played with the idea, as the child flees in

delighted terror from the creations of his fancy. The look of the thing

helped me. And when at last I began to flee up the mountain, it was

indeed partly to escape from the raw air that kept me coughing, but it

was also part in play.

As I ascended the mountain-side, I came once more to overlook the upper

surface of the fog; but it wore a different appearance from what I had

beheld at daybreak. For, first, the sun now fell on it from high

overhead, and its surface shone and undulated like a great nor'land moor

country, sheeted with untrodden morning snow. And next the new level

must have been a thousand or fifteen hundred feet higher than the old,

so that only five or six points of all the broken country below me,

still stood out. Napa Valley was now one with Sonoma on the west. On the

hither side, only a thin scattered fringe of bluffs was unsubmerged; and

through all the gaps the fog was pouring over, like an ocean, into the

blue clear sunny country on the east. There it was soon lost; for it

fell instantly into the bottom of the valleys, following the water-shed;

and the hill-tops in that quarter were still clear cut upon the eastern

sky.

Through the Toll House gap and over the near ridges on the other side,

the deluge was immense. A spray of thin vapour was thrown high above it,

rising and falling, and blown into fantastic shapes. The speed of its

course was like a mountain torrent. Here and there a few treetops were

discovered and then whelmed again; and for one second, the bough of a

dead pine beckoned out of the spray like the arm of a drowning man. But

still the imagination was dissatisfied, still the ear waited for

something more. Had this indeed been water (as it seemed so, to the

eye), with what a plunge of reverberating thunder would it have rolled

upon its course, disembowelling mountains and deracinating pines! And

yet water it was, and sea-water at that--true Pacific billows, only

somewhat rarefied, rolling in mid-air among the hilltops.

I climbed still higher, among the red rattling gravel and dwarf

underwood of Mount Saint Helena, until I could look right down upon

Silverado, and admire the favoured nook in which it lay. The sunny plain

of fog was several hundred feet higher; behind the protecting spur a

gigantic accumulation of cottony vapour threatened, with every second,

to blow over and submerge our homestead; but the vortex setting past the

Toll House was too strong; and there lay our little platform, in the

arms of the deluge, but still enjoying its unbroken sunshine. About

eleven, however, thin spray came flying over the friendly buttress, and

I began to think the fog had hunted out its Jonah after all. But it was

the last effort. The wind veered while we were at dinner, and began to

blow squally from the mountain summit; and by half-past one, all that

world of sea-fogs was utterly routed and flying here and there into the

south in little rags of cloud. And instead of a lone sea-beach, we found

ourselves once more inhabiting a high mountain-side, with the clear

green country far below us, and the light smoke of Calistoga blowing in

the air.

This was the great Russian campaign for that season. Now and then, in

the early morning, a little white lakelet of fog would be seen far down

in Napa Valley; but the heights were not again assailed, nor was the

surrounding world again shut off from Silverado.

THE TOLL HOUSE

The Toll House, standing alone by the wayside under nodding pines, with

its streamlet and water-tank; its backwoods, toll-bar, and well-trodden

croquet ground; the ostler standing by the stable door, chewing a straw;

a glimpse of the Chinese cook in the back parts; and Mr. Hoddy in the

bar, gravely alert and serviceable, and equally anxious to lend or

borrow books;--dozed all day in the dusty sunshine, more than half

asleep. There were no neighbours, except the Hansons up the hill. The

traffic on the road was infinitesimal; only, at rare intervals, a couple

in a waggon, or a dusty farmer on a spring-board, toiling over "the

grade" to that metropolitan hamlet, Calistoga; and, at the fixed hours,

the passage of the stages.

The nearest building was the schoolhouse, down the road; and the

school-ma'am boarded at the Toll House, walking thence in the morning to

the little brown shanty, where she taught the young ones of the

district, and returning thither pretty weary in the afternoon. She had

chosen this outlying situation, I understood, for her health. Mr. Corwin

was consumptive; so was Rufe; so was Mr. Jennings, the engineer. In

short, the place was a kind of small Davos: consumptive folk consorting

on a hilltop in the most unbroken idleness. Jennings never did anything

that I could see, except now and then to fish, and generally to sit

about in the bar and the veranda, waiting for something to happen.

Corwin and Rufe did as little as possible; and if the school-ma'am, poor

lady, had to work pretty hard all morning, she subsided when it was over

into much the same dazed beatitude as all the rest.

Her special corner was the parlour--a very genteel room, with Bible

prints, a crayon portrait of Mrs. Corwin in the height of fashion, a few

years ago, another of her son (Mr. Corwin was not represented), a

mirror, and a selection of dried grasses. A large book was laid

religiously on the table--"From Palace to Hovel," I believe, its

name--full of the raciest experiences in England. The author had mingled

freely with all classes, the nobility particularly meeting him with open

arms; and I must say that traveller had ill requited his reception. His

book, in short, was a capital instance of the Penny Messalina school of

literature; and there arose from it, in that cool parlour, in that

silent, wayside, mountain inn, a rank atmosphere of gold and blood and

"Jenkins," and the "Mysteries of London," and sickening, inverted

snobbery, fit to knock you down. The mention of this book reminds me of

another and far racier picture of our island life. The latter parts of

_Rocambole_ are surely too sparingly consulted in the country which they

celebrate. No man's education can be said to be complete, nor can he

pronounce the world yet emptied of enjoyment, till he has made the

acquaintance of "The Reverend Patterson, director of the Evangelical

Society." To follow the evolutions of that reverend gentleman, who goes

through scenes in which even Mr. Duffield would hesitate to place a

bishop, is to rise to new ideas. But, alas! there was no Patterson about

the Toll House. Only, alongside of "From Palace to Hovel," a sixpenny

"Ouida" figured. So literature, you see, was not unrepresented.

The school-ma'am had friends to stay with her, other school-ma'ams

enjoying their holidays, quite a bevy of damsels. They seemed never to

go out, or not beyond the veranda, but sat close in the little parlour,

quietly talking or listening to the wind among the trees. Sleep dwelt in

the Toll House, like a fixture: summer sleep, shallow, soft, and

dreamless. A cuckoo clock, a great rarity in such a place, hooted at

intervals about the echoing house; and Mr. Jennings would open his eyes

for a moment in the bar, and turn the leaf of a newspaper, and the

resting school-ma'ams in the parlour would be recalled to the

consciousness of their inaction. Busy Mrs. Corwin and her busy Chinaman

might be heard indeed, in the penetralia, pounding dough or rattling

dishes; or perhaps Rufe had called up some of the sleepers for a game of

croquet, and the hollow strokes of the mallet sounded far away among the

woods; but with these exceptions, it was sleep and sunshine and dust,

and the wind in the pine-trees, all day long.

A little before stage time, that castle of indolence awoke. The ostler

threw his straw away and set to his preparations. Mr. Jennings rubbed

his eyes; happy Mr. Jennings, the something he had been waiting for all

day about to happen at last! The boarders gathered in the veranda,

silently giving ear, and gazing down the road with shaded eyes. And as

yet there was no sign for the senses, not a sound, not a tremor of the

mountain road. The birds, to whom the secret of the hooting cuckoo is

unknown, must have set down to instinct this premonitory bustle.

And then the first of the two stages swooped upon the Toll House with a

roar and in a cloud of dust; and the shock had not yet time to subside,

before the second was abreast of it. Huge concerns they were, well

horsed and loaded, the men in their shirt-sleeves, the women swathed in

veils, the long whip cracking like a pistol; and as they charged upon

that slumbering hostelry, each shepherding a dust storm, the dead place

blossomed into life and talk and clatter. This the Toll House?--with its

city throng, its jostling shoulders, its infinity of instant business in

the bar? The mind would not receive it! The heartfelt bustle of that

hour is hardly credible; the thrill of the great shower of letters from

the post-bag, the childish hope and interest with which one gazed in all

these strangers' eyes. They paused there but to pass: the blue-clad

China-boy, the San Francisco magnate, the mystery in the dust coat, the

secret memoirs in tweed, the ogling, well-shod lady with her troop of

girls; they did but flash and go; they were hull-down for us behind

life's ocean, and we but hailed their topsails on the line. Yet, out of

our great solitude of four and twenty mountain hours, we thrilled to

their momentary presence; gauged and divined them, loved and hated; and

stood light-headed in that storm of human electricity. Yes, like

Piccadilly Circus, this is also one of life's crossing-places. Here I

beheld one man, already famous or infamous, a centre of pistol-shots;

and another who, if not yet known to rumour, will fill a column of the

Sunday paper when he comes to hang--a burly, thick-set, powerful Chinese

desperado, six long bristles upon either lip; redolent of whisky,

playing-cards, and pistols; swaggering in the bar with the lowest

assumption of the lowest European manners; rapping out blackguard

English oaths in his canorous oriental voice; and combining in one

person the depravities of two races and two civilisations. For all his

lust and vigour, he seemed to look cold upon me from the valley of the

shadow of the gallows. He imagined a vain thing; and while he drained

his cocktail, Holbein's death was at his elbow. Once, too, I fell in

talk with another of these flitting strangers--like the rest, in his

shirt-sleeves and all begrimed with dust--and the next minute we were

discussing Paris and London, theatres and wines. To him, journeying from

one human place to another, this was a trifle; but to me! No, Mr.

Lillie, I have not forgotten it.

And presently the city-tide was at its flood and began to ebb. Life runs

in Piccadilly Circus, say, from nine to one, and then, there also, ebbs

into the small hours of the echoing policeman and the lamps and stars.

But the Toll House is far up stream, and near its rural springs; the

bubble of the tide but touches it. Before you had yet grasped your

pleasure, the horses were put to, the loud whips volleyed, and the tide

was gone. North and south had the two stages vanished, the towering dust

subsided in the woods; but there was still an interval before the flush

had fallen on your cheeks, before the ear became once more contented

with the silence, or the seven sleepers of the Toll House dozed back to

their accustomed corners. Yet a little, and the ostler would swing round

the great barrier across the road; and in the golden evening, that

dreamy inn begin to trim its lamps and spread the board for supper.

As I recall the place--the green dell below; the spires of pine; the

sun-warm, scented air; that grey, gabled inn, with its faint stirrings

of life amid the slumber of the mountains--I slowly awake to a sense of

admiration, gratitude, and almost love. A fine place, after all, for a

wasted life to doze away in--the cuckoo clock hooting of its far home

country; the croquet mallets, eloquent of English lawns; the stages

daily bringing news of the turbulent world away below there; and perhaps

once in the summer, a salt fog pouring overhead with its tale of the

Pacific.

A STARRY DRIVE

In our rule at Silverado, there was a melancholy interregnum. The queen

and the crown prince with one accord fell sick; and, as I was sick to

begin with, our lone position on Mount Saint Helena was no longer

tenable, and we had to hurry back to Calistoga and a cottage on the

green. By that time we had begun to realise the difficulties of our

position. We had found what an amount of labour it cost to support life

in our red canyon; and it was the dearest desire of our hearts to get a

China-boy to go along with us when we returned. We could have given him

a whole house to himself, self-contained, as they say in the

advertisements; and on the money question we were prepared to go far.

Kong Sam Kee, the Calistoga washerman, was entrusted with the affair;

and from day to day it languished on, with protestations on our part and

mellifluous excuses on the part of Kong Sam Kee.

At length, about half-past eight of our last evening, with the waggon

ready harnessed to convey us up the grade, the washerman, with a

somewhat sneering air, produced the boy. He was a handsome, gentlemanly

lad, attired in rich dark blue, and shod with snowy white; but, alas! he

had heard rumours of Silverado. He knew it for a lone place on the

mountain-side, with no friendly wash-house near by, where he might smoke

a pipe of opium o' nights with other China-boys, and lose his little

earnings at the game of tan; and he first backed out for more money; and

then, when that demand was satisfied, refused to come point blank. He

was wedded to his wash-houses; he had no taste for the rural life; and

we must go to our mountain servantless. It must have been near half an

hour before we reached that conclusion, standing in the midst of

Calistoga high street under the stars, and the China-boy and Kong Sam

Kee singing their pigeon English in the sweetest voices and with the

most musical inflections.

We were not, however, to return alone; we brought with us a painter

guest, who proved to be a most good-natured comrade and a capital hand

at an omelette. I do not know in which capacity he was most valued--as a

cook or a companion; and he did excellently well in both.

The Kong Sam Kee negotiation had delayed us unduly; it must have been

half-past nine before we left Calistoga, and night came fully ere we

struck the bottom of the grade. I have never seen such a night. It

seemed to throw calumny in the teeth of all the painters that ever

dabbled in starlight. The sky itself was of a ruddy, powerful, nameless,

changing colour, dark and glossy like a serpent's back. The stars by

innumerable millions, stuck boldly forth like lamps. The milky way was

bright, like a moonlit cloud; half heaven seemed milky way. The greater

luminaries shone each more clearly than a winter's moon. Their light was

dyed in every sort of colour--red, like fire; blue, like steel; green,

like the tracks of sunset; and so sharply did each stand forth in its

own lustre that there was no appearance of that flat, star-spangled arch

we know so well in pictures, but all the hollow of heaven was one chaos

of contesting luminaries--a hurly-burly of stars. Against this the hills

and rugged treetops stood out redly dark.

As we continued to advance, the lesser lights and milky ways first grew

pale, and then vanished; the countless hosts of heaven dwindled in

number by successive millions; those that still shone had tempered their

exceeding brightness and fallen back into their customary wistful

distance; and the sky declined from its first bewildering splendour into

the appearance of a common night. Slowly this change proceeded, and

still there was no sign of any cause. Then a whiteness like mist was

thrown over the spurs of the mountain. Yet awhile, and, as we turned a

corner, a great leap of silver light and net of forest shadows fell

across the road and upon our wondering waggonful and, swimming low among

the trees, we beheld a strange, misshapen, waning moon, half tilted on

her back.

"Where are ye when the moon appears?" so the old poet sang, half

taunting, to the stars, bent upon a courtly purpose.

"As the sunlight round the dim earth's midnight tower of

shadow pours,

Streaming past the dim, wide portals,

Viewless to the eyes of mortals,

Till it floods the moon's pale islet or the morning's

golden shores."

So sings Mr. Trowbridge, with a noble inspiration. And so had the

sunlight flooded that pale islet of the moon, and her lit face put out,

one after another, that galaxy of stars. The wonder of the drive was

over; but, by some nice conjunction of clearness in the air and fit

shadow in the valley where we travelled, we had seen for a little while

that brave display of the midnight heavens. It was gone, but it had

been; nor shall I ever again behold the stars with the same mind. He who

has seen the sea commoved with a great hurricane, thinks of it very

differently from him who has seen it only in a calm. And the difference

between a calm and a hurricane is not greatly more striking than that

between the ordinary face of night and the splendour that shone upon us

in that drive. Two in our waggon knew night as she shines upon the

tropics, but even that bore no comparison. The nameless colour of the

sky, the hues of the star fire, and the incredible projection of the

stars themselves, starting from their orbits, so that the eye seemed to

distinguish their positions in the hollow of space--these were things

that we had never seen before and shall never see again.

Meanwhile, in this altered night, we proceeded on our way among the

scents and silence of the forest, reached the top of the grade, wound up

by Hanson's, and came at last to a stand under the flying gargoyle of

the chute. Lloyd, who had been lying back, fast asleep, with the moon on

his face, got down, with the remark that it was pleasant "to be home."

The waggon turned and drove away, the noise gently dying in the woods,

and we clambered up the rough path, Caliban's great feat of engineering,

and came home to Silverado.

The moon shone in at the eastern doors and windows and over the lumber,

on the platform. The one tall pine beside the ledge was steeped in

silver. Away up the canyon, a wild cat welcomed us with three discordant

squalls. But once we had lit a candle, and began to review our

improvements, homely in either sense, and count our stores, it was

wonderful what a feeling of possession and permanence grew up in the

hearts of the lords of Silverado. A bed had still to be made up for our

guest, and the morning's water to be fetched, with clinking pail; and as

we set about these household duties, and showed off our wealth and

conveniences before the stranger, and had a glass of wine, I think, in

honour of our return, and trooped at length one after another up the

flying bridge of plank, and laid down to sleep in our shattered,

moon-pierced barrack, we were among the happiest sovereigns in the

world, and certainly ruled over the most contented people. Yet, in our

absence, the palace had been sacked. Wild cats, so the Hansons said, had

broken in and carried off a side of bacon, a hatchet, and two knives.

EPISODES IN THE STORY OF A MINE

No one could live at Silverado and not be curious about the story of the

mine. We were surrounded by so many evidences of expense and toil, we

lived so entirely in the wreck of that great enterprise, like mites in

the ruins of a cheese, that the idea of the old din and bustle haunted

our repose. Our own house, the forge, the dump, the chutes, the rails,

the windlass, the mass of broken plant; the two tunnels, one far below

in the green dell, the other on the platform where we kept our wine; the

deep shaft, with the sun-glints and the water-drops; above all, the

ledge, that great gaping slice out of the mountain shoulder, propped

apart by wooden wedges, on whose immediate margin, high above our heads,

the one tall pine precariously nodded,--these stood for its greatness;

while the dog-hutch, boot-jacks, old boots, old tavern bills, and the

very beds that we inherited from bygone miners, put in human touches and

realised for us the story of the past.

I have sat on an old sleeper, under the thick madronas near the forge,

with just a look over the dump on the green world below, and seen the

sun lying broad among the wreck, and heard the silence broken only by

the tinkling water in the shaft, or a stir of the royal family about the

battered palace, and my mind has gone back to the epoch of the Stanleys

and the Chapmans, with a grand _tutti_ of pick and drill, hammer and

anvil, echoing about the canyon; the assayer hard at it in our

dining-room; the carts below on the road, and their cargo of red mineral

bounding and thundering down the iron chute. And now all gone--all

fallen away into this sunny silence and desertion: a family of squatters

dining in the assayer's office, making their beds in the big sleeping

room erstwhile so crowded, keeping their wine in the tunnel that once

rang with picks.

But Silverado itself, although now fallen in its turn into decay, was

once but a mushroom, and had succeeded to other mines and other flitting

cities. Twenty years ago, away down the glen on the Lake County side

there was a place, Jonestown by name, with two thousand inhabitants

dwelling under canvas, and one roofed house for the sale of whisky.

Round on the western side of Mount Saint Helena, there was at the same

date a second large encampment, its name, if it ever had one, lost for

me. Both of these have perished, leaving not a stick and scarce a memory

behind them. Tide after tide of hopeful miners have thus flowed and

ebbed about the mountain, coming and going, now by lone prospectors, now

with a rush. Last in order of time came Silverado, reared the big mill,

in the valley, founded the town which is now represented, monumentally,

by Hanson's, pierced all these slaps and shafts and tunnels, and in turn

declined and died away.

"Our noisy years seem moments in the being

Of the eternal silence."

As to the success of Silverado in its time of being, two reports were

current. According to the first, six hundred thousand dollars were taken

out of that great upright seam, that still hung open above us on crazy

wedges. Then the ledge pinched out, and there followed, in quest of the

remainder, a great drifting and tunnelling in all directions, and a

great consequent effusion of dollars, until, all parties being sick of

the expense, the mine was deserted, and the town decamped. According to

the second version, told me with much secrecy of manner, the whole

affair, mine, mill, and town, were parts of one majestic swindle. There

had never come any silver out of any portion of the mine; there was no

silver to come. At midnight trains of packhorses might have been

observed winding by devious tracks about the shoulder of the mountain.

They came from far away, from Amador or Placer, laden with silver in

"old cigar-boxes." They discharged their load at Silverado, in the hour

of sleep; and before the morning they were gone again with their

mysterious drivers to their unknown source. In this way, twenty thousand

pounds' worth of silver was smuggled in under cover of night, in these

old cigar-boxes; mixed with Silverado mineral; carted down to the mill;

crushed, amalgamated, and refined, and despatched to the city as the

proper product of the mine. Stock-jobbing, if it can cover such

expenses, must be a profitable business in San Francisco.

I give these two versions as I got them. But I place little reliance on

either, my belief in history having been greatly shaken. For it chanced

that I had come to dwell in Silverado at a critical hour; great events

in its history were about to happen--did happen, as I am led to believe;

nay, and it will be seen that I played a part in that revolution myself.

And yet from first to last I never had a glimmer of an idea what was

going on; and even now, after full reflection, profess myself at sea.

That there was some obscure intrigue of the cigar-box order, and that I,

in the character of a wooden puppet, set pen to paper in the interest of

somebody, so much, and no more, is certain.

Silverado, then under my immediate sway, belonged to one whom I will

call a Mr. Ronalds. I only knew him through the extraordinarily

distorting medium of local gossip, now as a momentous jobber; now as a

dupe to point an adage; and again, and much more probably, as an

ordinary Christian gentleman like you or me, who had opened a mine and

worked it for awhile with better and worse fortune. So, through a

defective window-pane, you may see the passer-by shoot up into a

hunch-backed giant, or dwindle into a pot-bellied dwarf.

To Ronalds, at least, the mine belonged; but the notice by which he

held it would run out upon the 30th of June--or rather, as I suppose, it

had run out already, and the month of grace would expire upon that day,

after which any American citizen might post a notice of his own, and

make Silverado his. This, with a sort of quiet slyness, Rufe told me at

an early period of our acquaintance. There was no silver, of course; the

mine "wasn't worth nothing, Mr. Stevens," but there was a deal of old

iron and wood around, and to gain possession of this old wood and iron,

and get a right to the water, Rufe proposed, if I had no objections, to

"jump the claim."

Of course, I had no objection. But I was filled with wonder. If all he

wanted was the wood and iron, what, in the name of fortune, was to

prevent him taking them? "His right there was none to dispute." He might

lay hands on all to-morrow, as the wild cats had laid hands upon our

knives and hatchet. Besides, was this mass of heavy mining plant worth

transportation? If it was, why had not the rightful owners carted it

away? If it was, would they not preserve their title to these movables,

even after they had lost their title to the mine? And if it were not,

what the better was Rufe? Nothing would grow at Silverado; there was

even no wood to cut; beyond a sense of property, there was nothing to be

gained. Lastly, was it at all credible that Ronalds would forget what

Rufe remembered? The days of grace were not yet over; any fine morning

he might appear, paper in hand, and enter for another year on his

inheritance. However, it was none of my business; all seemed legal; Rufe

or Ronalds, all was one to me.

On the morning of the 27th, Mrs. Hanson appeared with the milk as usual,

in her sun-bonnet. The time would be out on Tuesday, she reminded us,

and bade me be in readiness to play my part, though I had no idea what

it was to be. And suppose Ronalds came? we asked. She received the idea

with derision, laughing aloud with all her fine teeth. He could not find

the mine to save his life, it appeared, without Rufe to guide him. Last

year, when he came, they heard him "up and down the road a-hollerin' and

a-raisin' Cain." And at last he had to come to the Hansons in despair,

and bid Rufe, "Jump into your pants and shoes, and show me where this

old mine is, anyway!" Seeing that Ronalds had laid out so much money in

the spot, and that a beaten road led right up to the bottom of the dump,

I thought this a remarkable example. The sense of locality must be

singularly in abeyance in the case of Ronalds.

That same evening, supper comfortably over, our guest busy at work on a

drawing of the dump and the opposite hills, we were all out on the

platform together, sitting there, under the tented heavens, with the

same sense of privacy as if we had been cabined in a parlour, when the

sound of brisk footsteps came mounting up the path. We pricked our ears

at this, for the tread seemed lighter and firmer than was usual with our

country neighbours. And presently, sure enough, two town gentlemen, with

cigars and kid gloves, came debouching past the house. They looked in

that place like a blasphemy.

"Good-evening," they said. For none of us had stirred; we all sat stiff

with wonder.

"Good-evening," I returned; and then, to put them at their ease, "A

stiff climb," I added.

"Yes," replied the leader; "but we have to thank you for this path."

I did not like the man's tone. None of us liked it. He did not seem

embarrassed by the meeting, but threw us his remarks like favours, and

strode magisterially by us towards the shaft and tunnel.

Presently we heard his voice raised to his companion. "We drifted every

sort of way, but couldn't strike the ledge." Then again: "It pinched out

here." And once more: "Every miner that ever worked upon it says there's

bound to be a ledge somewhere."

These were the snatches of his talk that reached us, and they had a

damning significance. We, the lords of Silverado, had come face to face

with our superior. It is the worst of all quaint and of all cheap ways

of life that they bring us at last to the pinch of some humiliation. I

liked well enough to be a squatter when there was none but Hanson by;

before Ronalds, I will own, I somewhat quailed. I hastened to do him

fealty, said I gathered he was the Squattee, and apologised. He

threatened me with ejection, in a manner grimly pleasant--more pleasant

to him, I fancy, than to me; and then he passed off into praises of the

former state of Silverado. "It was the busiest little mining town you

ever saw": a population of between a thousand and fifteen hundred souls,

the engine in full blast, the mill newly erected; nothing going but

champagne, and hope the order of the day. Ninety thousand dollars came

out; a hundred and forty thousand were put in, making a net loss of

fifty thousand. The last days, I gathered, the days of John Stanley,

were not so bright; the champagne had ceased to flow, the population was

already moving elsewhere, and Silverado had begun to wither in the

branch before it was cut to the root. The last shot that was fired

knocked over the stove chimney, and made that hole in the roof of our

barrack, through which the sun was wont to visit slug-a-beds towards

afternoon. A noisy last shot, to inaugurate the days of silence.

Throughout this interview, my conscience was a good deal exercised; and

I was moved to throw myself on my knees and own the intended treachery.

But then I had Hanson to consider. I was in much the same position as

Old Rowley, that royal humourist, whom "the rogue had taken into his

confidence." And again, here was Ronalds on the spot. He must know the

day of the month as well as Hanson and I. If a broad hint were

necessary, he had the broadest in the world. For a large board had been

nailed by the crown prince on the very front of our house, between the

door and window, painted in cinnabar--the pigment of the country--with

doggrel rhymes and contumelious pictures, and announcing in terms

unnecessarily figurative, that the trick was already played, the claim

already jumped, and the author of the placard the legitimate successor

of Mr. Ronalds. But no, nothing could save that man; _quem deus vult

perdere, prius dementat_. As he came so he went, and left his rights

depending.

Late at night, by Silverado reckoning, and after we were all abed, Mrs.

Hanson returned to give us the newest of her news. It was like a scene

in a ship's steerage: all of us abed in our different tiers, the single

candle struggling with the darkness, and this plump handsome woman,

seated on an upturned valise beside the bunks, talking and showing her

fine teeth, and laughing till the rafters rang. Any ship, to be sure,

with a hundredth part as many holes in it as our barrack, must long ago

have gone to her last port. Up to that time I had always imagined Mrs.

Hanson's loquacity to be mere incontinence, that she said what was

uppermost for the pleasure of speaking, and laughed and laughed again as

a kind of musical accompaniment. But I now found there was an art in it.

I found it less communicative than silence itself. I wished to know why

Ronalds had come; how he had found his way without Rufe; and why, being

on the spot, he had not refreshed his title. She talked interminably on,

but her replies were never answers. She fled under a cloud of words; and

when I had made sure that she was purposely eluding me, I dropped the

subject in my turn, and let her rattle where she would.

She had come to tell us that, instead of waiting for Tuesday, the claim

was to be jumped on the morrow. How? If the time were not out, it was

impossible. Why? If Ronalds had come and gone and done nothing, there

was the less cause for hurry. But again I could reach no satisfaction.

The claim was to be jumped next morning, that was all that she would

condescend upon.

And yet it was not jumped the next morning, nor yet the next, and a

whole week had come and gone before we heard more of this exploit. That

day week, however, a day of great heat, Hanson, with a little roll of

paper in his hand, and the eternal pipe alight; Breedlove, his large,

dull friend, to act, I suppose, as witness; Mrs. Hanson in her Sunday

best; and all the children from the eldest to the youngest;--arrived in

a procession, tailing one behind another up the path. Caliban was

absent, but he had been chary of his friendly visits since the row; and

with that exception, the whole family was gathered together as for a

marriage or a christening. Strong was sitting at work, in the shade of

the dwarf madronas near the forge; and they planted themselves about him

in a circle, one on a stone, another on the waggon rails, a third on a

piece of plank. Gradually the children stole away up the canyon to where

there was another chute, somewhat smaller than the one across the dump;

and down this chute, for the rest of the afternoon, they poured one

avalanche of stones after another, waking the echoes of the glen.

Meanwhile we elders sat together on the platform, Hanson and his friend

smoking in silence like Indian sachems, Mrs. Hanson rattling on as usual

with an adroit volubility, saying nothing, but keeping the party at

their ease like a courtly hostess.

Not a word occurred about the business of the day. Once, twice, and

thrice I tried to slide the subject in, but was discouraged by the stoic

apathy of Rufe, and beaten down before the pouring verbiage of his wife.

There is nothing of the Indian brave about me, and I began to grill with

impatience. At last, like a highway robber, I cornered Hanson, and bade

him stand and deliver his business. Thereupon he gravely rose, as though

to hint that this was not a proper place, nor the subject one suitable

for squaws, and I, following his example, led him up the plank into our

barrack. There he bestowed himself on a box, and unrolled his papers

with fastidious deliberation. There were two sheets of note-paper, and

an old mining notice, dated May 30th, 1879, part print, part manuscript,

and the latter much obliterated by the rains. It was by this identical

piece of paper that the mine had been held last year. For thirteen

months it had endured the weather and the change of seasons on a cairn

behind the shoulder of the canyon; and it was now my business, spreading

it before me on the table, and sitting on a valise, to copy its terms

with some necessary changes, twice over on the two sheets of note-paper.

One was then to be placed on the same cairn--a "mound of rocks" the

notice put it; and the other to be lodged for registration.

Rufe watched me, silently smoking, till I came to the place for the

locator's name at the end of the first copy; and when I proposed that he

should sign, I thought I saw a scare in his eye. "I don't think that'll

be necessary," he said slowly; "just you write it down." Perhaps this

mighty hunter, who was the most active member of the local school board,

could not write. There would be nothing strange in that. The constable

of Calistoga is, and has been for years, a bed-ridden man, and, if I

remember rightly, blind. He had more need of the emoluments than

another, it was explained; and it was easy for him to "depytise," with a

strong accent on the last. So friendly and so free are popular

institutions.

When I had done my scrivening, Hanson strolled out, and addressed

Breedlove, "Will you step up here a bit?" and after they had disappeared

a little while into the chaparral and madrona thicket, they came back

again, minus a notice, and the deed was done. The claim was jumped; a

tract of mountain side, fifteen hundred feet long by six hundred wide,

with all the earth's precious bowels, had passed from Ronalds to Hanson,

and, in the passage, changed its name from the "Mammoth" to the

"Calistoga." I had tried to get Rufe to call it after his wife, after

himself, and after Garfield, the Republican Presidential candidate of

the hour--since then elected, and, alas! dead--but all was in vain. The

claim had once been called the Calistoga before, and he seemed to feel

safety in returning to that.

And so the history of that mine became once more plunged in darkness,

lit only by some monster pyrotechnical displays of gossip. And perhaps

the most curious feature of the whole matter is this: that we should

have dwelt in this quiet corner of the mountains, with not a dozen

neighbours, and yet struggled all the while, like desperate swimmers, in

this sea of falsities and contradictions. Wherever a man is, there will

be a lie.

TOILS AND PLEASURES

I must try to convey some notion of our life, of how the days passed and

what pleasure we took in them, of what there was to do and how we set

about doing it, in our mountain hermitage. The house, after we had

repaired the worst of the damages, and filled in some of the doors and

windows with white cotton cloth, became a healthy and a pleasant

dwelling-place, always airy and dry, and haunted by the outdoor perfumes

of the glen. Within, it had the look of habitation, the human look. You

had only to go into the third room, which we did not use, and see its

stones, its shifting earth, its tumbled litter; and then return to our

lodging, with the beds made, the plates on the rack, the pail of bright

water behind the door, the stove crackling in a corner, and perhaps the

table roughly laid against a meal,--and man's order, the little clean

spots that he creates to dwell in, were at once contrasted with the rich

passivity of nature. And yet our house was everywhere so wrecked and

shattered, the air came and went so freely, the sun found so many

portholes, the golden outdoor glow shone in so many open chinks, that we

enjoyed, at the same time, some of the comforts of a roof and much of

the gaiety and brightness of _al fresco_ life. A single shower of rain,

to be sure, and we should have been drowned out like mice. But ours was

a Californian summer, and an earthquake was a far likelier accident than

a shower of rain.

Trustful in this fine weather, we kept the house for kitchen and

bedroom, and used the platform as our summer parlour. The sense of

privacy, as I have said already, was complete. We could look over the

dump on miles of forest and rough hilltop; our eyes commanded some of

Napa Valley, where the train ran, and the little country townships sat

so close together along the line of the rail. But here there was no man

to intrude. None but the Hansons were our visitors. Even they came but

at long intervals, or twice daily, at a stated hour, with milk. So our

days, as they were never interrupted, drew out to the greater length;

hour melted insensibly into hour; the household duties, though they were

many, and some of them laborious, dwindled into mere islets of business

in a sea of sunny daytime; and it appears to me, looking back, as though

the far greater part of our life at Silverado had been passed, propped

upon an elbow, or seated on a plank, listening to the silence that there

is among the hills.

My work, it is true, was over early in the morning. I rose before any

one else, lit the stove, put on the water to boil, and strolled forth

upon the platform to wait till it was ready. Silverado would then be

still in shadow, the sun shining on the mountain higher up. A clean

smell of trees, a smell of the earth at morning, hung in the air.

Regularly, every day, there was a single bird, not singing, but

awkwardly chirruping among the green madronas, and the sound was

cheerful, natural, and stirring. It did not hold the attention, nor

interrupt the thread of meditation, like a blackbird or a nightingale;

it was mere woodland prattle, of which the mind was conscious like a

perfume. The freshness of these morning seasons remained with me far on

into the day.

As soon as the kettle boiled, I made porridge and coffee; and that,

beyond the literal drawing of water, and the preparation of kindling,

which it would be hyperbolical to call the hewing of wood, ended my

domestic duties for the day. Thenceforth my wife laboured single-handed

in the palace, and I lay or wandered on the platform at my own sweet

will. The little corner near the forge, where we found a refuge under

the madronas from the unsparing early sun, is indeed connected in my

mind with some nightmare encounters over Euclid, and the Latin Grammar.

These were known as Crown Prince's lessons. He was supposed to be the

victim and the sufferer; but here there must have been some

misconception, for whereas I generally retired to bed after one of these

engagements, he was no sooner set free than he dashed up to the

Chinaman's house, where he had installed a printing-press, that great

element of civilisation, and the sound of his labours would be faintly

audible about the canyon half the day.

To walk at all was a laborious business; the foot sank and slid, the

boots were cut to pieces, among sharp, uneven, rolling stones. When we

crossed the platform in any direction, it was usual to lay a course,

following as much as possible the line of waggon rails. Thus, if water

were to be drawn, the water-carrier left the house along some tilting

planks that we had laid down, and not laid down very well. These carried

him to that great highroad, the railway; and the railway served him as

far as to the head of the shaft. But from thence to the spring and back

again he made the best of his unaided way, staggering among the stones,

and wading in low growth of the calcanthus, where the rattlesnakes lay

hissing at his passage. Yet I liked to draw water. It was pleasant to

dip the grey metal pail into the clean, colourless, cool water; pleasant

to carry it back, with the water lipping at the edge, and a broken

sunbeam quivering in the midst.

But the extreme roughness of the walking confined us in common practice

to the platform, and indeed to those parts of it that were most easily

accessible along the line of rails. The rails came straight forward from

the shaft, here and there overgrown with little green bushes, but still

entire, and still carrying a truck, which it was Lloyd's delight to

trundle to and fro by the hour with various ladings. About midway down

the platform, the railroad trended to the right, leaving our house and

coasting along the far side within a few yards of the madronas and the

forge, and not far off the latter, ended in a sort of platform on the

edge of the dump. There, in old days, the trucks were tipped, and their

load sent thundering down the chute. There, besides, was the only spot

where we could approach the margin of the dump. Anywhere else, you took

your life in your right hand when you came within a yard and a half to

peer over. For at any moment the dump might begin to slide and carry you

down and bury you below its ruins. Indeed, the neighbourhood of an old

mine is a place beset with dangers. For as still as Silverado was, at

any moment the report of rotten wood might tell us that the platform had

fallen into the shaft; the dump might begin to pour into the road below;

or a wedge slip in the great upright seam, and hundreds of tons of

mountain bury the scene of our encampment.

I have already compared the dump to a rampart, built certainly by some

rude people, and for prehistoric wars. It was likewise a frontier. All

below was green and woodland, the tall pines soaring one above another,

each with a firm outline and full spread of bough. All above was arid,

rocky, and bald. The great spout of broken mineral, that had dammed the

canyon up, was a creature of man's handiwork, its material dug out with a

pick and powder, and spread by the service of the trucks. But nature

herself, in that upper district, seemed to have had an eye to nothing

besides mining; and even the natural hillside was all sliding gravel and

precarious boulder. Close at the margin of the well leaves would decay

to skeletons and mummies, which at length some stronger gust would carry

clear of the canyon and scatter in the subjacent woods. Even moisture and

decaying vegetable matter could not, with all nature's alchemy, concoct

enough soil to nourish a few poor grasses. It is the same, they say, in

the neighbourhood of all silver mines; the nature of that precious rock

being stubborn with quartz and poisonous with cinnabar. Both were plenty

in our Silverado. The stones sparkled white in the sunshine with

quartz; they were all stained red with cinnabar. Here, doubtless, came

the Indians of yore to paint their faces for the war-path; and cinnabar,

if I remember rightly, was one of the few articles of Indian commerce.

Now, the Crown Prince had it in his undisturbed possession, to pound

down and slake, and paint his rude designs with. But to me it had always

a fine flavour of poetry, compounded out of Indian story and

Hawthornden's allusion:

"Desire, alas! I desire a Zeuxis new,

From Indies borrowing gold, from Eastern skies

Most bright cinoper . . ."

Yet this is but half the picture; our Silverado platform has another

side to it. Though there was no soil, and scarce a blade of grass, yet

out of these tumbled gravel-heaps and broken boulders, a flower garden

bloomed as at home in a conservatory. Calcanthus crept, like a hardy

weed, all over our rough parlour, choking the railway, and pushing forth

its rusty, aromatic cones from between two blocks of shattered mineral.

Azaleas made a big snow-bed just above the well. The shoulder of the

hill waved white with Mediterranean heath. In the crannies of the ledge

and about the spurs of the tall pine, a red flowering stone-plant hung

in clusters. Even the low, thorny chaparral was thick with pea-like

blossom. Close at the foot of our path nutmegs prospered, delightful to

the sight and smell. At sunrise, and again late at night, the scent of

the sweet bay-trees filled the canyon, and the down-blowing night wind

must have borne it hundreds of feet into the outer air.

All this vegetation, to be sure, was stunted. The madrona was here no

bigger than the manzanita; the bay was but a stripling shrub; the very

pines, with four or five exceptions in all our upper canyon, were not so

tall as myself, or but a little taller, and the most of them came lower

than my waist. For a prosperous forest tree, we must look below, where

the glen was crowded with green spires. But for flowers and ravishing

perfume, we had none to envy: our heap of road-metal was thick with

bloom, like a hawthorn in the front of June; our red, baking angle in

the mountain, a laboratory of poignant scents. It was an endless wonder

to my mind, as I dreamed about the platform, following the progress of

the shadows, where the madrona with its leaves, the azalea and

calcanthus with their blossoms, could find moisture to support such

thick, wet, waxy growths, or the bay-tree collect the ingredients of its

perfume. But there they all grew together, healthy, happy, and

happy-making, as though rooted in a fathom of black soil.

Nor was it only vegetable life that prospered. We had, indeed, few

birds, and none that had much of a voice or anything worthy to be called

a song. My morning comrade had a thin chirp, unmusical and monotonous,

but friendly and pleasant to hear. He had but one rival: a fellow with

an ostentatious cry of near an octave descending, not one note of which

properly followed another. This is the only bird I ever knew with a

wrong ear; but there was something enthralling about his performance.

You listened and listened, thinking each time he must surely get it

right; but no, it was always wrong, and always wrong the same way. Yet

he seemed proud of his song, delivered it with execution and a manner of

his own, and was charming to his mate. A very incorrect, incessant human

whistler had thus a chance of knowing how his own music pleased the

world. Two great birds--eagles, we thought--dwelt at the top of the

canyon, among the crags that were printed on the sky. Now and again, but

very rarely, they wheeled high over our heads in silence, or with a

distant, dying scream; and then, with a fresh impulse, winged fleetly

forward, dipped over a hilltop, and were gone. They seemed solemn and

ancient things, sailing the blue air: perhaps coeval with the mountain

where they haunted, perhaps emigrants from Rome, where the glad legions

may have shouted to behold them on the morn of battle.

But if birds were rare, the place abounded with rattlesnakes--the

rattlesnakes' nest, it might have been named. Wherever we brushed among

the bushes, our passage woke their angry buzz. One dwelt habitually in

the wood-pile, and sometimes, when we came for firewood, thrust up his

small head between two logs, and hissed at the intrusion. The rattle has

a legendary credit; it is said to be awe-inspiring, and, once heard, to

stamp itself for ever in the memory. But the sound is not at all

alarming; the hum of many insects, and the buzz of the wasp convince the

ear of danger quite as readily. As a matter of fact, we lived for weeks

in Silverado, coming and going, with rattles sprung on every side, and

it never occurred to us to be afraid. I used to take sun-baths and do

calisthenics in a certain pleasant nook among azalea and calcanthus, the

rattles whizzing on every side like spinning-wheels, and the combined

hiss or buzz rising louder and angrier at any sudden movement; but I was

never in the least impressed, nor ever attacked. It was only towards the

end of our stay, that a man down at Calistoga, who was expatiating on

the terrifying nature of the sound, gave me at last a very good

imitation; and it burst on me at once that we dwelt in the very

metropolis of deadly snakes, and that the rattle was simply the

commonest noise in Silverado. Immediately on our return, we attacked the

Hansons on the subject. They had formerly assured us that our canyon was

favoured, like Ireland, with an entire immunity from poisonous reptiles;

but with the perfect inconsequence of the natural man, they were no

sooner found out than they went off at score in the contrary direction,

and we were told that in no part of the world did rattlesnakes attain to

such a monstrous bigness as among the warm, flower-dotted rocks of

Silverado. This is a contribution rather to the natural history of the

Hansons than to that of snakes.

One person, however, better served by his instinct, had known the

rattle from the first; and that was Chuchu, the dog. No rational

creature has ever led an existence more poisoned by terror than that

dog's at Silverado. Every whiz of the rattle made him bound. His eyes

rolled; he trembled; he would be often wet with sweat. One of our great

mysteries was his terror of the mountain. A little away above our nook,

the azaleas and almost all the vegetation ceased. Dwarf pines, not big

enough to be Christmas trees, grew thinly among loose stones and gravel

scaurs. Here and there a big boulder sat quiescent on a knoll, having

paused there till the next rain in his long slide down the mountain.

There was here no ambuscade for the snakes, you could see clearly where

you trod; and yet the higher I went, the more abject and appealing

became Chuchu's terror. He was an excellent master of that composite

language in which dogs communicate with men, and he would assure me, on

his honour, that there was some peril on the mountain; appeal to me, by

all that I held holy, to turn back; and at length, finding all was in

vain, and that I still persisted, ignorantly foolhardy, he would

suddenly whip round and make a bee-line down the slope for Silverado,

the gravel showering after him. What was he afraid of? There were

admittedly brown bears and Californian lions on the mountain; and a

grizzly visited Rufe's poultry yard not long before, to the unspeakable

alarm of Caliban, who dashed out to chastise the intruder, and found

himself, by moonlight, face to face with such a tartar. Something at

least there must have been; some hairy, dangerous brute lodged

permanently among the rocks a little to the north-west of Silverado,

spending his summer thereabout, with wife and family.

And there was, or there had been, another animal. Once, under the broad

daylight, on that open stony hillside, where the baby pines were

growing, scarcely tall enough to be a badge for a MacGregor's bonnet, I

came suddenly upon his innocent body, lying mummified by the dry air and

sun: a pigmy kangaroo. I am ingloriously ignorant of these subjects;

had never heard of such a beast; thought myself face to face with some

incomparable sport of nature; and began to cherish hopes of immortality

in science. Rarely have I been conscious of a stranger thrill than when

I raised that singular creature from the stones, dry as a board, his

innocent heart long quiet, and all warm with sunshine. His long hind

legs were stiff, his tiny forepaws clutched upon his breast, as if to

leap; his poor life cut short upon that mountain by some unknown

accident. But the Kangaroo rat, it proved, was no such unknown animal;

and my discovery was nothing.

Crickets were not wanting. I thought I could make out exactly four of

them, each with a corner of his own, who used to make night musical at

Silverado. In the matter of voice, they far excelled the birds, and

their ringing whistle sounded from rock to rock, calling and replying

the same thing, as in a meaningless opera. Thus, children in full health

and spirits shout together, to the dismay of neighbours; and their idle,

happy, deafening vociferations rise and fall, like the song of the

crickets. I used to sit at night on the platform, and wonder why these

creatures were so happy; and what was wrong with man that he also did

not wind up his days with an hour or two of shouting; but I suspect that

all long-lived animals are solemn. The dogs alone are hardly used by

nature; and it seems a manifest injustice for poor Chuchu to die in his

teens, after a life so shadowed and troubled, continually shaken with

alarm, and the tear of elegant sentiment permanently in his eye.

There was another neighbour of ours at Silverado, small but very active,

a destructive fellow. This was a black, ugly fly--a bore, the Hansons

called him--who lived by hundreds in the boarding of our house. He

entered by a round hole, more neatly pierced than a man could do it with

a gimlet, and he seems to have spent his life in cutting out the

interior of the plank, but whether as a dwelling or a store-house, I

could never find. When I used to lie in bed in the morning for a

rest--we had no easy-chairs in Silverado--I would hear, hour after hour,

the sharp cutting sound of his labours, and from time to time a dainty

shower of sawdust would fall upon the blankets. There lives no more

industrious creature than a bore.

And now that I have named to the reader all our animals and insects

without exception--only I find I have forgotten the flies--he will be

able to appreciate the singular privacy and silence of our days. It was

not only man who was excluded: animals, the song of birds, the lowing of

cattle, the bleating of sheep, clouds even, and the variations of the

weather, were here also wanting; and as, day after day, the sky was one

dome of blue, and the pines below us stood motionless in the still air,

so the hours themselves were marked out from each other only by the

series of our own affairs, and the sun's great period as he ranged

westward through the heavens. The two birds cackled awhile in the early

morning; all day the water tinkled in the shaft, the bores ground

sawdust in the planking of our crazy palace--infinitesimal sounds; and

it was only with the return of night that any change would fall on our

surroundings, or the four crickets begin to flute together in the dark.

Indeed, it would be hard to exaggerate the pleasure that we took in the

approach of evening. Our day was not very long, but it was very tiring.

To trip along unsteady planks or wade among shifting stones, to go to

and fro for water, to clamber down the glen to the Toll House after meat

and letters, to cook, to make fires and beds, were all exhausting to the

body. Life out of doors, besides, under the fierce eye of day, draws

largely on the animal spirits. There are certain hours in the afternoon

when a man, unless he is in strong health or enjoys a vacant mind, would

rather creep into a cool corner of a house and sit upon the chairs of

civilisation. About that time, the sharp stones, the planks, the

upturned boxes of Silverado, began to grow irksome to my body; I set out

on that hopeless, never-ending quest for a more comfortable posture; I

would be fevered and weary of the staring sun; and just then he would

begin courteously to withdraw his countenance, the shadows lengthened,

the aromatic airs awoke, and an indescribable but happy change announced

the coming of the night.

The hours of evening when we were once curtained in the friendly dark,

sped lightly. Even as with the crickets, night brought to us a certain

spirit of rejoicing. It was good to taste the air; good to mark the

dawning of the stars, as they increased their glittering company; good,

too, to gather stones, and send them crashing down the chute, a wave of

light. It seemed, in some way, the reward and the fulfilment of the day.

So it is when men dwell in the open air; it is one of the simple

pleasures that we lose by living cribbed and covered in a house, that,

though the coming of the day is still the most inspiriting, yet day's

departure, also, and the return of night refresh, renew, and quiet us;

and in the pastures of the dusk we stand, like cattle, exulting in the

absence of the load.

Our nights were never cold, and they were always still, but for one

remarkable exception. Regularly, about nine o'clock, a warm wind sprang

up, and blew for ten minutes, or maybe a quarter of an hour, right down

the canyon, fanning it well out, airing it as a mother airs the night

nursery before the children sleep. As far as I could judge, in the clear

darkness of the night, this wind was purely local: perhaps dependent on

the configuration of the glen. At least, it was very welcome to the hot

and weary squatters; and if we were not abed already, the springing up

of this lilliputian valley-wind would often be our signal to retire.

I was the last to go to bed, as I was still the first to rise. Many a

night I have strolled about the platform, taking a bath of darkness

before I slept. The rest would be in bed, and even from the forge I

could hear them talking together from bunk to bunk. A single candle in

the neck of a pint bottle was their only illumination; and yet the old

cracked house seemed literally bursting with the light. It shone keen as

a knife through all the vertical chinks; it struck upward through the

broken shingles; and through the eastern door and window, it fell in a

great splash upon the thicket and the overhanging rock. You would have

said a conflagration, or at the least a roaring forge; and behold, it

was but a candle. Or perhaps it was yet more strange to see the

procession moving bedwards round the corner of the house, and up the

plank that brought us to the bedroom door; under the immense spread of

the starry heavens, down in a crevice of the giant mountain, these few

human shapes, with their unshielded taper, made so disproportionate a

figure in the eye and mind. But the more he is alone with nature, the

greater man and his doings bulk in the consideration of his fellow-men.

Miles and miles away upon the opposite hilltops, if there were any

hunter belated or any traveller who had lost his way, he must have

stood, and watched and wondered, from the time the candle issued from

the door of the assayer's office till it had mounted the plank and

disappeared again into the miners' dormitory.

"VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE"

AND OTHER PAPERS

DEDICATION

MY DEAR WILLIAM ERNEST HENLEY,

We are all busy in this world building Towers of Babel; and the child of

our imaginations is always a changeling when it comes from nurse. This

is not only true in the greatest, as of wars and folios, but in the

least also, like the trifling volume in your hand. Thus I began to write

these papers with a definite end: I was to be the _Advocatus_, not I

hope _Diaboli_, but _Juventutis_; I was to state temperately the beliefs

of youth as opposed to the contentions of age; to go over all the field

where the two differ, and produce at last a little volume of special

pleadings which I might call, without misnomer, "Life at Twenty-five."

But times kept changing, and I shared in the change. I clung hard to

that entrancing age; but, with the best will, no man can be twenty-five

for ever. The old, ruddy convictions deserted me, and, along with them,

the style that fits their presentation and defence. I saw, and indeed my

friends informed me, that the game was up. A good part of the volume

would answer to the long-projected title; but the shadows of the

prison-house are on the rest.

It is good to have been young in youth and, as years go on, to grow

older. Many are already old before they are through their teens; but to

travel deliberately through one's ages is to get the heart out of a

liberal education. Times change, opinions vary to their opposite, and

still this world appears a brave gymnasium, full of sea-bathing, and

horse-exercise, and bracing, manly virtues; and what can be more

encouraging than to find the friend who was welcome at one age, still

welcome at another? Our affections and beliefs are wiser than we; the

best that is in us is better than we can understand; for it is grounded

beyond experience, and guides us, blindfold but safe, from one age on to

another.

These papers are like milestones on the wayside of my life; and as I

look back in memory, there is hardly a stage of that distance but I see

you present with advice, reproof, or praise. Meanwhile, many things have

changed, you and I among the rest: but I hope that our sympathy, founded

on the love of our art, and nourished by mutual assistance, shall

survive these little revolutions undiminished, and, with God's help,

unite us to the end.

R. L. S.

DAVOS PLATZ, 1881.

I

"VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE"

I

With the single exception of Falstaff, all Shakespeare's characters are

what we call marrying men. Mercutio, as he was own cousin to Benedick

and Biron, would have come to the same end in the long run. Even Iago

had a wife, and, what is far stranger, he was jealous. People like

Jacques and the Fool in _Lear_, although we can hardly imagine they

would ever marry, keep single out of a cynical humour or for a broken

heart, and not, as we do nowadays, from a spirit of incredulity and

preference for the single state. For that matter, if you turn to George

Sand's French version of _As You Like It_ (and I think I can promise you

will like it but little), you will find Jacques marries Celia just as

Orlando marries Rosalind.

At least there seems to have been much less hesitation over marriage in

Shakespeare's days; and what hesitation there was was of a laughing

sort, and not much more serious, one way or the other, than that of

Panurge. In modern comedies the heroes are mostly of Benedick's way of

thinking, but twice as much in earnest, and not one quarter so

confident. And I take this diffidence as a proof of how sincere their

terror is. They know they are only human after all; they know what gins

and pitfalls lie about their feet; and how the shadow of matrimony

waits, resolute and awful, at the cross-roads. They would wish to keep

their liberty; but if that may not be, why, God's will be done! "What,

are you afraid of marriage?" asks Cecile, in _Maitre Guerin_. "Oh, mon

Dieu, non!" replies Arthur; "I should take chloroform." They look

forward to marriage much in the same way as they prepare themselves for

death: each seems inevitable; each is a great Perhaps, and a leap into

the dark, for which, when a man is in the blue devils, he has specially

to harden his heart. That splendid scoundrel, Maxime de Trailles, took

the news of marriages much as an old man hears the deaths of his

contemporaries. "C'est desesperant," he cried, throwing himself down in

the arm-chair at Madame Schontz's; "c'est desesperant, nous nous marions

tous!" Every marriage was like another grey hair on his head; and the

jolly church-bells seemed to taunt him with his fifty years and fair

round belly.

The fact is, we are much more afraid of life than our ancestors, and

cannot find it in our hearts either to marry or not to marry. Marriage

is terrifying, but so is a cold and forlorn old age. The friendships of

men are vastly agreeable, but they are insecure. You know all the time

that one friend will marry and put you to the door; a second accept a

situation in China, and become no more to you than a name, a

reminiscence, and an occasional crossed letter, very laborious to read;

a third will take up with some religious crotchet and treat you to sour

looks thenceforward. So, in one way or another, life forces men apart

and breaks up the goodly fellowships for ever. The very flexibility and

ease which make men's friendships so agreeable while they endure, make

them the easier to destroy and forget. And a man who has a few friends,

or one who has a dozen (if there be any one so wealthy on this earth),

cannot forget on how precarious a base his happiness reposes; and how by

a stroke or two of fate--a death, a few light words, a piece of stamped

paper, a woman's bright eyes--he may be left, in a month, destitute of

all. Marriage is certainly a perilous remedy. Instead of on two or

three, you stake your happiness on one life only. But still, as the

bargain is more explicit and complete on your part, it is more so on the

other; and you have not to fear so many contingencies; it is not every

wind that can blow you from your anchorage; and so long as Death

withholds his sickle, you will always have a friend at home. People who

share a cell in the Bastile, or are thrown together on an uninhabited

isle, if they do not immediately fall to fisticuffs, will find some

possible ground of compromise. They will learn each other's ways and

humours, so as to know where they must go warily, and where they may

lean their whole weight. The discretion of the first years becomes the

settled habit of the last; and so, with wisdom and patience, two lives

may grow indissolubly into one.

But marriage, if comfortable, is not at all heroic. It certainly narrows

and damps the spirits of generous men. In marriage, a man becomes slack

and selfish, and under-goes a fatty degeneration of his moral being. It

is not only when Lydgate misallies himself with Rosamond Vincy, but when

Ladislaw marries above him with Dorothea, that this may be exemplified.

The air of the fireside withers out all the fine wildings of the

husband's heart. He is so comfortable and happy that he begins to prefer

comfort and happiness to everything else on earth, his wife included.

Yesterday he would have shared his last shilling; to-day "his first duty

is to his family," and is fulfilled in large measure by laying down

vintages and husbanding the health of an invaluable parent. Twenty years

ago this man was equally capable of crime or heroism; now he is fit for

neither. His soul is asleep, and you may speak without constraint; you

will not wake him. It is not for nothing that Don Quixote was a bachelor

and Marcus Aurelius married ill. For women there is less of this danger.

Marriage is of so much use to a woman, opens out to her so much more of

life, and puts her in the way of so much more freedom and usefulness,

that, whether she marry ill or well, she can hardly miss some benefit.

It is true, however, that some of the merriest and most genuine of women

are old maids; and that those old maids, and wives who are unhappily

married, have often most of the true motherly touch. And this would seem

to show, even for women, some narrowing influence in comfortable married

life. But the rule is none the less certain: if you wish the pick of men

and women, take a good bachelor and a good wife.

I am often filled with wonder that so many marriages are passably

successful, and so few come to open failure, the more so as I fail to

understand the principle on which people regulate their choice. I see

women marrying indiscriminately with staring burgesses and ferret-faced,

white-eyed boys, and men dwell in contentment with noisy scullions, or

taking into their lives acidulous vestals. It is a common answer to say

the good people marry because they fall in love; and of course you may

use and misuse a word as much as you please, if you have the world along

with you. But love is at least a somewhat hyperbolical expression for

such lukewarm preference. It is not here, anyway, that Love employs his

golden shafts; he cannot be said, with any fitness of language, to reign

here and revel. Indeed, if this be love at all, it is plain the poets

have been fooling with mankind since the foundation of the world. And

you have only to look these happy couples in the face, to see they have

never been in love, or in hate, or in any other high passion all their

days. When you see a dish of fruit at dessert, you sometimes set your

affections upon one particular peach or nectarine, watch it with some

anxiety as it comes round the table, and feel quite a sensible

disappointment when it is taken by some one else. I have used the phrase

"high passion." Well, I should say this was about as high a passion as

generally leads to marriage. One husband hears after marriage that some

poor fellow is dying of his wife's love. "What a pity!" he exclaims;

"you know I could so easily have got another!" And yet that is a very

happy union. Or again: A young man was telling me the sweet story of his

loves. "I like it well enough as long as her sisters are there," said

this amorous swain; "but I don't know what to do when we're alone." Once

more: A married lady was debating the subject with another lady. "You

know, dear," said the first, "after ten years of marriage, if he is

nothing else, your husband is always an old friend." "I have many old

friends," returned the other, "but I prefer them to be nothing more."

"Oh, perhaps I might _prefer_ that also!" There is a common note in

these three illustrations of the modern idyll; and it must be owned the

god goes among us with a limping gait and blear eyes. You wonder whether

it was so always; whether desire was always equally dull and spiritless,

and possession equally cold. I cannot help fancying most people make,

ere they marry, some such table of recommendations as Hannah Godwin

wrote to her brother William anent her friend, Miss Gay. It is so

charmingly comical, and so pat to the occasion, that I must quote a few

phrases. "The young lady is in every sense formed to make one of your

disposition really happy. She has a pleasing voice, with which she

accompanies her musical instrument with judgment. She has an easy

politeness in her manners, neither free nor reserved. She is a good

housekeeper and a good economist, and yet of a generous disposition. As

to her internal accomplishments, I have reason to speak still more

highly of them: good sense without vanity, a penetrating judgment

without a disposition to satire, with about as much religion as my

William likes, struck me with a wish that she was my William's wife."

That is about the tune: pleasing voice, moderate good looks,

unimpeachable internal accomplishments after the style of the copy-book,

with about as much religion as my William likes; and then, with all

speed, to church.

To deal plainly, if they only married when they fell in love, most

people would die unwed; and among the others, there would be not a few

tumultuous households. The Lion is the King of Beasts, but he is

scarcely suitable for a domestic pet. In the same way, I suspect love

is rather too violent a passion to make, in all cases, a good domestic

sentiment. Like other violent excitements, it throws up not only what is

best, but what is worst and smallest, in men's characters. Just as some

people are malicious in drink, or brawling and virulent under the

influence of religious feeling, some are moody, jealous, and exacting

when they are in love, who are honest, downright, good-hearted fellows

enough in the everyday affairs and humours of the world.

How then, seeing we are driven to the hypothesis that people choose in

comparatively cold blood, how is it they choose so well? One is almost

tempted to hint that it does not much matter whom you marry; that, in

fact, marriage is a subjective affection, and if you have made up your

mind to it, and once talked yourself fairly over, you could "pull it

through" with anybody. But even if we take matrimony at its lowest, even

if we regard it as no more than a sort of friendship recognised by the

police, there must be degrees in the freedom and sympathy realised, and

some principle to guide simple folk in their selection. Now what should

this principle be? Are there no more definite rules than are to be found

in the Prayer-book? Law and religion forbid the banns on the ground of

propinquity or consanguinity; society steps in to separate classes; and

in all this most critical matter, has common sense, has wisdom, never a

word to say? In the absence of more magisterial teaching, let us talk it

over between friends: even a few guesses may be of interest to youths

and maidens.

In all that concerns eating and drinking, company, climate, and ways of

life, community of taste is to be sought for. It would be trying, for

instance, to keep bed and board with an early riser or a vegetarian. In

matters of art and intellect, I believe it is of no consequence.

Certainly it is of none in the companionships of men, who will dine more

readily with one who has a good heart, a good cellar, and a humorous

tongue, than with another who shares all their favourite hobbies and is

melancholy withal. If your wife likes Tupper, that is no reason why you

should hang your head. She thinks with the majority, and has the courage

of her opinions. I have always suspected public taste to be a mongrel

product, out of affectation by dogmatism; and felt sure, if you could

only find an honest man of no special literary bent, he would tell you

he thought much of Shakespeare bombastic and most absurd, and all of him

written in very obscure English and wearisome to read. And not long ago

I was able to lay by my lantern in content, for I found the honest man.

He was a fellow of parts, quick, humorous, a clever painter, and with an

eye for certain poetical effects of sea and ships. I am not much of a

judge of that kind of thing, but a sketch of his comes before me

sometimes at night. How strong, supple, and living the ship seems upon

the billows! With what a dip and rake she shears the flying sea! I

cannot fancy the man who saw this effect, and took it on the wing with

so much force and spirit, was what you call commonplace in the last

recesses of the heart. And yet he thought, and was not ashamed to have

it known of him, that Ouida was better in every way than William

Shakespeare. If there were more people of his honesty, this would be

about the staple of lay criticism. It is not taste that is plentiful,

but courage that is rare. And what have we in place? How many, who think

no otherwise than the young painter, have we not heard disbursing

second-hand hyperboles? Have you never turned sick at heart, O best of

critics! when some of your own sweet adjectives were returned on you

before a gaping audience? Enthusiasm about art is become a function of

the average female being, which she performs with precision and a sort

of haunting sprightliness, like an ingenious and well-regulated machine.

Sometimes, alas! the calmest man is carried away in the torrent, bandies

adjectives with the best, and out-Herods Herod for some shameful

moments. When you remember that, you will be tempted to put things

strongly, and say you will marry no one who is not like George the

Second, and cannot state openly a distaste for poetry and painting.

The word "facts" is, in some ways, crucial. I have spoken with Jesuits

and Plymouth Brethren, mathematicians and poets, dogmatic republicans

and dear old gentlemen in bird's-eye neckcloths; and each understood the

word "facts" in an occult sense of his own. Try as I might, I could get

no nearer the principle of their division. What was essential to them

seemed to me trivial or untrue. We could come to no compromise as to

what was, or what was not, important in the life of man. Turn as we

pleased, we all stood back to back in a big ring, and saw another

quarter of the heavens, with different mountain-tops along the sky-line

and different constellations overhead. We had each of us some whimsy in

the brain, which we believed more than anything else, and which

discoloured all experience to its own shade. How would you have people

agree, when one is deaf and the other blind? Now this is where there

should be community between man and wife. They should be agreed on their

catchword in "_facts of religion_," or "_facts of science_," or

"_society, my dear_"; for without such an agreement all intercourse is a

painful strain upon the mind. "About as much religion as my William

likes," in short, that is what is necessary to make a happy couple of

any William and his spouse. For there are differences which no habit nor

affection can reconcile, and the Bohemian must not intermarry with the

Pharisee. Imagine Consuelo as Mrs. Samuel Budget, the wife of the

Successful Merchant! The best of men and the best of women may sometimes

live together all their lives, and for want of some consent on

fundamental questions, hold each other lost spirits to the end.

A certain sort of talent is almost indispensable for people who would

spend years together and not bore themselves to death. But the talent,

like the agreement, must be for and about life. To dwell happily

together they should be versed in the niceties of the heart, and born

with a faculty for willing compromise. The woman must be talented as a

woman, and it will not much matter although she is talented in nothing

else. She must know her _metier de femme_, and have a fine touch for the

affections. And it is more important that a person should be a good

gossip, and talk pleasantly and smartly of common friends and the

thousand and one nothings of the day and hour, than that she should

speak with the tongues of men and angels; for a while together by the

fire happens more frequently in marriage than the presence of a

distinguished foreigner to dinner. That people should laugh over the

same sort of jests, and have many a story of "grouse in the gun-room,"

many an old joke between them which time cannot wither nor custom stale,

is a better preparation for life, by your leave, than many other things

higher and better sounding in the world's ears. You could read Kant by

yourself, if you wanted; but you must share a joke with some one else.

You can forgive people who do not follow you through a philosophical

disquisition; but to find your wife laughing when you had tears in your

eyes or staring when you were in a fit of laughter, would go some way

towards a dissolution of the marriage.

I know a woman who, from some distaste or disability, could never so

much as understand the meaning of the word _politics_, and has given up

trying to distinguish Whigs from Tories; but take her on her own

politics, ask her about other men or women and the chicanery of everyday

existence--the rubs, the tricks, the vanities on which life turns--and

you will not find many more shrewd, trenchant, and humorous. Nay, to

make plainer what I have in mind, this same woman has a share of the

higher and more poetical understanding, frank interest in things for

their own sake, and enduring astonishment at the most common. She is

not to be deceived by custom, or made to think a mystery solved when it

is repeated. I have heard her say she could wonder herself crazy over

the human eyebrow. Now in a world where most of us walk very contentedly

in the little lit circle of their own reason, and have to be reminded of

what lies without by specious and clamant exceptions--earthquakes,

eruptions of Vesuvius, banjos floating in mid-air at a _seance_, and the

like--a mind so fresh and unsophisticated is no despicable gift. I will

own I think it a better sort of mind than goes necessarily with the

clearest views on public business. It will wash. It will find something

to say at an odd moment. It has in it the spring of pleasant and quaint

fancies. Whereas I can imagine myself yawning all night long until my

jaws ached and the tears came into my eyes, although my companion on the

other side of the hearth held the most enlightened opinions on the

franchise or the ballot.

The question of professions, in as far as they regard marriage, was only

interesting to women until of late days, but it touches all of us now.

Certainly, if I could help it, I would never marry a wife who wrote. The

practice of letters is miserably harassing to the mind; and after an

hour or two's work, all the more human portion of the author is extinct;

he will bully, backbite, and speak daggers. Music, I hear, is not much

better. But painting, on the contrary, is often highly sedative; because

so much of the labour, after your picture is once begun, is almost

entirely manual, and of that skilled sort of manual labour which offers

a continual series of successes, and so tickles a man, through his

vanity, into good humour. Alas! in letters there is nothing of this

sort. You may write as beautiful a hand as you will, you have always

something else to think of, and cannot pause to notice your loops and

flourishes; they are beside the mark, and the first law stationer could

put you to the blush. Rousseau, indeed, made some account of penmanship,

even made it a source of livelihood, when he copied out the "Heloise"

for _dilettante_ ladies; and therein showed that strange eccentric

prudence which guided him among so many thousand follies and insanities.

It would be well for all of the _genus irritabile_ thus to add something

of skilled labour to intangible brain-work. To find the right word is so

doubtful a success and lies so near to failure, that there is no

satisfaction in a year of it; but we all know when we have formed a

letter perfectly; and a stupid artist, right or wrong, is almost equally

certain he has found a right tone or a right colour, or made a dexterous

stroke with his brush. And, again, painters may work out of doors; and

the fresh air, the deliberate seasons, and the "tranquillising

influence" of the green earth, counterbalance the fever of thought, and

keep them cool, placable, and prosaic.

A ship captain is a good man to marry if it is a marriage of love, for

absences are a good influence in love and keep it bright and delicate;

but he is just the worst man if the feeling is more pedestrian, as habit

is too frequently torn open and the solder has never time to set. Men

who fish, botanise, work with the turning-lathe, or gather sea-weeds,

will make admirable husbands; and a little amateur painting in

water-colour shows the innocent and quiet mind. Those who have a few

intimates are to be avoided; while those who swim loose, who have their

hat in their hand all along the street, who can number an infinity of

acquaintances and are not chargeable with any one friend, promise an

easy disposition and no rival to the wife's influence. I will not say

they are the best of men, but they are the stuff out of which adroit and

capable women manufacture the best of husbands. It is to be noticed that

those who have loved once or twice already are so much the better

educated to a woman's hand; the bright boy of fiction is an odd and most

uncomfortable mixture of shyness and coarseness, and needs a deal of

civilising. Lastly (and this is, perhaps, the golden rule) no woman

should marry a teetotaller, or a man who does not smoke. It is not for

nothing that this "ignoble tabagie," as Michelet calls it, spreads over

all the world. Michelet rails against it because it renders you happy

apart from thought or work; to provident women this will seem no evil

influence in married life. Whatever keeps a man in the front garden,

whatever checks wandering fancy and all inordinate ambition, whatever

makes for lounging and contentment, makes just so surely for domestic

happiness.

These notes, if they amuse the reader at all, will probably amuse him

more when he differs than when he agrees with them; at least they will

do no harm, for nobody will follow my advice. But the last word is of

more concern. Marriage is a step so grave and decisive that it attracts

light-headed, variable men by its very awfulness. They have been so

tried among the inconstant squalls and currents, so often sailed for

islands in the air or lain becalmed with burning heart, that they will

risk all for solid ground below their feet. Desperate pilots, they run

their sea-sick, weary barque upon the dashing rocks. It seems as if

marriage were the royal road through life, and realised, on the instant,

what we have all dreamed on summer Sundays when the bells ring, or at

night when we cannot sleep for the desire of living. They think it will

sober and change them. Like those who join a brotherhood, they fancy it

needs but an act to be out of the coil and clamour for ever. But this is

a wile of the devil's. To the end, spring winds will sow disquietude,

passing faces leave a regret behind them, and the whole world keep

calling and calling in their ears. For marriage is like life in

this--that it is a field of battle, and not a bed of roses.

II

Hope, they say, deserts us at no period of our existence. From first to

last, and in the face of smarting disillusions we continue to expect

good fortune, better health, and better conduct; and that so

confidently, that we judge it needless to deserve them. I think it

improbable that I shall ever write like Shakespeare, conduct an army

like Hannibal, or distinguish myself like Marcus Aurelius in the paths

of virtue; and yet I have my by-days, hope prompting, when I am very

ready to believe that I shall combine all these various excellences in

my own person, and go marching down to posterity with divine honours.

There is nothing so monstrous but we can believe it of ourselves. About

ourselves, about our aspirations and delinquencies, we have dwelt by

choice in a delicious vagueness from our boyhood up. No one will have

forgotten Tom Sawyer's aspiration: "Ah, if he could only die

_temporarily_!" Or, perhaps, better still, the inward resolution of the

two pirates, that "so long as they remained in that business, their

piracies should not again be sullied with the crime of stealing." Here

we recognise the thoughts of our boyhood; and our boyhood ceased,--well,

when?--not, I think, at twenty; nor, perhaps, altogether at twenty-five;

nor yet at thirty; and possibly, to be quite frank, we are still in the

thick of that arcadian period. For as the race of man, after centuries

of civilisation, still keeps some traits of their barbarian fathers, so

man the individual is not altogether quit of youth, when he is already

old and honoured, and Lord Chancellor of England. We advance in years

somewhat in the manner of an invading army in a barren land; the age

that we have reached, as the phrase goes, we but hold with an outpost,

and still keep open our communications with the extreme rear and first

beginnings of the march. There is our true base; that is not only the

beginning, but the perennial spring of our faculties; and grandfather

William can retire upon occasion into the green enchanted forest of his

boyhood.

The unfading boyishness of hope and its vigorous irrationality are

nowhere better displayed than in questions of conduct. There is a

character in the "Pilgrim's Progress," one Mr. "Linger-after-Lust," with

whom I fancy we are all on speaking terms; one famous among the famous

for ingenuity of hope up to and beyond the moment of defeat; one who,

after eighty years of contrary experience, will believe it possible to

continue in the business of piracy and yet avoid the guilt of theft.

Every sin is our last; every 1st of January a remarkable turning-point

in our career. Any overt act, above all, is felt to be alchemic in its

power to change. A drunkard takes the pledge; it will be strange if that

does not help him. For how many years did Mr. Pepys continue to make and

break his little vows? And yet I have not heard that he was discouraged

in the end. By such steps we think to fix a momentary resolution; as a

timid fellow hies him to the dentist's while the tooth is stinging.

But, alas, by planting a stake at the top of flood, you can neither

prevent nor delay the inevitable ebb. There is no hocus-pocus in

morality; and even the "sanctimonious ceremony" of marriage leaves the

man unchanged. This is a hard saying, and has an air of paradox. For

there is something in marriage so natural and inviting, that the step

has an air of great simplicity and ease; it offers to bury for ever many

aching preoccupations; it is to afford us unfailing and familiar company

through life; it opens up a smiling prospect of the blest and passive

kind of love, rather than the blessing and active; it is approached not

only through the delights of courtship, but by a public performance and

repeated legal signatures. A man naturally thinks it will go hard with

him if he cannot be good and fortunate and happy within such august

circumvallations.

And yet there is probably no other act in a man's life so hot-headed and

foolhardy as this one of marriage. For years, let us suppose, you have

been making the most indifferent business of your career. Your

experience has not, we may dare to say, been more encouraging than

Paul's or Horace's; like them, you have seen and desired the good that

you were not able to accomplish; like them, you have done the evil that

you loathed. You have walked at night in a hot or a cold sweat,

according to your habit of body, remembering, with dismal surprise, your

own unpardonable acts and sayings. You have been sometimes tempted to

withdraw entirely from this game of life; as a man who makes nothing but

misses withdraws from that less dangerous one of billiards. You have

fallen back upon the thought that you yourself most sharply smarted for

your misdemeanours, or, in the old, plaintive phrase, that you were

nobody's enemy but your own. And then you have been made aware of what

was beautiful and amiable, wise and kind, in the other part of your

behaviour; and it seemed as if nothing could reconcile the

contradiction, as indeed nothing can. If you are a man, you have shut

your mouth hard and said nothing; and if you are only a man in the

making, you have recognised that yours was quite a special case, and you

yourself not guilty of your own pestiferous career.

Granted, and with all my heart. Let us accept these apologies; let us

agree that you are nobody's enemy but your own; let us agree that you

are a sort of moral cripple, impotent for good; and let us regard you

with the unmingled pity due to such a fate. But there is one thing to

which, on these terms, we can never agree:--we can never agree to have

you marry. What! you have had one life to manage, and have failed so

strangely, and now can see nothing wiser than to conjoin with it the

management of some one else's? Because you have been unfaithful in a

very little, you propose yourself to be a ruler over ten cities. You

strip yourself by such a step of all remaining consolations and excuses.

You are no longer content to be your own enemy; you must be your wife's

also. You have been hitherto in a mere subaltern attitude; dealing cruel

blows about you in life, yet only half responsible, since you came there

by no choice or movement of your own. Now, it appears, you must take

things on your own authority: God made you, but you marry yourself; and

for all that your wife suffers, no one is responsible but you. A man

must be very certain of his knowledge ere he undertake to guide a

ticket-of-leave man through a dangerous pass; you have eternally missed

your way in life, with consequences that you still deplore, and yet you

masterfully seize your wife's hand, and, blindfold, drag her after you

to ruin. And it is your wife, you observe, whom you select. Her, whose

happiness you most desire, you choose to be your victim. You would

earnestly warn her from a tottering bridge or bad investment. If she

were to marry some one else, how you would tremble for her fate! If she

were only your sister, and you thought half as much of her, how

doubtfully would you entrust her future to a man no better than

yourself!