CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 924 075 754 386 &^ Cornell University WB Library The original of tiiis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924075754386 THE SILVEKADO SQUATTERS. Frontispiece— Vol. Three. EDINBURGH PICTURESQUE NOTES THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS WILL O' THE MILL BY ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON Volume Three NEW YORK PETER FENELON COLLIER, PUBLISHER CONTENTS VOLUME TBBEE EDINBURGH: PICTURESQUE NOTES PAas I. Introductory 7 n. Old Town— The Lands 17 m. The Parliament Close 28 IV. Legends 37 V. Greyfriars 46 VI. New Town — Town and Country. 57 VIL The Villa Quarters 67 Vm. TheCalton Hill 70 IX. Winter and New Year 81 X. To the Pentland Hills. .- 90 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS In the Valley: L Calistoga 110 IL The Petrified Forest 115 m. Napa Wine 120 IV. The Scot Abroad 126 With the Children of Israel: I. To Introduce Mr. Kehnar 131 n. First Impressions of Silverado 135 m. The Return 146 The Act of Squatting 152 The Hunter's Family 168 The Sea Fogs 174 The Toll House 181 A Starry Drive 187 Episodes in the Story of a Mine 192 Toils and Pleasures 204 WILL O'THB MILL 219 3 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. EDINBURGH: PICTURESQUE NOTES PAGE. The Old City from Salisbury Crags , 8 Gate of Holyrood 10 The Castle 13 Cowfeeder Row and Head of West Port 18 Advocates' Close 31 Old Bow-Head, liawnmarket, Edinburgh 23 High Street 25 The Spire of St. Giles's 39 John Knox's House in the High Street 31 The Canongate 89 Planestones Close, Canongate 41 Greyfriars 47 Tombs in Greyfriars 49 Tombs in Greyfriars 51 The Grassmarket 53 The Royal Institution 59 Princes Street 61 In the Village of Dean 63 Princes Street Gardens 65 The Calton Hill 71 View from the Calton Hill 72 Salisbury Crags from the Burns Monument 73 Queen Mary's Bath 75 Arthur's Seat 77 Back of Greenside 79 Duddingstone 88 Craigmillar Castle 89 Distant View of Edinburgh 99 Vol. m., p. 4. EDINBURGH PICTURESQUE NOTES EDINBURGH CHAPTER ONE INTEODUCTORT The ancient and famous metropolis of the North sits overlooking a windy estuary from the slope and sum- mit of three hills. No situation could be more com- manding for the head city of a kingdom; none better chosen for noble prospects. From her tall precipice and terraced gardens she looks far and wide on the sea and broad champaigns. To the east you may catch at sunset the spark of the May hghthouse, where the Firth expands into the German Ocean; and away to the west, over all the carse of Stirling, you can see the first snows upon Ben Ledi. But Edinburgh pays cruelly for her high seat in one of the vilest climates under heaven. She is liable to be beaten upon by all the winds that blow, to be drenched with rain, to be buried in cold sea fogs out of the east, and powdered with the snow as it comes fly- ing southward from the Highland hills. The weather is raw and boisterous in winter, shifty and ungenial in summer, and a downright meteorological purgatory in (7) 8 U/orl^s of r^obcrt Couis Steueijso^ the spring. The delicate die early, and I, as a sur- vivor, among bleak winds and plumping rain, have been sometimes tempted to envy them their fate. For aU who love shelter and the blessings of the sun, who hate dark weather and perpetual tilting against squalls, there could scarcely be found a more unhomely and harassing place of residence. Many such aspire angrily after that Somewhere-else of the imagination, where all ;:Z1^ «a;'^t*3?i^■- ■* THE OLD CITY FROM BAUSBURY CHAOS troubles are supposed to end. They lean over the great bridge which joins the New Town with the Old— that windiest spot, or high altar, in this northern temple of the vdnds — and watch the trains smoking out from un- der them and vanishing into the tunnel on a voyage to brighter skies. Happy the passengers who shake ofiE the dust of Edinburgh, and have heard for the last time the cry of the east wind among her chimney- tops ! And yet the place establishes an interest in people's hearts; go where they will, they find no city of the EdiQbur^^ : picturesque ffotes 9 same distinction; go where they will, they take a pride in their old home. Venice, it has been said, dififers from all other cities in the sentiment which she inspires. The rest may have admirers; she only, a famous fair one, counts lovers in her train. And indeed, even by her kindest friends, Edinburgh is not considered in a similar sense. These like her for many reasons, not any one of which is satisfactory in itself. They Hke her whimsically, if you will, and somewhat as a virtuoso dotes upon his cabinet. Her attraction is romantic in the narrowest meaning of the term. Beautiful as she is, she is not so much beautiful as interesting. She is pre-eminently Gothic, and all the more so since she has set herself off with some Greek airs, and erected classic temples on her crags. In a word, and above all, she is a curiosity. The Palace of Holyrood has been left aside in the growth of Edinburgh, and stands gray and silent in a workman's quarter and among breweries and gas works. It is a house of many memories. Great people of yore, kings and queens, buffoons and grave embassadors, played their stately farce for centuries in Holyrood. Wars have been plotted, dancing has lasted deep into the night, murder has been done in its chambers. There Prince Charlie held his phantom levees, and in a very gallant manner represented a fallen dynasty for some hours. Now, all these things of clay are mingled with the dust, the king's crown itseK is shown for sixpence to the vulgar; but the stone palace has outlived these changes. For fifty weeks together, it is no more than a show for tourists and a museum of old furniture; but on the fifty-first, behold the palace reawakened 10 U/orI^5 of I^obert Couis Steuei?soi> and mimicking its past. The Lord Commissioner, a kind of stage sovereign, sits among stage courtiers; a coach and six and clattering escort come and go before the gate; at night, the windows are lighted up, and its near neighbors, the workmen, may dance in their own houses to the palace music. And in this the pal- ace is typical. There is a spark among the embers; GATE OF HOLYROOD from time to time the old volcano smokes. Edinburgh has but partly abdicated, and still wears, in parody, her metropolitan trappings. Half a capital and half a country town, the whole city leads a double existence; it has long trances of the one and flashes of the other; like the king of the Black Isles, it is half alive and half a monumental marble. There are armed men and cannon in the citadel overhead; you may see the troops Edi)7bur(}l? : picturesque f/otej 11 marshaled on the high parade; and at night after the early winter evenfall, and in the morning before the laggard winter dawn, the wind carries abroad over Edinburgh the sound of drums and bugles. Grave judges sit bewigged in what was once the scene of imperial deliberations. Close by in the High Street per- haps the trumpets may sound about the stroke of noon; and you see a troop of citizens in tawdry masquerade; tabard above, heather-mixture trowser below, and the men themselves trudging in the mud among unsympa- thetic bystanders. The grooms of a well-appointed cir- cus tread the streets with a better presence. And yet these are the Heralds and Pursuivants of Scotland, who are about to proclaim a new law of the United King- dom before two score boys, and thieves, and hackney- coachmen. Meanwhile every hour the bell of the University rings out over the hum of the streets, and every hour a double tide of students, coming and going, fills the deep archways. And lastly, one night in the spring- time — or say one morning rather, at the peep of day — late folk may hear the voices of many men singing a psalm in unison from a church on one side of the old High Street ; and a little after, or perhaps a 'httle be- fore, the sound of many men singing a psalm in uni- son from another church on the opposite side of the way. There will be something in the words about the dew of Hermon, and how goodly it is to see brethren dwelling together in unity. And the late folk will teU themselves that all this singing denotes the conclusion of two yearly ecclesiastical parliaments — the parliaments of Churches which are brothers in many admirable 12 U/orKs of P(obert Couij Steuei)50i> virtues, but not specially like brothers in this particular of a tolerant and peaceful life. Again, meditative people will find a charm in a cer- tain consonancy between the aspect of the city and its odd and stirring history. Few places, if any, offer a more barbaric display of contrasts to the eye. In the very midst stands one of the most satisfactory crags in nature — a Bass Rock upon dry land, rooted in a gar- den, shaken by passing trains, carrying a crown of bat- tlements and turrets, and describing its war-like shadow over the liveliest and brightest thoroughfare of the new town. From their smoky beehives, ten stories high, the unwashed look down upon the open squares and gar- dens of the wealthy; and gay people sunning them- selves along Princes Street, with its mile of commercial palaces all beflagged upon some great occasion, see, across a gardened valley set with statues, where the washings of the old town flutter in the breeze at its high windows. And then, upon all sides, what a clash- ing of architecture! In this one valley, where the life of the town goes most busily forward, there may be seen, shown one above and behind another by the acci- dents of the ground, buildings in almost every style upon the globe. Egyptian and Greek temples, Venetian pal- aces and Gothic spires, are huddled one over another in a most admired disorder; while, above all, the brute mass of the Castle and the summit of Arthur's Seat look down upon these imitations with a becoming dig- nity, as the works of Nature may look down upon the monuments of Art. But Nature is a more indiscrimi- nate patroness than we imagine, and in no way fright- ened of a strong effect. The birds roost as willingly Edipburtjl; : picturesque ftot^s 13 among the Corinthian capitals as in the crannies of the crag; the same atmosphere and daylight clothe the eternal rock and yesterday's imitation portico; and as the soft northern sunshine throws out everything into TBS CABTLE a glorified distinctness — or easterly mists, coming up with the blue evening, fuse all these incongruous feat- ures into one, and the lamps begin to glitter along the street, and faint lights to burn in the high windows 14 U/orl^s of F^obert Couis Steuepsoi) across the valley— the feeling grows upon you that this also is a piece of nature in the most intimate sense; that this profusion of eccentricities, this dream in masonry and living rock, is not a drop-scene in a theater, but a city in the world of every-day reality, connected by railway and telegraph-wire with all the capitals of Europe, and inhabited by citizens of the famihar type, who keep ledgers, and attend chui'ch, and have sold their immortal portion to a daily paper. By all the canons of romance, the place demands to be half deserted and leaning toward decay; birds we might admit in profusion, the play of the sun and winds, and a few gypsies encamped in the chief thoroughfare; but these citizens, with their cabs and tramways, their trains and posters, are altogether out of key. Chartered tourists, they make free with historic localities, and rear their young among the most picturesque sites with a grand human indifference. To see them thronging by, in their neat clothes and conscious moral rectitude, and with a little air of possession that verges on the ab- surd, is not the least striking feature of the place.* * These sentences have, I hear, given offense in my native town, and a proportionable pleasure to our rivals of Glasgow. I confess the news caused me both pain and merriment. May I remark, as a balm for wounded fellow-townsmen, that there is nothing deadly in my accusations? Small blame to them if they keep ledgers : 'tis an excellent business habit. Church- going is not, that ever I heard, a subject of reproach ; decency of linen is a mark of prosperous affairs, and conscious moral rectitude one of the tokens of good living. It is not their fault if the city calls for something more specious by way of inhabitants. A man in a frock-coat looks out of place upon Edii^bur^jt; : picturesque ffotej 15 And the Btory of the town is as eccentric as its ap- pearance. For centuries it was a capital thatched with heather, and more than once, in the evil days of En- gUsh invasion, it has gone up in flame to heaven, a beacon to ships at sea. It was the jousting-ground of jealous nobles, not only on Greenside or by the King's Stables, where set tournaments were fought to the sound of trumpets and under the authority of the royal presence, but in every alley where there was room to cross swords, and in the main street, where popular tumult under the Blue Blanket alternated with the brawls of outlandish clansmen and retainers. Down in the palace John Kiiox reproved his queen in the ac- cents of modern democracy. In the town, in one of those little shops plastered like so many swallows' nests among the buttresses of the old Cathedral, that familiar autocrat, James "VI., would gladly share a bottle of wine ynth George Heriot the goldsmith. Up on the Pentland Hills, that so quietly look down on the Castle vdfch the city lying in waves around it, those mad and dismal fanatics, the Sweet Singers, haggard from long exposure on the moors, sat day and night with "tear- ful psalms" to see Edinburgh consumed with fire from heaven, like another Sodom or Gomorrah, There, in the Grass-market, stiff-necked, covenanting heroes, of- an Alp or Pyramid, although he has the virtues of a Pea- body and the talents of a Bentham. And let them console themselves — they do as well as anybody else ; the population of (let us say) Chicago would cut quite as rueful a figure on the same romantic stage. To the Glasgow people I would say only one word, but that is of gold : I have not yet writ- ten a book about Glasgow. 16 U/orl^s of I^obert Couis SteuepsoQ fered up the often unnecessary, but not less honorable, sacrifice of their lives, and bade eloquent farewell to sun, moon, and stars, and earthly friendships, or died silent to the roll of drums. Down by yon outlet rode Grahame of Claverhouse and his thirty dragoons, with the town beating to arms behind their horses' tails — a sorry handful thus riding for their lives, but with a man at the head who was to return in a different temper, make a dash that staggered Scotland to the heart, and die happily in the thick of fight. There Aikenhead was hanged for a piece of boyish incredul- ity; there, a few years afterward, David Hume ruined Philosophy and Faith, an undisturbed and well-reputed citizen; and thither, in yet a few years more. Burns came from the plow-tail, as to an academy of gilt un- belief and artificial letters. There, when the great ex- odus was made across the valley, and the new town began to spread abroad its draughty parallelograms and rear its long frontage on the opposing hill, there was such a flitting, such a change of domicile and dweller, as was never excelled in the history of cities: the cobbler succeeded the earl; the beggar ensconced himself by the judge's chimney; what had been a pal- ace was used as a pauper refuge; and great mansions were so parceled out among the least and lowest in so- ciety, that the hearthstone of the old proprietor was thought large enough to be partitioned off into a bedroom by the new. Ediipburf}!; : pietur^squ^ ffote^ 17 CHAPTER TWO OLD TOWN— THE LANDS The Old Town, it is pretended, is the chief char- acteristic, and, from a picturesque point of view, the liver-wing of Edinburgh. It is one of the most com- mon forms of depreciation to throw cold water on the whole by adroit over-commendation of a part, since everything worth judging, whether it be a man, a work of art, or only a fine city, must be judged upon its merits as a whole. The Old Town depends for much of its effect on the new quarters that lie around it, on the sufficiency of its situation, and on the hills that back it up. If you were to set it somewhere else by itself, it would look remarkably like Stirling in a bolder and loftier edition. The point is to see this em- bellished Stirling planted in the midst of a large, ac- tive, and fantastic modern city; for there the two react in a picturesque sense, and the one is the making of the other. The Old Town occupies a sloping ridge or tail of diluvial matter, protected, in some subsidence of the waters, by the Castle cliffs which fortify it to the west. On the one side of it and the other the new towns of 18 U/orK5 of F^obert Couis Steuepjop the south and of the north occupy their lower, broader, and more gentle hill-tops. Thus, the quarter of the Castle overtops the whole city and keeps an open view to sea and land. It dominates for miles on every side; '^^^-i^CSIt^^^A^^ COWFEBDER ROW AND HEAD OF WEST POST and people on the decks of ships, or plowing in quiet country places over in Fife, can see the banner on the Castle battlements, and the smoke of the Old Town blowing abroad over the subjacent country. A city that is set upon a hill. It was, I suppose, from this Edipbur^l;: pieturesqu^ f/ot^s 19 distant aspect that she got her nickname of Auld Reekie. Perhaps it was given her by people who had never crossed her doors: day after day, from their vari- ous rustic Pisgahs, they had seen the pile of buUding on the hill-top, and the long plume of smoke over the plain; so it appeared to them; so it had appeared to their fathers tilling the same field; and as that was all they knew of the place, it could be all expressed in these two words. Indeed, even on a nearer view, the Old Town is properly smoked; and though it is well washed with rain all the year round, it has a grim and sooty aspect among its younger suburbs. It grew, under the law that regulates the growth of walled cities in precarious situations, not in extent, but in height and density. Pubhc buildings were forced, wherever there was room for them, into the midst of thoroughfares; thorough- fares were diminished into lanes; houses sprang up story after story, neighbor mounting upon neighbor's shoulder, as in some Black Hole of Calcutta, until the population slept fourteen or fifteen deep in a vertical direction. The tallest of these lands, as they arc lo- cally termed, have long since been burned out; but to this day it is not uncommon to see eight or ten win- dows at a flight; and the cliff of building which hangs imminent over Waverley Bridge would still put many natural precipices to shame. The cellars are already high above the gazer's head, planted on the steep hill- side; as for the garret, all the furniture may be in the pawnshop, but it commands a famous prospect to the Highland hills. The poor man may roost up there in the center of Edinburgh, and yet have a peep of no U/orKs of P^oberC Couij Steueijjop the green country from his window; he shall see the quarters of the well-to-do fathoms underneath, with their broad squares and gardens; he shall have noth- ing overhead but a few spires, the stone top-gallants of the city; and perhaps the wind may reach him with a rustic pureness, and bring a smack of the sea, or of flowering lilacs in the spring. It is almost the correct Uterary sentiment to deplore the revolutionary improvements of Mr. Chambers and his following. It is easy to be a conservator of the discomforts of others; indeed, it is only our good quali- ties we find it irksome to conserve. Assuredly, in driv- ing streets through the black labyrinth, a few curious old corners have been swept away, and some associa- tions turned out of house and home. But what slices of sunhght, what breaths of clean air, have been let it! And what a picturesque world remains untouched I You go under dark arches, and down dark stairs and alleys. The way is so narrow that you can lay a hand on either wall; so steep that, in greasy winter weather, the pavement is almost as treacherous as ice. "Washing dangles above washing from the windows; the houses bulge outward upon flimsy brackets; you see a bit of sculpture in a dark corner; at the top of all, a gable and a few crowsteps are printed on the sky. Here, you come into a court where the children are at play and the grown people sit upon their doorsteps, and perhaps a church spire shows itself above the roofs. Here, in the narrowest of the entry, you find a great old mansion still erect, with some insignia of its former state— some scutcheon, some holy or courageous motto, on the lintel. The local antiquary points out where Edii)bur(}l7 : pistureequ^ J^tot^s ai famous and well-born people had their lodging; and aa you look up, out pops the head of a slatternly woman ADVOCATES CLOSE from the countess's window. The Bedouins camp within Pharaoh's palace walls, and the old warship is given over to the rats. We are already a far way from the 22 U/orKs of F^obert Couis Steuepgoi) days when powdered heads wore plentiful in these al- leys, with jolly, port-wine faces underneath. Even in the chief thoroughfares Irish washings flutter at the win- dows, and the pavements are encumbered with loiterers. These loiterers are a true character of the scene. Some shrewd Scotch workmen may have paused on their way to a job, debating Church affairs and poli- tics with their tools upon their arm. But the most part are of a different order — skulking jail-birds; unkempt, bare-foot children; big-mouthed, robust women, in a sort of uniform of striped flannel petticoat and short tartan shawl: among these, a few supervising constables and a dismal sprinkling of mutineers and broken men from higher ranks in society, with some mark of bet- ter days upon them, hke a brand. In a place no larger than Edinburgh, and where the traffic is mostly centered in five or six chief streets, the same face comes often under the notice of an idle stroller. In fact, from this point of view, Edinburgh is hot so much a small city as the largest of small towns. It is scarce possible to avoid observing your neighbors; and I never yet heard of any one who tried. It has been my fortune, in this anonymous accidental way, to watch more than one of these downward travelers for some stages on the road to ruin. One man must have been upward of sixty before I first observed him, and he made then a decent, personable figure in broadcloth of the best. For three years he kept falling— grease coming and buttons going from the square-skirted coat, the face puffing and pimpling, the shoulders growing bowed, the hair falhng scant and gray upon his head; and the last that ever I saw of him, he was standing Edipbur<}i7 : picturesque ffotes 23 at the mouth of an entry with several men in mole- skin, three parts drunk, and his old black raiment daubed with mud. I fancy that I still can hear him laugh. There was something heart-breaking in this OLD BOW-HEAD, LAWNUARKET, EDINBURGH gradual declension at so advanced an age; you would have thought a man of sixty out of the reach of these calamities; you would have thought that he was niched by that time into a safe place in life, whence he could pass quietly and honorably into the grave. 24 U/orl^5 of f^oberl; Coui5 Steuepjor) One of the earliest marks of these degringolades is, that the victim begins to disappear from the New Town thoroughfares, and takes to the High Street, like a wounded animal to the woods. And such a one is the type of the quarter. It also has fallen socially. A scutcheon over the door somewhat jars in sentiment where there is a washing at every window. The old man, when I saw him last, wore the coat in which he had played the gentleman three years before; and that was just what gave him so pre-eminent an air of wi-etchedness. It is true that the over-population was at least as dense in the epoch of lords and ladies, and that now- adays some customs which made Edinburgh notorious of yore have been fortunately pretermitted. But an ag- gregation of comfort is not distasteful like an aggrega- tion of the reverse. Nobody cares how many lords and ladies, and divines and lawyers, may have been crowded into these houses in the past — perhaps the more the merrier. The glasses clink around the china punch- bowl, some one touches the virginals, there are pea- cocks' feathers on the chimney, and the tapers bum clear and pale in the red firelight. That is not an ugly picture .in itself, nor will it become ugly upon repetition. All the better if the like were going on in every second room; the land would only look the more inviting. Times are changed. In one house, perhaps, twoscore families herd together; and, perhaps, not one of them is wholly out of the reach of want. The great hotel is given over to discomfort from the founda- tion to the chimney-tops; everywhere a pinching, nar- row habit, scanty meals, and an air of sluttishness and Edii^bur^l; : picturesque ffobej 25 dirt. In the first room there is a birth, in another a death, in a third a sordid drinking-bout, and the de- tective and the Bible-reader cross upon the stairs. High words are audible from dwelling to dwelling, and chil- dren have a strange experience from the first; only a robust soul, you would think, could grow up in such conditions without hurt. And even if God tempers His HIQH STREET dispensations to the young, and all the ill does not arise that our apprehensions may forecast, the sight of such a way of living is disquieting to people who are more happily circumstanced. Social inequality is no- where more ostentatious than at Edinburgh. I have mentioned already how, to the stroller along Princes Street, the High Street callously exhibits its back gar- rets. It is true, there is a garden between. And al- gTEVENSOH. Vol. ni. — 3 36 U/orKs of F^obert Couis Steuepsop though nothing could be more glaring by way of con- trast, sometimes the opposition is more immediate; sometimes the thing lies in a nutshell, and there is not so much as a blade of grass between the rich and poor. To look over the South Bridge and see the Cow- gate below full of crying hawkers, is to view one rank of society from another in the twinkling of an eye. One night I went along the Cowgate after every one was abed but the policeman, and stopped by haz- ard before a tall land. The moon touched upon its chimneys, and shone blankly on the upper windows; there was no light anywhere in the great bulk of building; but as I stood there it seemed to me that I could hear quite a body of quiet sounds from the inte- rior; doubtless there were many clocks ticking, and peo- ple snoring on their backs. And thus, as I fancied, the dense life within made itself faintly audible in my ears, family after family contributing its quota to the general hum, and the whole pile beating in tune to its time-pieces, like a great disordered heart. Perhaps it was little more than a fancy altogether, but it was strangely impressive at the time, and gave me an imaginative measure of the disproportion between the quantity of living flesh and the trifling walls that sepa- rated and contained it. There was nothing fanciful, at least, but every cir- cumstance of terror and reality, in the fall of the land in the High Street. The building had grown rotten to the core; the entry underneath had suddenly closed up so that the scavenger's barrow could not pass; cracks and reverberations sounded through the house at night; the inhabitants of the huge old human bee- hive discussed Ediipbur^l; : pietureeque j^otes 21 their peril when they encountered on the stair; some had even left their dwellings in a panic of fear, and returned to them again in a fit of economy or self-re- spect; when, in the black hours of a Sunday morning, the whole structure ran together with a hideous uproar and tumbled story upon story to the ground. The physical shock was felt far and near; and the moral shock traveled with the morning milkmaid into all the suburbs. The church-bells never sounded more dismally over Edinburgh than that gray forenoon. Death had made a brave harvest; and, like Samson, by pulling down one roof destroyed many a home. None who saw it can have forgotten the aspect of the gable: here it was plastered, there papered, according to the rooms; here the kettle still stood on the hob, high overhead; and there a cheap picture of the Queen was pasted over the chimney. So, by this disaster, you had a glimpse into the life of thirty famiUes, all suddenly cut off from the revolving years. The land had fallen; and with the land how much! Far in the country, people saw a gap in the city ranks, and the sun looked through between the chimneys in an unwonted place. And all over the world, in London, in Canada, in New Zealand, fancy what a multitude of people could ex- claim with truth: "The house that I was born in fell last night!" '&^'&-^-'&' gg U/or^s of I^obert Couis Steuepsoi) CHAPTER THREE THE PARLIAMENT CLOSE Time has wrought its changes most notably around the precinct of St. Giles's Church. The church itself, if it were not for the spire, would be unrecognizable; the Krames are all gone, not a shop is left to shelter in its buttresses; and zealous magistrates and a misguided architect have shorn the design of manhood, and left it poor, naked, and pitifully pretentious. As St. Giles's must have had in former days a rich and quaint ap- pearance now forgotten, so the neighborhood was bust- ling, sunless, and romantic. It was here that the town was most overbuilt; but the overbuilding has been all rooted out, and not only a free fairway left along the High Street with an open space on either side of the church, but a great porthole, knocked in the main line of the lands, gives an outlook to the north and the New Town. There is a silly story of a subterranean passage be- tween the Castle and Holyrood, and a bold Highland piper who volunteered to explore its windings. He made his entrance by the upper end, playing a strath- spey; the curious footed it after him down the street following his descent by the sound of the chanter from Edipbur^I; : picturesque ffote^ 29 below; until all of a sudden, about the level of St. Giles's, the music came abruptly to an end, and the people in the street stood at fault with hands uplifted. Whether he was choked with gases, or perished in a quag, or was removed bodily by the Evil One, remains a point of doubt; but the piper has never again been seen or heard of from that day to this. Perhaps he wandered down into the land of Thomas the Rhymer, and some day, when it is least expected, may take a THE SPIRE OP ST. GIIiES S thought to revisit the sunlit upper world. That will be a strange moment for the cabmen on the stance beside St. Giles's, when they hear the drone of hia pipes reascending from the bowels of the earth below their horses' feet. But it is not only pipers who have vanished, many a sohd btilk of masonry has been likewise spirited into the air. Here, for example, is the shape of a heart let into the causeway. This was the site of the Tolbooth, 30 U/orKs of I^obert Couis Steuei^jop the Heart of Midlothian, a place old in story and namefather to a noble book. The walls are now down in the dust; there is no more squalor carceris for merry- debtors, no more cage for the old, acknowledged prison- breaker; but the sun and the wind play freely over the foundations of the jail. Nor is this the only me- morial that the pavement keeps of former days. The ancient burying-ground of Edinburgh lay behind St. Giles's Church, running downhill to the Cowgate and covering the site of the present Parliament House. It has disappeared as utterly as the prison or the Lucken- booths; and for those ignorant of its history, I know only one token that remains. In the Parliament Close, trodden daily underfoot by advocates, two letters and a date mark the resting-place of the man who made Scotland over again in his own image, the indefati- gable, undissuadable John Knox. He sleeps within call of the church that so often echoed to his preaching. Hard by the reformer, a bandy-legged and garlanded Charles Second, made of lead, bestrides a tun-beUied charger. The King has his back turned, and, as you look, seems to be trotting clumsily away from such a dangerous neighbor. Often, for hours together, these two will be alone in the Close, for it lies out of the way of all but legal traffic. On one side the south wall of the church, on the other the arcades of the Parliament House, inclose this irregular bight of cause- way and describe their shadows on it in the sun. At either end, from round St, Giles's buttresses, you com- mand a look into tho High Street with its motley pas- sengers; but the stream goes by, east and west, and leaves the Parliament Close to Charles the Second and Edipbur^l; : picturesque j^Jotej 31 the birds. Once in a while, a patient crowd may be seen loitering there all day, some eating fruit, some . reading a newspaper; and to judge by their quiet de- JOHN KMOX^S HOUSE IN THE HIGH STREET meaner, you would think they were waiting for a dis- tribution of soup-tickets. The fact is far otherwise; within in the Justiciary Court a man is upon trial for his life, and these are some of the curious for whom 33 U/orKs of l^obert Couie Steuepsop the gallery was found too narrow. Toward afternoon, if the prisoner is unpopular, there wUl be a round of hisses when he is brought forth. Once in a while, too, an advocate in wig and gown, hand upon mouth, full of pregnant nods, sweeps to and fro in the arcade list- ening to an agent; and at certain regular hours a whole tide of lawyers hui-ries across the space. The Parliament Close has been the scene of mark- ing incidents in Scottish history. Thus, when the Bishops were ejected from the Convention in 1688, "all fourteen of them gathered together with pale faces and stood in a cloud in the Parliament": poor episcopal personages who were done with fair weather for life! Some of the west-country Societarians stand- ing by, who would have "rejoiced more than in great sums" to be at their hanging, hustled them so rudely that they knocked their heads together. It was not magnanimous behavior to dethroned enemies; but one, at least, of the Societarians had groaned in the boots, and they had all seen their dear friends upon the Bcaflfold. Again, at the "woful Union," it was here that people crowded to escort their favorite from the last of Scottish parliaments: people flushed with nation- ality, as Boswell would have said, ready for riotous acts, and fresh from throwing stones at the author of "Robinson Crusoe" as he looked out of window. One of the pious in the seventeenth century, going to pass his trials (examinations as we now say) for the Scottish Bar, beheld the Parliament Close open and had a vision of the mouth of Hell. This, and small wonder, was the means of his conversion. Nor was the vision unsuitable to the locality; for after a hospital Edii^bur^l; : pieturesque ffotes S3 what uglier piece is there in civilization than a court of law? Hither come envy, malice, and all unchari- tableness to wrestle it out in public tourney; crimes, broken fortunes, severed households, the knave and his victim, gravitate to this low building with the arcade. To how many has not St. Giles's bell told the first hour after ruin? I think I see them pause to count the strokes, and wander on again into the moving High Street, stunned and sick at heart. A pair of swing doors gives admittance to a hall wdth a carved roof, hung with legal portraits, adorned with legal statuary, lighted by windows of painted glass, and warmed by three vast fires. This is the Salle des pas perdus of the Scottish Bar. Here, by a ferocious custom, idle youths must promenade from ten till two. From end to end, singly or in pairs or trios, the gowns and wigs go back and forward. Through a hum of talk and footfalls, the piping tones of a Macer announce a fresh cause and call upon the names of those con- cerned. Intelligent men have been walking here daily for ten or twenty years without a rag of business or a shilling of reward. In process of time, they may per- haps be made the Sheriff-Substitute and Fountain of Justice at Lerwick or Tobermory. There is nothing re- quired, you would say, but a little patience and a taste for exercise and bad air. To breathe dust and bomba- zine, to feed the mind on cackling gossip, to hear three parts of a case and drink a glass of sherry, to long with indescribable longings for the hour when a man may slip out of his travesty and devote himself to golf for the rest of the afternoon, and to do this day by day and year after year, may seem so small a thing 34 U/orKs of f^obert Couis Steuepsop to the inexperienced! But those who have made the experiment are of a different way of thinking, and count it the most arduous form of idleness. More swing doors open into pigeon-holes where Judges of the First Appeal sit singly, and halls of audience where the supreme Lords sit by three or four. Here, you may see Scott's place within the bar, where he wrote many a page of Waverley novels to the drone of judicial proceeding. You will hear a good deal of shrewdness, and, as their Lordships do not al- together disdain pleasantry, a fair proportion of dry fun. The broadest of broad Scotch is now banished from the bench; but the courts still retain a certain national flavor. We have a solemn enjoyable way of lingering on a case. We treat law as a fine art, and i-elish and digest a good distinction. There is no hurry: point after point must be rightly examined and reduced to principle; judge after judge must utter forth his obiter dicta to delighted brethren. Besides the courts, there are installed under the same roof no less than three libraries: two of no mean order; confused and semi-subterranean, full of stairs and galleries; where you may see the most studious- looking wigs fishing out novels by lantern light, in the very place where the old Privy Council tortured Cov- enanters. As the Parliament House is built upon a slope, although it presents only one story to the north, it measures half-a-dozen at least upon the south; and range after range of vaults extend below the libraries. Few places are more characteristic of this hilly capital. You descend one stone stair after another, and wander, by the flicker of a match, in a labyrinth of stone eel- Edipbur^l; : pieturesque ffote^ 35 lars. Now, you pass below the Outer Hall and hear overhead, brisk but ghostly, the interminable pattering of legal feet. Now, you come upon a strong door with a wicket: on the other side are the cells of the police oflSce and the trap-stair that gives admittance to the dock in the Justiciary Court. Many a foot that has gone up there lightly enough, has been dead-heavy in the descent. Many a man's life has been argued away from him during long hours in the court above. But just now that tragic stage is empty and silent like a church on a week-day, with the bench all sheeted up and nothing moving but the sunbeams on the wall. A little further and you strike upon a room, not empty like the rest, but crowded with productions from by- gone criminal cases: a grim lumber: lethal weapons, poisoned organs in a jar, a door with a shot hole through the panel, behind which a man fell dead. I cannot fancy why they should preserve them, unless it were against the Judgment Day. At length, as you continue to descend, you see a peep of yellow gaslight and hear a jostling, whispering noise ahead; next mo- ment you turn a corner, and there, in a whitewashed passage, is a machinery belt industriously turning on its wheels. You would think the engine had grown there of its own accord, like a cellar fungus, and would soon spin itself out and fill the vaults from end to end with its mysterious labors. In truth, it is only some gear of the steam ventilator; a,nd you will find the engineers at hand, and may step out of their door into the sunlight. For all this while, you have not been descending toward the earth's center, but only to the bottom of the hill and the foundations of 36 U/orl^5 of I^obert Couij Stcucpsop the Parliament House; low down, to be sure, but still under the open heaven and in a field of grass. The daylight shines garishly on the back windows of the Irish quarter; on broken shutters, wry gables, old pal- sied houses on the brink of ruin, a crumbling human pig-sty fit for human pigs. There are few signs of life, besides a scanty washing or a face at a window: the dwellers are abroad, but they will return at night and stagger to their pallets. i"^ Edii}bur(}l7 : pietur^squ^ ffotej 37 CHAPTER FOUR LEGENDS The character of a place is often most perfectly ex- pressed in its associations. An event strikes root and grows into a legend, when it has happened among con- genial surroundings. Ugly actions, above all in ugly places, have the true romantic quality, and become an undying property of their scene. To a man like Scott, the different appearances of nature seemed each to con- tain its own legend ready made, which it was his to call forth: in such or such a place, only such or such events ought with propriety to happen; and in this spirit he made the "Lady of the Lake" for Ben Venue, the "Heart of Midlothian" for Edinburgh, and the "Pi- rate," so indifferently written but so romantically con- ceived, for the desolate islands and roaring tideways of the North. The common run of mankind have, from generation to generation, an instinct almost as delicate as that of Scott; but where he created new things, they only forget what is unsuitable among the old; and by survival of the fittest, a body of tradition be- comes a work of art. So, in the low dens and high- flying garrets of Edinburgh, people may go back upon dark passages in the town's adventures; and chill their marrow with winter's tales about the fire: tales that 38 U/orl^B of P^oberfc Couis Steueijsop are singularly apposite and characteristic, not only of the old life, but of the very constitution of built nature in that part, and singularly well qualified to add horror to horror, when the wind pipes around the tall lands, and hoots adown arched passages, and the far-spread wilderness of city lamps keeps quavering and flaring in the gusts. Here, it is the tale of Begbie the bank-porter, stricken to the heart at a blow and left in his blood within a step or two of the crowded High Street. There, people hush their voices over Burke and Hare; over drugs and violated graves, and the resurrection men smother- ing their victims with their knees. Here, again, the fame of Deacon Brodie is kept piously fresh. A great man in his day was the Deacon; well seen in good society, crafty with his hands as a cabinet maker, a,nd one who could sing a song with taste. Many a citizen was proud to welcome the Deacon to supper, and dis- missed him with regret at a timeous hour, who would have been vastly disconcerted had he known how soon, and in what guise, his visitor returned. Many stories are told of this redoubtable Edinburgh burglar, but the one I have in my mind most vividly gives the key of all the rest. A friend of Brodie's, nested some way toward heaven in one of these great lands, had told him of a projected visit to the country, and afterward detained by some affairs, put it off and stayed the night in town. The good man had lain some time awake; it was far on in the small hours by the Tron bell; when suddenly there came a creak, a jar, a faint light. Softly he clambered out of bed and up to a false window which looked upon another room, and Edipbur^i; : pieCureeque ffotee 39 there, by the gUmnier of a thieves' lantern, was his good friend the Deacon in a mask. It is characteristic of the town and the town's manners that this little episode should have been quietly tided over, and quite a good time elapsed before a great robbery, an escape, a Bow Street runner, a cock-fight, an apprehension in a cupboard in Amsterdam, and a last step into the air off his own greatly-improved gallows drop, brought the THE CANONGATE career of Deacon "William Brodie to an end. But still, by the mind's eye, he may be seen, a man harassed below a mountain of dupUcity, slinking from a magis- trate's supper-room to a thieves' ken, and pickeering among the closes by the flicker of a dark lamp. Or where the Deacon is out of favor, perhaps some memory lingers of the great plagues, and of fatal houses still unsafe to enter within the memory oi man. For 40 U/orI^5 of r^obert Couis Steuepjop in time of pestilence the discipline had been sharp and sudden, and what we now call "stamping out con- tagion" was carried on with deadly rigor. The offi- cials, in their gowns of gray, with a white St. An- drew's cross on back and breast, and a white cloth carried before them on a staff, perambulated the city, adding the terror of man's justice to the fear of God's visitation. The dead they buried on the Borough Muir; the living who had concealed the sickness were drowned, if they were women, in the Quarry Holes, and if they were men, were hanged and gibbeted at their own doors; and wherever the evil had passed, furniture was destroyed and houses closed. And the most bogeyish part of the story is about such houses. Two genera- tions back they still stood dark and empty; people avoided them as they passed by; the boldest schoolboy only shouted through the keyhole and made off; for within, it was supposed, the plague lay ambushed like a basilisk, ready to flow forth and spread blain and pustule through the city. What a terrible next-door neighbor for superstitious citizens! A rat scampering within would send a shudder through the stoutest heart. Here, if you like, was a sanitary parable, addressed by our uncleanly forefathers to their own neglect. And then we have Major "Weir; for although even his house is now demolished, old Edinburgh cannot clear herself of his unholy memory. He and his sister lived together in an odor of sour piety. She was a marvelous spinster; he had a rare gift of supplication, and was known among devout admirers by the name of Angelical Thomas. "He was a tall, black man, and ordinarily looked down to the ground; a grim counte- Edii)bur(}^ : pieture^que jVotej 41 nance, and a big nose. His garb was still a cloak, and somewhat dark, and he never went without his staff." How it came about that Angelical Thomas was PLANESTONBS CLOSE, CANOXGATE turned in company with his staff, and his sister in gentler manner hanged, and whether these two were simply religious maniacs of the more furious order, or 43 U/orKs of I^obert Couis Steuepjop had real as well as imaginary sins upon their old-world shoulders, are points happily beyond the reach of our intention. At least, it is suitable enough that out of this superstitious city some such example should have been put forth: the outcome and fine flower of dark and vehement religion. And at least the facts struck the public fancy and brought forth a remarkable family of myths. It would appear that the Major's staff went upon his errands, and even ran before him with a lan- tern on dark nights. Gigantic females, "stentoriously laughing and gaping with tehees of laughter" at un- seasonable hours of night and morning, haunted the purlieus of his abode. His house fell under such a load of infamy that no one dared to sleep in it, until municipal improvement leveled the structure with the ground. And my father has often been told in the nursery how the devil's coach, drawn by six coal-black horses with fiery eyes, would drive at night into the West Bow, and belated people might see the dead Major through the glasses. Another legend is that of the two maiden sisters. A legend I am afraid it may be, in the most dis- creditable meaning of the term; or perhaps something worse — a mere yesterday's fiction. But it is a story of some vitality, and is worthy of a place in the Edin- burgh calendar. This pair inhabited a single room; from the facts, it must have been double-bedded; and it may have been of some dimensions: but when all is said, it was a single room. Here our two spinsters fell out — on some point of controversial divinity belike: but fell out so bitterly that there was never a word spoken between them, bla^ or white, from that day Ediijbar^l^ : picturesque f/ot^s 43 forward. You would have thought they would sepa- rate: but no; whether from lack of means, or the Scottish fear of scandal, they continued to keep house together where they were. A chalk line drawn upon the floor separated their two domains; it bisected the doorway and the fireplace, so that each could go out and in, and do her cooking, without violating the ter- ritory of the other. So, for years, they coexisted in a hateful silence; their meals, their ablutions, their friendly visitors, exposed to an unfriendly scrutiny; and at night, in the dark watches, each could hear the breathing of her enemy. Never did four walls look down upon an uglier spectacle than these sisters rival- ing in unsisterliness. Here is a canvas for Hawthorne to have turned into a cabinet picture — he had a Puri- tanic vein, which would have fitted him to treat this Puritanic horror; he could have shown them to us in their sicknesses and at their hideous twin devotions, thumbing a pair of great Bibles, or praying aloud for each other's penitence with marrowy emphasis; now each, with kilted petticoat, at her own corner of the fire on some tempestuous evening; now sitting each at her window, looking out upon the summer landscape sloping far below them toward the firth, and the field- paths where they had wandered hand in hand; or, as age and infirmity grew upon them and prolonged their toilets, and their hands began to tremble and their heads to nod involuntarily, growing only the more steeled in enmity with years; until one fine day, at a word, a look, a visit, or the approach of death, their hearts would melt and the chalk boundary be over- stepped forever. 44 M/orl^s of I^obert Couis Steuei>8op Alas! to those who know the ecclesiastical history of the race — the most perverse and melancholy in man's annals — this will seem only a figure of much that is typical of Scotland and her high-seated capital above the Forth — a figure so grimly realistic that it may pass with strangers for a caricature. We are wonderful pa- tient haters for conscience' sake up here in the North. I spoke, in the first of these papers, of the Parliaments of the Established and Free Churches, and how they can hear each other singing psalms across the street. There is but a street between them in space, but a shadow between them in principle; and yet there they sit, enchanted, and in damnatory accents pray for each other's growth in grace. It would be well if there were no more than two; but the sects in Scotland form a large family of sisters, and the chalk lines are thickly drawn, and run through the midst of many private homes. Edinburgh is a city of churches, as though it were a place of pilgrimage. You will see four within a stone-cast at the head of the West Bow. Some are crowded to the doors; some are empty like monuments; and yet you will ever find new ones in the building. Hence that surprising clamor of church bells that suddenly breaks out upon the Sabbath morn- ing, from Trinity and the sea skirts to Morningside on the borders of the hills. I have heard the chimes of Oxford playing their symphony in a golden autumn morning, and beautiful it was to hear. But in Edin- burgh all manner of loud bells join, or rather disjoin, in one swelling, brutal babblement of noise. Now one overtakes another, and now lags behind it; now five or six all strike on the pained tympanum at the same Edii}bur<}l7 : picturesque ffote; 45 punctual instant of time, and make together a dismal chord of discord; and now for a second aU seem to have conspired to hold their peace. Indeed, there are not many uproars in this world more dismal than that of the Sabbath bells in Edinburgh: a harsh ecclesiasti- cal tocsin; the outcry of incongruous orthodoxies, call- ing on every separate conventicler to put up a protest, each in his own synagogue, against "right-hand ex- tremes and left-hand defections." And surely there are few worse extremes than this extremity of zeal; and few more deplorable defections than this disloyalty to Christian love. Shakespeare wrote a comedy of "Much Ado about Nothing." The Scottish nation made a fan- tastic tragedy on the same gubject. And it is for the success of this remarkable piece that these bells are sounded every Sabbath morning on the hiUs above the Forth. How many of them might rest silent in the steeple, how many of these ugly churches might be demoUshed and turned once more into useful building material, i£ people who think almost exactly the same thoughts about reKgion would condescend to worship God under the same roof! But there are the chalk lines. And which is to pocket pride, and speak the foremost word? 46 U/ori^s of I^obert Couis @teueQ80i> CHAPTER FIVE GREYFRIAES It was Queen Mary who threw open the gardens of the Grey Friars: a new and semi-rural cemetery in those days, although it has grown an antiquity in its turn and been superseded by half-a-dozen others. The Friars must have had a pleasant time on summer even- ings; for their gardens were situated to a wish, with the tall castle and the tallest of the castle crags in front. Even now, it is one of our famous Edinburgh points of view; and strangers are led thither to see, by yet another instance, how strangely the city lies upon her hills. The inclosure is of an irregular shape; th« double church of Old and New Greyfriars stands on the level at the top; a few thorns are dotted here and there, and the ground falls by terrace and steep slope toward the north. The open shows many slabs and table tombstones; and all round the margin, the place is girt by an array of aristocratic mausoleums appallingly adorned. Setting aside the tombs of Roubilliac, which belong to the heroic order of graveyard art, we Scotch stand, to my fancy, highest among nations in the matter of grimly illustrating death. We seem to love for their Edipbur^lp : pieturqsqu^ fiotes 47 own sake the emblems of time and the great change; and even around country churches you will find a won- derful exhibition of skulls, and crossbones, and noseless angels, and trumpets pealing for the Judgment Day, GREYFBIARS Every mason was a pedestrian Holbein: he had a deep consciousness of death, and loved to put its terrors, pithily before the churchyard loiterer; he was' brimful of rough hints upon mortality, and any dead farmer 48 U/orl^5 of Ho'*®'"^ Couig Steuepjop was seized upon to be a text. The classical examples of this art are in Greyfriars. In their time, these were doubtless costly monuments, and reckoned of a very elegant proportion by contemporaries; and now, when the elegance is not so apparent, the significance re- mains. You may perhaps look with a smile on the profusion of Latin mottoes — some crawling endwise up the shaft of a pillar, some issuing on a scroll from angels' trumpets — on the emblematic horrors, the figures rising headless from the grave, and all the traditional ingenuities in which it pleased our fathers to set forth their sorrow for the dead and their sense of earthly mutability. But it is not a hearty sort of mirth. Each ornament may have been executed by the merriest ap- prentice, whistling as he plied the mallet; but the original meaning of each, and the combined efifect of so many of them in this quiet inclosure, is serious to the point of melancholy. Round a great part of the circuit, houses of a low class present their backs to the churchyard. Only a few inches separate the living from the dead. Here, a window is partly blocked up by the pediment of a tomb; there, where the street falls far below the level of the graves, a chimney has been trained up the back of a monument, and a red pot looks vulgarly over from behind. A damp smell of the graveyard finds its way into houses where workmen sit at meat. Domestic life on a small scale goes forward visibly at the windows. The very solitude and stillness of the inclosure, which lies apart from the town's traflSc, serves to accentuate the contrast. As you walk upon the graves, you see children scattering crumos to feed the sparrows; you Edipbur^l; : picturesque f^ot^s 49 hear people singing or washing dishes, or the sound of tears and castigation; the linen on a clothespole ^ps against funereal sculpture; or perhaps the cat slips over the lintel and descends on a memorial urn. And as OREYFRIABS there is nothing else astir, these incongruous sights and noises take hold on the attention and exaggerate the sadness of the place. Greyfriars is continually overrun by cats. I have seen one afternoon, as many as thirteen of them seated Stevenson. Vol. III.— 3 50 U/orK5 of J^obert Couis SteueQ^OQ on the grass beside old Milne, the Master Builder, all sleek and fat, and complacently blinking, as if they had fed upon strange meats. Old Milne was chanting with the saints, as we may hope, and cared little for the company about his grave; but I confess the spec- tacle had an ugly side for me; and I was glad to step forward and raise my eyes to where the Castle and the roofs of the Old Town, and the spire of the As- sembly Hall, stood deployed against the sky with the colorless precision of engraving. An open outlook is to be desired fi-om a churchyard, and a sight of the sky and some of the world's beauty relieves a mind from morbid thoughts. I shall never forget one visit. It was a gray, drop- ping day; the grass was strung with rain-drops; and the people in the houses kept hanging out their shirts and petticoats and angrily taking them in again, as the weather turned from wet to fair and back again. A grave-digger, and a friend of his, a gardener from the country, accompanied me into one after another of the cells and little courtyards in which it gratified the wealthy of old days to inclose their old bones from neighborhood. In one, under a sort of shrine, we found a forlorn human effigy, very realistically executed down to the detail of his ribbed stockings, and holding in his hand a ticket with the date of his demise. He looked most pitiful and ridiculous, shut up by himself in his aristocratic precinct, like a bad old boy or an inferior forgotten deity under a new dispensation; the burdocks grew familiarly about his feet, the rain dripped all round him; and the world maintained the most en- tire indifference as to who he was or whither he had Edipbur^l; : pietureequ^ ]y[ot^8 51 gone. In another, a vaulted tomb, handsome externally but horrible inside with damp and cobwebs, there were three mounds of black earth and an uncovered thigh bone. This was the place of interment, it appeared, of a family with whom the gardener had been long in service. He was among old acquaintances. "This'U be Miss Marg'et's," said he, giving the bone a friendly kick. "The auld !" I have always an uncomfort- able feeUng in a graveyard, at sight of so many tombs to perpetuate memories best forgotten; but I never had « "^ -046-.' -^V QRETFRIARS the impression so strongly as that day. People had been at some expense in both these cases: to provoke a melancholy feeling of derision in the one, and an insulting epithet in the other. The proper inscription for the most part of mankind, I began to think, is the cynical jeer, eras tibi. That, if anything, will stop the mouth of a carper; since it both admits the worst and , carries the war triumphantly into the enemy's camp. Greyfriars is a place of many associations. There 53 U/orK5 of F^pbert Couis Steueijsoi^ was one window in a house at the lower end, now demolished, which was pointed out to me by the grave- digger as a spot of legendary interest. Burke, the resur- rection man, infamous for so many murders at five shilUngs a head, used to sit thereat, with pipe and nightcap, to watch burials going forward on the green. In a tomb higher up, which must then have been but newly finished, John Knox, according to the same in- formant, had taken refuge in a turmoil of the Reforma- tion. Behind the church is the haunted mausoleum of Sir George Mackenzie: Bloody Mackenzie, Lord Advo- cate in the Covenanting troubles and author of some pleasing sentiments on toleration. Here, in the last century, an old Heriot's Hospital boy once harbored from the pursuit of the police. The Hospital is next door to Greyfriars — a courtly building among lawns, where, on Founder's Day, you may see a multitude of children playing Kiss-in-the Ring and Round the Mul- berry-bush. Thus, when the fugitive had managed to conceal himself in the tomb, his old schoolmates had a hundred opportunities to bring him food; and there he lay in safety till a ship was found to smuggle him abroad. But his must have been indeed a heart of brass, to lie all day and night alone with the dead persecutor; and other lads were far from emulating him in courage. When a man's soul is certainly in hell, his body will scarce lie quiet in a tomb however costly; some time or other the door must open, and the reprobate come forth in the abhorred garments of the grave. It was thought a high piece of prowess to knock at the Lord Advocate's mausoleum and challenge him to appear. "Bluidy Mackingie, come oot if ye Edipbur^^: pietur^squ^ ffotes 53 dar'l" sang the foolhardy urchins. But Sir George had other affairs on hand; and the author of an essay on toleration continues to sleep peacefully among tha many whom he so intolerantly helped to slay. For this infehx campus, as it is dubbed in one of its own inscriptions — an inscription over which Dr. John- son passed a critical eye — is in many ways sacred to the memory of the men whom Mackenzie persecuted. It was here, on the flat tombstones, that the Covenant TH8 GBASSHARKffr was signed by an enthusiastic people. In the loi^ arm of the churchyard that extends to Lauriston, the prison- ers from Bothwell Bridge — ^fed on bread and water and guarded, life for life, by vigilant marksmen — ^lay five months looking for the scaffold or the plantations. And while the good work was going forward in the Grass- market, idlers in Greyfriars might have heard the throb of the military drums that drowned the voices of the martyrs. Nor is this all: for down in the comer fur- 54 U/orKs of Robert Couis Steucpjop thest from Sir George there stands a monument dedi- cated, in uncouth Covenanting verse, to all who lost their lives in that contention. There is no moorsman shot in a snow shower beside Irongray or Co'monell; there is not one of the two hundred who were drowned off the Orkneys; nor so much as a poor, over-driven, Covenanting slave in the American plantations; but can lay claim to a share in that memorial, and, if such things interest just men among the shades, can boast he has a monument on earth as well as Julius Csesar or the Pharaohs. Where they may all lie, I know not. Far-scattered bones, indeed! But if the reader cares to learn how some of them — or some part of some of them — found their way at length to such honorable sepulture, let him listen to the words of one who was their comrade in life and their apologist when they were dead, Some of the insane controversial matter I omit, as well as some digressions, but leave the rest in Patrick Walker's language and orthography: "The never to be forgotten Mr. James Renwick told me, that he was Witness to their Public Murder at the Gallow- lee, between Leith and Edinburgh, when he saw the Hang- man hash and hagg off all their Five Heads, with Patrick Foreman's Right Hand: Their Bodies were all buried at the Gallows Foot; their Heads, with Patrick's Hand, were brought and put upon five Pikes on the Pleasaunce-Port. . . . Mr. Renwick told me also that it was the first public Action that his Hand was at, to conveen Friends, and lift their mur- thered Bodies, and carried them to the West Churchyard of Edinburgh" — not Greyfriars, this time — "and buried them there. Then they came about the City .... and took down these Five Heads and that Hand ; and Day being come, they went quickly up the Pleasaunce; and when they came to Edipbur^l; : picturesque ffotej 55 Lauristoun Yards, upon the South-side of the City, they durst not venture, being so light, to go and bury their Heads with their Bodies, which they designed; it being present Death, if any of them had been found. Alexander Tweedie, a Friend, being with them, who at that Time was Gardner in these Yards, concluded to bury them in his Yard, being in a Box (wrapped in Linen), where they lay 45 Years except 3 Days, being executed upon the ICth of October 1681, and found the 7th Day of October 1736. That Piece of Ground lay for some Years unlabored ; and trenching it, the Gardner found them, which affrighted him; the Box was consumed. Mr. Schaw, the Owner of these Yards, caused lift them, and lay them upon a Table in his Summer-house : Mr. Schaw's mother was so kind, as to cut out a Linen-cloth, and cover them. They lay Twelve Days there, where all had Access to see them. Alexander Tweedie, the foresaid Gardner, said, when dying, There was a Treasure hid in his Yard, but neither Gold nor Silver. Daniel Tweedie, his Son, came along with me to that Yard, and told me that his Father planted a white Rose-bush above them, and farther down the Yard a red Rose-bush, which were more fruitful than any other Bush in the Yard. . . . Many came" — to see the heads— "out of Curiosity; yet I rejoiced to see so many concerned grave Men and Women favoring the Dust of our Martyrs. There were Six of us concluded to bury them upon the Nineteenth Day of October 1726, and every One of us to acquaint Friends of the Day and Hour, being Wednes- day, the Day of the Week on which most of them were exe- cuted, and at 4 of the Clock at Night, being the Hour that most of them went to their resting Graves. We caused make a compleat Coffin for them in Black, with four Yards of fine Linen, the way that our Martyrs Corps were managed. . . . Accordingly we kept the aforesaid Day and Hour, and doubled the Linen, and laid the Half of it below them, their nether Jaws being parted from their Heads ; but being young Men, their Teeth remained. All were Witness to the Holes in each of their Heads, which the Hangman broke with his 56 U/orKs of F^obert Couis Steueijsop Hammer ; and according to the Bigness of their Sculls, we laid the Jaws to them, and drew the other Half of the Linen above them, and stuff t the Coflfin with Shavings. Some prest hard to go thorow the chief Parts of the City as was done at the Revolution ; but this we refused, considering that it looked airy and frothy, to make such Show of them, and inconsistent with the solid serious Observing of such an affect- ing, surprizing unheard-of Dispensation : But took the ordi- nary "Way of other Burials from that Place ; to wit, we went east the Back of the Wall, and in at Bristo-Port, and down the Way to the Head of the Cowgate, and turned up to the Church-yard, where they were interred closs to the Martyrs Tomb, with the greatest Multitude of People Old and Young, Men and Women, Ministers and others, that ever I saw to- gether." And so there they were at last, in "their resting graves." So long as men do their duty, even if it be greatly in a misapprehension, they will be leading pattern lives; and whether or not they come to lie beside a mar- tyrs' moniunent, we may be sure they wiU find a safe haven somewhere in the providence of God. It is not well to think of death, unless we temper the thought with that of heroes who despised it. Upon what ground, is of small account; if it be only the bishop who was burned for his faith in the antipodes, his memory lightens the heart and makes us walk undisturbed among graves. And so the martyrs' monument is a wholesome heart- some spot in the field of the dead; and as we look upon it, a brave influence comes to us from the land of those who have won their discharge, and, in another phrase of Patrick Walker's, got "cleanly off the stage." Edii)burf})7 : picturesque flote^ fi7 CHAPTER SIX NEW TOWN — TOWN AND COUNTRY It is as much a matter of course to decry the New Town as to exalt the Old; and the most celebrated authorities have picked out this quarter as the very em- blem of what is condemnable in architecture. Much may be said, much indeed has been said, upon the text; but to the unsophisticated, who call anything pleasing if it only pleases them, the New Town of Edinburgh seems, in itself, not only gay and airy, but highly picturesque. An old skipper, invincibly ignorant of all theories of the sub- lime and beautiful, once propounded as his most radi- ant notion for Paradise: "The new town of Edinburgh, with the wind the matter of a point free." He has now gone to that sphere where all good tars are prom- ised pleasant weather in the song, and perhaps his thoughts fly somewhat higher. But there are bright and temperate days — with soft air coming from the in- land hills, military music sounding bravely from the hollow of the gardens, the flags all waving on the pal- aces of Princes Street — when I have seen the town through a sort of glory, and shaken hands in senti- ment with the old sailor. And indeed, for a man who has been much tumbled round Orcadian skerries, what 58 U/orKs of l^obert Couis Steueijsop scene could be more agreeable to witness? On such a day, the valley wears a surprising air of festival. It seems (I do not know how else to put my meaning) as if it were a triiie too good to be true. It is what Paris ought to be. It has the scenic quality that would best set off a hfe of unthinking, open-air diversion. It ,was meant by nature for the realization of the society of comic operas. And you can imagine, if the climate were but towardly, how all the world and his wife would flock into these gardens in the cool of the even- ing, to hear cheerful music, to sip pleasant drinks, to see the moon rise from behind Arthur's Seat and shine upon the spires and monuments and the green tree-tops in the vaUey. Alas! and the next morning the rain is splashing on the window, and the passengers flee along Princes Street before the galloping squalls. It cannot be denied that the original design was faulty and short-sighted, and did not fully profit by the capabilities of the situation. The architect was essen- tially a town bird, and he laid out the modern city with a view to sti-eet scenery, and to street scenery alone. The country did not enter into his plan; he had never Hfted his eyes to the hills. If he had so chosen, every street upon the northern slope might have been a noble terrace and commanded an extensive and beautiful view. But the space has been too closely built; many of the houses front the wrong way, in- tent, like the Man with the Muck-Rake, on what is not worth observation, and standing discourteously back- foremost in the ranks; and in a word, it is too often only from attic windows, or here and there at a cross- ing, that you can get a look beyond the city upon its Ediijbur^l^ : pietur^squ^ flotej 59 diversified surroundings. But perhaps it is all the more surprising, to come suddenly on a comer, and see a perspective of a mUe or more of falling street, and be- yond that woods and villas, and a blue arm of sea, and the hills upon the further side. Fergusson, our Edinburgh poet, Bums's model, once saw a butterfly at the Town Cross; and the sight in- spired him with a worthless little ode. This painted country man, the dandy of the rose gai-den, looked far ■H^^''*^^ THE BOYAL INSTITUTION abroad in such a humming neighborhood; and you can fancy what moral considerations a youthful poet would supply. But the incident, in a fanciful sort of way, is characteristic of the place. Into no other city does the sight of the country enter so far; if you do not meet a butterfly, you shall certainly catch a glimpse of far- away trees upon your walk; and the place is full of theater tricks in the way of scenery. You peep under an arch, you descend stairs that look as if they would land you in a cellar, you turn to the back-window of 60 U/orKs of I^obert Couis Steuei?5oi> a grimy tenement in a lane: — and behold! you are face to face with distant and bright prospects. You turn a corner, and there is the sun going down into the High- land hills. You look down an alley, and see ships tacking for the Baltic. For the country people to see Edinburgh on her hill-tops, is one thing; it is another for the citizen, from the thick of his affairs, to. overlook the country. It should be a genial and ameliorating influence in life; it should prompt good thoughts and remind him of Nature's unconcern: that he can watch from day to day, as he trots officeward, how the Spring green bright- ens in the wood or the field grows black under a mov- ing plowshare. I have been tempted, in this connec- tion, to deplore the slender faculties of the human race, with its penny-whistle of a voice, its dull ears, and its narrow range of sight. If you could see as people are to see in heaven, if you had eyes such as you can fancy for a superior race, if you could take clear note of the objects of vision, not only a few yards, but a few miles from where you stand: — think how agreeably your sight would be entertained, how pleasantly your thoughts would be diversified, as you walked the Edin- burgh streets! For you might pause, in some business perplexity, in the midst of the city traffic, and perhaps catch the eye of a shepherd as he sat down to breathe upon a heathery shoulder of the Pentlands; or perhaps some urchin, clambering in a country elm, would put aside the leaves and show you his flushed and rustic visage; or a fisher racing seaward, with the tiller under his elbow, and the sail sounding in the wind, would fling you a salutation from between Anst'er and the May. EdiQbur^l;: pietur^squ^ ffotej 61 To be old is not the same thing as to be pict- uresque; nor because the Old Town bears a strange physiognomy, does it at all follow that the New Town shall look commonplace. Indeed, apart from antique houses, it is curious how much description would apply commonly to either. The same sudden accidents of ground, a similar dominating site above the plain, and the same superposition of one rank of society over an- other are to be observed in both. Thus, the broad PBINCES STREET and comely approach to Princes Street from the east, lined with hotels and public offices, makes a leap over the gorge of the Low Calton; if you cast a glance over the parapet, you look direct into that sunless and disreputable confluent of Leith Street; and the same tall houses open upon both thoroughfares. This is only the New Town passing overhead above its own cellars; walking, so to speak, over its own children, as is the way of cities and the human race. But at the Dean 62 U/orKs of I^obert Couis Steueijsoij Bridge, you may behold a spectacle of a more novel order. The river runs at the bottom of a deep valley, among rocks and between gardens; the crest of either bank is occupied by some of the most commodious streets and crescents in the modern city; and a hand- some bridge unites the two summits. Over this, every afternoon, private carriages go spinning by, and ladies with card-cases pass to and fro about the duties of society. And yet down below, you may still see, with its mills and foaming weir, the little rural village of Dean. Modern improvement has gone overhead on its high-level viaduct; and the extended city has cleanly overleaped, and left unaltered, what was once the sum- mer retreat of its comfortable citizens. Every town embraces hamlets in its growth; Edinburgh herself has embraced a good few; but it is strange to see one still surviving — and to see it some hundreds of feet below your path. Is it Torre del Greco that is built above buried Herculaneum? Herculaneum was dead at least; but the sun still shines upon the roofs of Dean; the smoke still rises thriftily from its chimneys; the dusty miller comes to his door, looks at the gurgling water, hearkens to the turning wheel and the birds about the shed, and perhaps whistles an air of his own to enrich the symphony — for all the world as if Edinburgh were still the old Edinburgh on the Castle Hill, and Dean were still the quietest of hamlets buried a mile or so in the green country. It is not so long ago since magisterial David Hume lent the authority of his example to the exodus from the Old Town, and took up his new abode in a street which is still (so oddly may a jest become perpetuated) Edii)bur^t7 : pietureeque f/otes 63 known as Saint David Street. Nor is the town so large but a holiday schoolboy may harry a bird's nest within half a mile of his own door. There are places that still smell of the plow in memory's nostrils. Here, one had heard a blackbird on a hawthorn; there, an- other was taken on summer evenings to eat straw- is TBS TtLLAOB OF DKAK berries and cream; and you have seen a waving wheat- field on the site of your present residence. The memories of an Edinburgh boy are but partly memories of the town. I look back with delight on many an escalade of garden walls; many a ramble among lilacs full of piping birds; many an exploration in obscure quarters 64 U/orKs of P^obert Couis Steuepsop that were neither town nor country; and I think that both for my companions and myself, there was a special interest, a point of romance, and a sentiment as of for- eign travel, when we hit in our excursions on the butt- end of some former hamlet, and found a few rustic cottages embedded among streets and squares. The tun- nel to the Scotland Street Station, the sight of the trains shooting out of its dark maw with the two guards upon the brake, the thought of its length and the many ponderous edifices and open thoroughfares above, were certainly things of paramount impressive- ness to a young mind. It was a subterranean passage, although of a larger bore than we were accustomed to in Ains worth's novels; and these two words, "subter- ranean passage," were in themselves an irresistible at- traction, and seemed to bring us nearer in spirit to the heroes we loved and the black rascals we secretly aspired to imitate. ' To scale the Castle Rock from West Princes Street Gardens, and lay a triumphal hand against the rampart itself, was to taste a high order of romantic pleasure. And there are other sights and exploits which crowd back upon my mind under a very strong illumination of remembered pleasure. But the effect of not one of them all will compare with the discoverer's joy, and the sense of old Time and his slow changes on the face of this earth, with which I explored such corners as Cannonmills or Water Lane, or the nugget of cottages at Broughton Market. They were more rural than the open country, and gave a greater impression of antiquity than the oldest land upon the High Street. They too, like Fergusson's but- terfly, had a quaint air of having wandered far from Edipbur^l; : picturesque ffotes 65 their own place; they looked abashed and homely, with their gables and their creeping plants, their outside stairs and running mill-streams; there were corners that smeUed like the end of the country garden where I spent my Aprils; and the people stood to gossip at their doors, as they might have done in Colinton or Cramond. In a great measure we may, and shall, eradicate PRINCES STREET GARDENS this haunting flavor of the country. The last elm is dead in Elm Row; and the villas and the workmen's quarters spread apace on all the borders of the city. We can cut down the trees; we can bury the grass under dead paving-stones; we can drive brisk streets through all our sleepy quarters; and we may forget fhe stories and the playgrounds of our boyhood. But we 66 VI/orKs of I^obert Couig Steuepsop have some possessions that not even the infuriate zeal of builders can utterly aboUsh and destroy. Nothing can abolish the hUls, unless it be a cataclysm of nature which shall subvert Edinburgh Castle itself and lay all her florid structures in the dust. And as long as we have the hills and the Firth, w.e have a famous herit- age to leave our children. Our windows, at no expense to us, are mostly artfully stained to represent a land- scape. And when the Spring comes round, and the hawthorn begins to flower, and the meadows to smell of young grass, even in the thickest of our streets, the country hill-tops find out a young man's eyes, and set his heart beating for travel and pure air. Ediijbur!}!? : picturesque p/otej 67 CHAPTER SEVEIT THE VILLA QUAKTEKS Mr. Rxjskin's denunciation of the New Town of Edinburgh includes, as I have heard it repeated, nearly- all the stone and lime we have to show. Many, how- ever, find a grand air and something settled and im- posing in the better parts; and upon many, as I have said, the confusion of styles induces an agreeable stimu- lation of the mind. But upon the subject of our re- cent villa architecture, I am frankly ready to mingle my tears with Mr. Ruskin's, and it is a subject which makes one envious of his large declamatory and con- troversial eloquence. Day by day, one new villa, one new object of offense, is added to another; all around Newington and Morningside, the dismalest structures keep springing up like mushrooms; the pleasant hills are loaded with them, each impudently squatted in its garden, each roofed and carrying chimneys like a house. And yet a glance of an eye discovers their true character. They are not houses; for they were not designed with a view to human habitation, and the internal arrangements are, 68 U/orKs of I^obert Couis Steuepsop as they tell me, fantastically unsuited to the needs of man. They are not buildings; for you can scarcely say a thing is built where every measurement is in clamant disproportion with its neighbor. They belong to no style of art, only to a form of business much to be regretted. Why should it be cheaper to erect a structure where the size of the windows bears no rational relation to the size of the front? Is there any profit in a mis- placed chimney-stalk? Does a hard-working, greedy builder gain more on a monstrosity than on a decent cottage of equal plainness? Frankly, we should say, No. Bricks may be omitted, and green timber employed, in the construction of even a very elegant design; and there is no reason why a chimney should be made to vent, because it is so situated as to look comely from without. On the other hand, there is a noble way of being ugly: a high-aspiring fiasco like the fall of Luci- fer. There are daring and gaudy buildings that man- age to be offensive, without being contemptible; and we know that "fools rush in where angels fear to tread." But to aim at making a commonplace villa, and to make it insufferably ugly in each particular; to attempt the homeliest achievement and to attain the bottom of derided failure; not to have any theory but profit and yet, at an equal expense, to outstrip all com- petitors in the art of conceiving and rendering perma- nent deformity; and to do all this in what is, by nat- ure, one of the most agreeable neighborhoods in Britain: — what are we to say, but that this also is a distinc- tion, hard to earn although not greatly worshipful? Indifferent buildings give pain to the sensitive; but Edipbur^I; : picturesque ffotes 69 these things offend the plainest taste. It is a danger which threatens the amenity of the town; and as this eruption keeps spreading on our borders, we have ever the further to walk among unpleasant sights, before we gain the country air. If the population of Edinburgh were a living, autonomous body, it would arise like one man and make night hideous with arson; the build- ers and their accomplices would be driven to work, like the Jews of yore, with the trowel in one hand and the defensive cutlass in the other; and as soon as one of these masonic wonders had been consummated, right- minded iconoclasts should fall thereon and make an end of it at once. Possibly these words may meet the eye of a builder or two. It is no use asking them to employ an archi- tect; for that would be to touch them in a delicate quarter, and its use would largely depend on what architect they were minded to call in. But let them get any architect in the world to point out any rea- sonably well-proportioned villa, not his own design; and let them reproduce that model to satiety. 70 U/orKs of I^obert Couij Sfceuepsoi) CHAPTER EIGHT THE C ALTON HILL The east of new Edinburgh is guarded by a craggy hill, of no great elevation, which the town embraces. The old London road runs on one side of it; while the New Approach, leaving it on the other hand, com- pletes the circuit. You mount by stairs in a cutting of the rock to find yourself in a field of monuments. Dugald Stewart has the honors of situation and archi- tecture; Burns is memoriahzed lower down upon a spur; Lord Nelson, as befits a sailor, gives his name to the top-gallant of the Calton Hill. This latter erec- tion has been differently and yet, in both cases, aptly compared to a telescope and a butterchurn; comparisons apart, it ranks among the vilest of men's handiworks. But the chief feature is an unfinished i-ange of col- umns, "the Modern Ruin" as it has been called, an imposing object from far and near, and giving Edin- burgh, even from the sea, that false air of a Modern Athens which has earned for her so many slighting speeches. It was meant to be a National Monument; and its present state is a very suitable monument to certain national characteristics. The old Observatory — a quaint brown building on the edge of the steep — and EdiTfharij)) : picturesque f/otes 71 the new Observatory — a classical edifice with a dome — occupy the central portion of the summit. All these are scattered on a green turf, browsed over by some sheep. The scene suggests reflections on fame and on man's injustice to the dead. You" see Dugald Stewart rather more handsomely commemorated than Burns. Imme- ditely below, in the Oanongate churchyard, lies Robert Fergusson, Burns's master in his art, who died insane while yet a stripling; and if Dugald Stewart has been somewhat too boisterously acclaimed, the Edinburgh poet, on the other hand, is most unrighteously forgot- THE CALTON HILL ten. The votaries of Burns, a crew too common in aU ranks in Scotland and more remarkable for number than discretion, eagerly suppress all mention of the lad who handed to him the poetic impulse and, up to the time when he grew famuos, continued to influence him in his manner and the choice of subjects. Burns himself not only acknowledged his debt in a fragment of auto- biography, but erected a tomb over the grave in Canon- gate churchyard. This was worthy of an artist, but it was done .in vain; and although I think I have read nearly all the biographies of Burns, I cannot remember one in which the modesty of nature was not violated, 73 U/orK5 of Ho'>s''t Couis Steuei>5op or where Fergussoa was not sacrificed to the credit of his follower's originality. There is a kind of gaping admiration that would fain roll Shakespeare and Bacon into one, to have a bigger thing to gape at; and a class of men who cannot edit one author without dis- paraging all others. They are indeed mistaken if they think to please the great originals; and whoever puts Fergusson right with fame, cannot do better than dedi- cate his labors to the memory of Burns, who will be the best delighted of the dead. Of all places for a view, this Calton Hill is perhaps the best; since you can see the Castle, which you lose from the Castle, and Arthur's Seat, which you cannot see from Arthur's Seat. It is the place to stroll on Edipbur^l; : picturesque j^ot^s 73 one of those days of sunshine and east wind which are BO common in our more than temperate summer. The breeze comes off the sea, with a Httle of the freshness, and that touch of chill, peculiar to the quarter, which is delightful to certain very ruddy organizations and greatly the reverse to the majority of mankind. It brings with it a faint, floating haze, a cunning decolor- izer, although not thick enough to obscure outlines near at hand. But the haze lies more thickly to windward SALISBUKY CRAGS FROM THB BURNS MONUMENT at the far end of Musselburgh Bay; and over the Links of Aberlady and Berwick Law and the hump of the Bass Kock it assumes the aspect of a bank of thin sea fog. Immediately underneath upon the south, you com- mand the yards of the High School, and the towers and courts of the new Jail — a large place, castellated to the extent of folly, standing by itself on the edge of a steep cliff, and often joyfully hailed by tourists as the Castle. In the one, you may perhaps see fe- Stevenson. Vol. III. — I 74 U/orKs of r^obert Couis Steueosoi? male prisoners taking exercise like a string of nuns; in the other, schoolboys running at play and their shadows keeping step with them. From the bottom of the val- ley, a gigantic chimney lises almost to the level of the eye, a taller and a shapelier edifice than Nelson's Monu- ment. Look a little further, and there is Holyrood Palace, with its Gothic frontal and ruined abbey, and the red sentry pacing smartly to and fro before the door like a mechanical figure in a panorama. By way of an outpost, you can single out the little peak-roofed lodge, over which Rizzio's murderers made their escape and where Queen Mary herself, according to gossip, bathed in white wine to entertain her loveliness. Be- hind and overhead, lie the Queen's Park, from Muschat's Cairn to Dumbiedykes, St. Margaret's Loch, and the long wall of Salisbury Crags; and thence, by knoll and rocky bulwark and precipitous slope, the eye rises to the top of Arthur's Seat, a hill for magnitude, a mountain in virtue of its bold design. This upon your left. Upon the right, the roofs and spires of the Old Town climb one above another to where the citadel prints its broad bulk and jagged crown of bastions on the western sky. — Perhaps it is now one in the after- noon; and at the same instant of time, a ball rises to the summit of Nelson's flagstaff close at hand, and, far away, a puff of smoke followed by a report bursts from the half-moon battery at the Castle. This is the time-gun by which people set their watches, as far as the seacoast or in hill farms upon the Pentlands. — To complete the view, the eye enfilades Princes Street, black with traffic, and has a broad look over the val- ley between the Old Town and the New: here, full of Edipbur^l? : picturesque f/otes 75 railway trains and stepped over by the high North Bridge upon its many columns, and there, green with trees and gardens. On the north, the Calton Hill is neither so abrupt in itself nor has it so exceptional an outlook; and yet even here it commands a striking prospect. A gully ^•"'WV (JUEEN mart's bath separates it from the New Town. This is Greenside, where witches were burned and tournaments held in former days. Down that almost precipitous bank, Both- well launched his horse, and so first, as they say, at- tracted the bright eyes of Mary. It is now tessellated with sheets and blankets out to dry, and the sound of 1^6 UlorKs of I^obert Couis Steueijsoo people beating carpets is rarely absent. Beyond all this, the suburbs run out to Leith; Leith camps on the sea- side with her forest of masts; Leith roads are full of ships at anchor; the sun picks out the white pharos upon Inchkeith Island; the Firth extends on either hand from the Ferry to the May; the towns of Fife- shire sit, each in its bank of blowing smoke, along the opposite coast; and the hills inclose the view, except to the furthest east, where the haze of the horizon rests upon the open sea. There lies the road to Norway: a dear road for Sir Patrick Spens and his Scots Lords; and yonder smoke on the hither side of Largo Law is Aberdour, from whence they sailed to seek a queen for Scotland. " O lang, lang, may the ladies sit, Wi' their fans into their hand, Or ere they see Sir Patrick Spens Come sailing to the land I " The sight of the sea, even from a city, will bring thoughts of storm and sea disaster. The sailors' wives of Leith and the fisherwomen of Cockenzie, not sitting languorously with fans, but crowding to the tail of the harbor with a shawl about their ears, may still look vainly for brave Scotsmen who will return no more, or boats that have gone on their last fishing. Since Sir Patrick sailed from Aberdour, what a multitude have gone down in the North Sea! Yonder is Auldhame, where the London smack went ashore and wreckers cut the lings from ladies' fingers; and a few miles round Fife Ness is the fatal Inchcape, now a star of guidance; and the lee shore to the east of the Inch- Edi^bur^l^: picturesque ffoteg 77 cape, is that Forfarshire coast where Mucklebackit sor- rowed for his son. These are the maia features of the scene roughly sketched. How they are all tilted by the iuclination of the ground, how each stands out in delicate relief against the rest, what manifold detail, and play of sun and shadow, animate and accentuate the picture, is a matter for a person on the spot, and turning swiftly on his heels, to grasp and bind together in one com prehensive look. It is the character of such a prospect, to be full of change and of things moving. The mul- ABTHUR S BEAT tiplicity embarrasses the eye; and the mind, among so much, suffers itself to grow absorbed with single points. You remark a tree in a hedgerow, or follow a cart along a country road. You turn to the city, and see children, dwarfed ' by distance into pigmies, at play about suburban doorsteps; you have a glimpse upon a thoroughfare where people are densely moving; you note ridge after ridge of chimney-stacks running downhill one behind another, and church spires rising bravely from the sea of roofs. At one of the innumerable win- dows, you watch a figure moving; on one of the mul- titude of roofs, you watch clambering chimney-sweeps. 78 U/orI;5 of I^obert Couij Steuepsoi) The wind takes a run and scatters the smoke; bells are heard, far and near, faint and loud, to tell the hour; or perhaps a bird goes dipping evenly over the housetops, like a gull across the waves. And here you are in the meantime, on this pastoral hillside, among nibbling sheep and looked upon by monumental build- ings. Return thither on some clear, dark, moonless night, with a ring of frost in the air, and only a star or two set sparsedly in the vault of heaven; and you will find a sight as stimulating as the hoariest summit of the Alps. The solitude seems perfect; the patient as- tronomer, flat on his back under the Observatory dome and spying heaven's secrets, is your only neighbor; and yet from all round you there come up the dull hum of the city, the tramp of countless people marching out of time, the rattle of carriages and the continuous keen jingle of the tramway bells. An hour or so before, the gas was turned on; lamplighters scoured the city; in every house, from kitchen to attic, the windows kindled and gleamed forth into the dusk. And so now, al- though the town lies blue and darkling on her hills, innumerable spots of the bright element shine far and near along the pavements and upon the high fagades. Moving lights of the railway pass and repass below the stationary lights upon the bridge. Lights burn in the Jail. Lights burn high up in the tall lands and on the Castle turrets, they burn low down in Green- side or along the Park. They run out one beyond the other into the dark country. They walk in a proces- sion down to Leith, and shine singly far along Leith Pier, Thus, the plan of the city and her suburbs is Ediipbur^I; : picturesque pfot^s 79 mapped out upon the ground of blackness, as when a child pricks a drawing full of pinholes and exposes it before a candle; not the darkest night of winter can conceal her high station and fanciful design; every BACK OF GREKNSIDB evening in the year she proceeds to illuminate herself in honor of her own beauty; and as if to complete the scheme — or rather as if some prodigal Pharaoh were beginning to extend to the adjacent sea and country — half way over to Fife, there is an outpost of light 80 U/orKs of F^obert Couis Steveijsop upon Inchkeith, and far to seaward, yet another on the May. And while you are looking, across upon the Castle Hill, the drums and bugles begin to recall the scattered garrison; the air thrills with the sound; the bugles sing aloud; and the last rising flourish mounts and melts into the darkness like a star: a martial swang- song, fitly rounding in the labors of the day. EdiQburf}!^ : pietureequ^ ffot^s 81 CHAPTER NINE WINTER AND NEW YEAR The Scotch dialect is singularly rich in terms of reproach against the winter wind. Snell, hlae, nirly, and scowthering, are four of these significant vocables; they are all words that carry a shiver with them; and for my part as I see them aligned before me on the page, I am persuaded that a big wind comes tearing over the Firth from Burntisland and the northern hills; I think I can hear it howl in the chimney, and as I set my face northward, feel its smarting kisses on my cheek. Even in the names of places there is often a desolate, inhospitable sound; and I remember two from the near neighborhood of Edinburgh, Cauldhame and Blaw-weary, that would promise but starving comfort to their inhabitants. The inclemency of heaven, which has thus endowed the language of Scotland with words, has also largely modified the spirit of its poetry. Both poverty and a northern climate teach men the love of the hearth and the sentiment of the family; and the latter, in its own right, incUnes a poet to the praise of strong waters. In Scotland, all our singers have a stave or two for blazing fires and stout potations: — to get indoors out of the wind and to swallow something 82 U/orK5 of P^obert Couij Steuepjop hot to the stomach, are benefits so easily appreciated where they dwelt! And this is not only so in country districts, where the shepherd must wade in the snow all day after his flock, but in Edinburgh itself, and nowhere more ap- parently stated than in the works of our Edinburgh poet, Fergusson. He was a delicate youth, I take it, and willingly slunk from the robustious winter to an inn fireside. Love was absent from his life, or only present, if you prefer, in such a form that even the least serious of Burns's amorettes was ennobling by comparison; and so there is nothing to temper the sen- timent of indoor revelry which pervades the poor boy's verses. Although it is characteristic of his native town, and the manners of its youth to the" present day, this spirit has perhaps done something to restrict his popu- larity. He recalls a supper-party pleasantry with some- thing akin to tenderness; and sounds the praises of the act of drinking as if it were virtuous, or at least witty, in itself. The kindly jar, the warm atmosphere of tav- ern parlors, and the revelry of lawyers' clerks, do not offer by themselves the materials of a rich existence. It was not choice, so much as an external fate, that kept Fergusson in this round of sordid pleasures. A Scot of poetic temperament, and without religious ex- altation, drops as if by nature into the public-house. The picture may not be pleasing; but what else is a man to do in this dog's weather? To none but those who have themselves suffered the thing in the body, can the gloom and depression of our Edinburgh winter be brought home. For some con- stitutions there is something almost physically disgust- Ediijbur^l? : pieturqsqu^ f/ote5 83 ing in the bleak ugliness of easterly weather; the wind wearies, the sickly sky depresses them; and they turn back from their walk to avoid the aspect of the unre- fulgent sun going down among perturbed and pallid mists. The days are so short that a man' does much of his business, and certainly all his pleasure, by the hag- gard glare of gas lamps. The roads are as heavy as a fallow. People go by, so drenched and draggle-tailed that I have often wondered how they found the heart to undress. And meantime the wind whistles through the town as if it were an open meadow; and if you lie awake all night, you hear it shrieking and raving overhead with a noise of shipwrecks and of falling houses. In a word, life is so unsightly that there are times when the heart turns sick in a man's inside; and the look of a tavern, or the thought of the warm, fire-lit study, is like the touch of land to one who has been long struggling with the seas. As the weather hardens toward frost, the world be- gins to improve . for Edinburgh people. We enjoy su- perb, sub-arctic sunsets, with the profile of the city stamped in indigo upon a sky of luminous green. The wind may still be cold, but there is a briskness in the air that stirs good blood. People do not all look equally sour and downcast. They fall into two divisions: one, the knight of the blue face and hollow paunch, whom Winter has gotten by the vitals; the other well lined with Ifew Year's fare, conscious of the touch of cold on his periphery, but stepping through it by the glow of his interna} fires. Such a one L remember, triply cased in grease, whom no extremity of temperature could vanquish. "Well," would be his jovial salutation, 84 U/orKs of I^oberb Couis Steueijsoo "here's a sneezer!" And the look of these warm fel- lows is tonic, and upholds their drooping fellow-towns- men. There is yet another class who do not depend on corporal advantages, but support the winter in virtue of a brave and merry heart. One shivering evening, cold enough for frost but with too high a wind, and a little past sundown, when the lamps were beginning to enlarge their circles in the growing dusk, a brace of barefoot lassies were seen coming eastward in the teeth of the wind. If the one was as much as nine, the other was certainly not more than seven. They were miserably clad; and the pavement was so cold you would have thought no one could lay a naked foot on it unflinching. Yet they came along waltzing, if you please, while the elder sang a tune to give them music. The person who saw this, and whose heart was full of bitterness at the moment, pocketed a reproof which has been of use to him ever since, and which he now hands on, with his good wishes, to the reader. At length, Edinburgh, with her satellite hills and all the sloping country, are sheeted up in white. If it has happened in the dark hours, nurses pluck their children out of bed and run with them to some com- manding window, whence they may see the change that has been worked upon earth's face. "A' the hills are covered wi' snaw," they sing, "and Winter's noo come fairly!" And the children, marveling at the si- lence and the white landscape, find a spell appropriate to the season in the words. The reverberation of the snow increases the pale daylight, and brings all objects nearer the eye. The Pentlands are smooth and glitter- ing, with here and there the black ribbon of a dry- Edipbor^t^: pietar^sqa^ {iotes 85 stone dyke, and here and tliere, if there be wind, a cloud of blowing snow upon a shoulder. The Firth seems a leaden cieek, that a man might almost jnmp across, between well-powdered Lothian and well-pow- dered Fife. And the eflEect is not, as in other cities, a thing of half a day; the streets are soon trodden black, but the country keeps its virgin white; and you have only to lift your eyes and look over miles of coun- try snow. An indescribable cheerfolness breathes about the city; and the weU-fed heart sits lightly and beats gayly in the bosom. It is New Year's weather. Xew Tear's Day, the great national festival, is a time of family expansions and of deep carousal. Some- times, by a sore stroke of fate for this Calvinistic peo- ple, the year's anniversary falls upon a Sunday, when the pubUc-houses are inexorably closed, when singing and even whistling is banished from our homes and highways, and the oldest toper feels called upon to go to church. Thus puUed about, as if between two loyal- ties, the Scotch have to decide many nice cases of con- science, and ride the marches narrowly between the weekly and the annual observance. A party of con- vivial musicians, next door to a friend of mine, hung sospended in this manner on the bidnk of their diver- sions. From ten o'clock on Sunday night, my friend heard them tuning their instruments; and as the hour of liberty drew near, each must have had his music open, his bow in readiness across the fiddle, his foot already raised to mark the time, and his nerves braced for execution; for hardly had the twelfth stroke sounded from the earliest steeple, before they had launched forth into a secular bravura. 86 U/orKs of F^obert Couis Steuepsop Currant-loaf is now popular eating in all households. For weeks before the great morning, confectioners dis- play stacks of Scotch bun — a dense, black substance, inimical to life — and full moons of shortbread adorned with mottoes of peel or sugar-plum, in honor of the season and the family affections. "Frae Auld Reekie," "A guid New Year to ye a'," "For the Auld Folk at Hame," are among the most favored of these de- vices. Can you not see the carrier, after half a day's journey on pinching hill-roads, draw up before a cot- tage in Teviotdale, or perhaps in Manor Glen among the rowans, and the old people receiving the parcel with moist eyes and a prayer for Jock or Jean in the city? For at this season, on the threshold of another year of calamity and stubborn conflict, men feel a need to draw closer the links that unite them; they reckon the num- ber of their friends, like allies before a war; and the prayers grow longer in the morning as the absent are recommended by name into God's keeping. On the day itself, the shops are all shut as on a Sunday; only taverns, toyshops, and other holiday maga- zines, keep open doors. Every one looks for his hand- sel. The postmen and the lamplighters have left, at every house in their districts, a copy of vernacular verses, asking and thanking in a breath; and it is characteristic of Scotland that these verses may have sometimes a touch of reality in detail or sentiment and a measure of strength in the handling. All over the town, you may see comforter'd schoolboys hasting to squander their half-crowns. There are an infinity of visits to be paid; all the world is in the street, except the daintier classes; the sacramental greeting is heard Edipbur^lp: pieturesque ffoteg 87 upon all sides; Auld Lang Syne is much in people's mouths; and whisky and shortbread are staple articles of consumption. From an early hour a stranger will be impressed by the number of drunken men; and by afternoon drunkenness has spread to the women. With some classes of society, it is as much a matter of duty to drink hard on New Year's Day as to go to church on Sunday. Some have been saving their wages for perhaps a month to do the season honor. Many carry a whisky-bottle in their pocket, which they will press with embarrassing effusion on a perfect stranger. It is inexpedient to risk one's body in a cab, or not, at least, until after a prolonged study of the driver. The streets, which are thronged from end to end, become a place for deUcate pilotage. Singly or arm-in-arm, some speechless, others noisy and quarrelsome, the votaries of the New Year go meandering in and out and cannon- ing one against another; and now and again, one falls and lies as he has fallen. Before night, so many have gone to bed or the police office that the streets seem almost clearer. And as guisards and first-footers are now not much seen except in country places, when once the New Year has been rung in and proclaimed at the Tron railings, the festivities begin to find their way indoors and something like quiet returns upon the town. But think, in these piled lands, of all the sense- less snorers, all the broken heads and empty pockets! Of old, Edinburgh University was the scene of heroic snowballing; and one riot obtained the epic honors of military intervention. But the great genera- tion, I am afraid, is at an end; and even during my own college days, the spirit appreciably declined. Skat- 88 U/orKs of P^obert Couis Steuepsoi) ing and sliding, on the other hand, are honored more and more; and curling, being a creature of the national genius, is Uttle likely to be disregarded. The patriotism that leads a man to eat Scotch bun will scarce desert him at the curling-pond. Edinburgh, with its long, steep pavements, is the proper home of sliders; many a happy urchin can slide the whole way to school; and the profession of errand boy is transformed into a holiday amusement. As for skating, there is scarce any city so handsomely provided. Duddingstone Loch itlM. TMA.tMiuJ'. DDDDIHaSTONB lies under the abrupt southern side of Arthur's Seat; in summer, a shield of blue, with swans sailing from the reeds; in winter, a field of ringing ice. The vil- lage church sits above it on a green promontory; and the village smoke rises from among goodly trees. At the church gates is the historical joug, a place of penance for the neck of detected sinners, and the his- torical loupmg-on stane, from which Dutch-built lairds and farmers climbed into the saddle. Here Prince Charlie slept before the battle of Prestonpans; and Edii^bur^l; : pietur^squ^ ftotez 89 here Deacon Brodie, or one of his gang, stole a plow coulter before the burglary in Chessel's Court. On the opposite side of the loch, the ground rises to Craigmil- lar Castle, a place friendly to Stuart Mariolaters. It is worth a chmb, even in summer, to look down upon the loch from Arthur's Seat; but it is tenfold more so on a day of skating. The surface is thick with people moving easily and swiftly and leaning over at a thou- sand graceful incUnations; the crowd opens and closes, M CBAIOHTLLAR CASTLE and keeps moving through itself like water; and the ice rings to half a mile away, with the flying steel. As night draws on, the sifagle figures melt into the dusk, until only an obscure stir and coming and going of black clusters, is visible upon the loch. A little longer, and the first torch is kindled and begins to flit rapidly across the ice in a ring of yellow reflection, and this is followed by another and another, until the whole field is full of skimming lights. 00 U/orKs of Robert Couij Steuepjop CHAPTER TEN TO THE PENTLAND HILLS On three sides of Edinburgh, the country slopes downward from the city, here to the sea, there to the fat farms of Haddington, there to the mineral fields of Linlithgow. On the south alone, it keeps rising until it not only out-tops the Castle but looks down on Arthur's Seat. The character of the neighborhood is pretty strongly marked by a scarcity of hedges; by many stone walls of varying height; by a fair amount of timber, some of it well grown, but apt to be of a bushy, northern profile and poor in foliage; by here and there a little river, Esk or Leith or Almond, busily journeying in the bottom of its glen; and from almost every point, by a peep of the sea or the hills. There is no lack of variety, and yet most of the ele- ments are common to all parts; and the southern dis- trict is alone distinguished by considerable summits and a wide view. From Boroughmuirhead, where the Scottish army en- camped before Flodden, the road descends a long hill, at the bottom of which and just as it is preparing to mount upon the other side, it passes a toll-bar and issues at once into the open country. Even as I write these words, they are being antiquated in the progress of events, and the chisels are tinkling on a new row Ediijbur^l^: pietur(^8qu^ ffotej 91 of houses. The builders have at length adventured be- yond the toll which held them in respect so long, and proceed to career in these fresh pastures like a herd of clots turned loose. As Lord Beaconsfield proposed to hang an architect by way of stimulation, a man, look- ing on these doomed meads, imagines a similar example to deter the builders; for it seems as if it must come to an open fight at last to preserve a corner of green country unbedeviled. And here, appropriately enough, there stood in old days a crow-haunted gibbet, with two bodies hanged in chains. I used to be shown, when a child, a flat stone in the roadway to which the gibbet had been fixed. People of a willing fancy were persuaded, and sought to persuade others, that this stone was never dry. And no wonder, they would add, for the two men had only stolen fourpence between them. For about two miles the road climbs upward, a long hot walk in summer time. You reach the summit at a place where four ways meet, beside the toll of Fair- milehead. The spot is breezy and agreeable both in name and aspect. The hills are close by across a val- ley: Kirk Yetton, with its long, upright scars visible as far as Fife, and AUermuir the tallest on this side: with wood and tilled field running high upon their bor- ders, and haunches all molded into innumerable glens and shelvings and variegated with heather and fern. The air comes briskly and sweetly off the hills, pure from the elevation and rustically scented by the upland plants; and even at the toll, you may hear the curlew calling on its mate. At certain seasons, when the gulls desert their surfy forelands, the birds of sea and moun- tain hunt and scream together in the same field by 93 U/orl^s of F^obert Couis Stcueijsop Fairmilehead. The winged, wild things intermix their wheelings, the seabirds skim the tree tops and fish among the furrows of the plow. These little craft of air are at home in all the world, so long as they cruise in their own element; and like sailors, ask but food and water from the shores they coast. Below, over a stream, the road passes Bow Bridge, now a dairy-farm, but once a distillery of whisky. It chanced, some time in the past century, that the dis- tiller was on terms of good-fellowship with the visiting ofiicer of excise. The latter was of an easy, friendly disposition and a master of convivial arts. Now and again, he had to walk out of Edinburgh to measure the distiller's stock; and although it was agreeable to find his business lead him in a friend's direction, it was unfortunate that the friend should be a loser by his visits. Accordingly, when he got about the level of Fairmilehead, the gauger would take his flute, with- out which he never traveled, from his pocket, fit it together, and set manfully to playing, as if for his own delectation and inspired by the beauty of the scene. His favorite air, it seems, was "Over the hills and far away." At the first note, the distiller pricked his ears. A flute at Fairmilehead? and playing "Over the hills and far away"? This must be his friendly enemy, the gauger. Instantly, horses were harnessed,, and sundry barrels of whisky were got upon a cart, driven at a gaUop round Hill End, and buried in the mossy glen behind Kirk Yetton. In the same breath, you may be sure, a fat fowl was put to the fire, and the whitest napery prepared for the back parlor. A lit- tle after, the gauger, having had his fill of music for Edipbur^l? : picturesque f/otes 93 the moment, came strolling down with the most inno- cent air imaginable, and found the good people at Bow Bridge taken entirely unawares by his arrival, but none the less glad to see him. The distiller's liquor and the ganger's flute would combine to speed the moments of digestion; and when both were somewhat mellow, they would wind up the evening with "Over the hills and far away" to an accompaniment of knowing glances. And at least, there is a smuggling story, with original and half-idyllic features. A little further, the road to the right passes an upright stone in a field. The country people call it General Kay's monument. According to them, an officer of that name had perished there in battle at some in- distinct period before the beginning of history. The date is reassuring; for I think cautious writers are si- lent on the General's exploits. But the stone is con- nected with one of those remarkable tenures of land which linger on into the modern world from Feudalism. "Whenever the reigning sovereign passes by, a certain landed proprietor is held bound to climb on to the top, trumpet in hand, and sound a flourish according to the measure of his knowledge in that art. Happily for a respectable family, crowned heads have no great busi- ness in the Pentland HiUs. But the story lends a character of comicality to the stone; and the passer-by will sometimes chuckle to himself. The district is dear to the superstitious. Hard by, at the back-gate of Comiston, a belated carter beheld a lady in white, "with the most beautiful, clear shoes upon her feet," who looked upon him in a very ghastly manner and then vanished; and just in front is the 94 U/orKs of P^obert Couis Steuepsop Hunters' Tryst, once a roadside inn, and not so long ago haunted by the devil in person. Satan led the in- habitants a pitiful existence. He shook the four cor- ners of the building with lamentable outcries, beat at the doors and windows, overthrew crockery in the dead hours of the morning, and danced unholy dances on the roof. Every kind of spiritual disinfectant was put in requisition; chosen ministers were summoned out of Edinburgh and prayed by the hour; pious neighbors sat up all night making a noise of psalmody; but Satan minded them no more than the wind about the hill-tops; and it was only after years of persecution, that he left the Hunters' Tryst in peace to occupy himself with the remainder of mankind. What with General Kay, and the white lady, and this singular visitation, the neighborhood offers great facilities to the makers of sun-myths; and without exactly casting in one's lot with that disenchanting school of writers, one cannot help hearing a good deal of the winter wind in the last story. "That nicht," says Burns, in one of his happiest moments — " nat nicht a child might understand The deil had business on his hand." And if people sit up all night in lone places on the hills, with Bibles and tremulous psalms, they wiU be apt to hear some of the most fiendish noises in the world: the wind will beat on doors and dance upon roofs for them, and make the hills howl around their cottage with a clamor like the judgment day. The road goes down through another valley, and then finally begins to scale the main slope of the Pent- lands. A bouquet of old trees stands round a white Edirjbur(jl? : pieturesque fiotcj 95 farmhouse; and from a neighboring dell, you can see smoke rising and leaves ruffling in the breeze. Straight above, the hills climb a thousand feet into the air. The neighborhood, about the time of lambs, is clamor- ous with the bleating of flocks; and you will be awak- ened, in the gray of early summer mornings, by the barking of a dog or the voice of a shepherd shouting to the echoes. This, with the hamlet lying behind un- seen, is Swanston. The place in the dell is immediately connected with the city. Long ago, this sheltered field was purchased by the Edinburgh magistrates for the sake of the springs that rise or gather there. After they had built their water-house and laid their pipes, it occurred to them that the place was suitable for junketing. Once entertained, with jovial magistrates and public funds, the idea led speedily to accomplishment; and Edinburgh could soon boast of a municipal Pleasure House. The dell was turned into a garden; and on the knoll that shelters it from the plain and the sea winds, they built a cottage looking to the hills. They brought crockets and gargoyles from old St. Giles's which they were then restoring, and disposed them on the gables and over the door and about the garden; and the quarry which had supplied them with building material, they draped with clematis and carpeted with beds of roses. So much for the pleasure of the eye; for creature com- fort, they made a capacious cellar in the hillside and fitted it with bins of the hewn stone. In process of time, the trees grew higher and gave shade to the cottage, and the evergreens sprang up and turned the dell into a thicket. There, purple magistrates relaxed 96 U/orK5 of F(obert Couij Steuepsop themselves from the pursuit of municipal ambition; cocked hats paraded soberly about the garden and in and out among the hollies; authoritative canes drew ciph- ering upon the path; and at night, from high upon the hills, a shepherd saw Ughted windows through the foliage and heard the voice of city dignitaries raised in song. The farm is older. It was first a grange of White- kirk Abbey, tilled and inhabited by rosy friars. Thence, after the Reformation, it passed into the hands of a true- blue Protestant family. During the Covenanting troubles, when a night conventicle was held upon the Pentlands, the farm doors stood hospitably open till the morn- ing; the dresser was laden with cheese and bannocks, milk and brandy; and the worshipers kept slipping down from the hill between two exercises, as couples visit the supper-room between two dances of a modern ball. In the Forty-Five, some foraging Highlanders from Prince Charlie's army fell upon Swanston in the dawn. The great-grandfather of the late farmer was then a Httle child; him they awakened by plucking the blankets from his bed, and he remembered, when he was an old man, their truculent looks and uncouth speech. The churn stood full of cream in the dairy, and with this they made their brose in high delight. "It was braw brose," said one of them. At last, they made off, laden like camels with their booty; and Swanston Farm has lain out of the way of history from that time forward. I do not know what may be yet in store for it. On dark days, when the mist runs low upon the hill, the house has a gloomy air as if suitable for private tragedy. But in hot July, you can fancy nothing more perfect than the garden. laid out in alleys and arbors and bright, old-fashioned flower-plots, and ending in a miniature ravine, all trel- lis-work and moss and tinkling waterfall, and housed from the sun under fathoms of broad foUage. The hamlet behind is one of the least considerable of hamlets, and consists of a few cottages on a green beside a bum. Some of them (a strange thing in Scot- land) are models of internal neatness; the beds adorned with patchwork, the shelves arrayed with willow-pattern plates, the floors and tables bright with scrubbing or pipeclay, and the very kettle polished like silver. It is the sign of a contented old age in country places, where there is little matter for gossip and no street sights. Housework becomes an art; and at evening, when the cottage interior shines and twinkles in the glow of the fire, the housewife folds her- hands and contemplates her finished picture; the snow and the wind may do their worst, she has made herself a pleasant corner in the world. The city might be a thousand miles away: and yet it was from close by that Mr. Bough painted the distant view of Edinburgh which has been engraved for this collection: and you have only to look at the cut, to see how near it is at hand. But hills and hill people are not easily sophisti- cated; and if you walk out here on a stmuner Sun- day, it is as like as not the shepherd may set , his dogs upon you. But keep an unmoved countenance; they look formidable at the charge, but their'hearts are in the right place; and they wiU only bark and sprawl about you on the grass, unmindful of their master's excitations. Eark Yetton forms the northeastern angle of the range; thence, the Pentlands trend off to south and Stevenson. Vol. ITT.— 5 98 U/orKs of F^obert Couis Steuei>8op west. From the summit you look over a great expanse of champaign sloping to the sea and behold a large variety of distant hills. There are the hills of Fife, the hills of Peebles, the Lammermoors and the Ochils, more or less mountainous in outline, more or less blue with distance. Of the Pentlands themselves, you see a field of wild heathery peaks with a pond gleaming in the midst; and to that side the view is as desolate as if you were looking into Galloway or Applecross. To turn to the other, is like a piece of travel. Far out in the lowlands Edinburgh shows herself, making a great smoke on clear days and spreading her suburbs about her for miles; the Castle rises darkly in the midst; and close by, Arthur's Seat makes a bold fig- ure in the landscape. All around, cultivated fields, and woods, and smoking villages, and white country roads, diversify the uneven surface of the land. Trains crawl slowly abroad upon the railway lines; little ships are tacking in the Firth; the shadow of a mountainous cloud, as large as a parish, travels before the wind; the wind itself rufl3es the wood and standing corn, and sends pulses of varying color across the landscape. So you sit, hke Jupiter upon Olympus, and look down from afar upon men's life. The city is as silent as a city of the dead: from all its humming thoroughfares, not a voice, not a footfall, reaches you upon the hill. The sea surf, the cries of plowmen, the streams and the mill-wheels, the birds and the wind, keep up an animated concert through the plain; from farm to farm, dogs and crowing cocks contend together in de- fiance; and yet from this Olympian station, except for the whispering rumor of a train, the world has fallen Edii)bur$l7 = picturesque jVotes d9 into a dead silence and the business of town and coun- try grown voiceless in your ears, A crying hill-bird, the bleat of a sheep, a wind singing in the dry grass, seem not so much to interrupt, as to accompany, the stillness; but to the spiritual ear, the whole scene makes a music at once human and rural, and dis- courses pleasant reflections on the destiny of man. The DISTANT VIEW OF BDINBURGH spiry habitable city, ships, the divided fields, and brows- ing herds, and the straight highways, tell visibly of man's active and comfortable ways; and you may be never so laggard and never so unimpressionable, but there is something in the view that spirits up your blood and puts you in the vein for cheerful labor. Immediately below is Fairmilehead, a spot of roof 100 U/orK5 of l^obert Couij Steuepjop and a smoking chimney, where two roads, no thicker than packthread, intersect beside a hanging wood. If you are fanciful, you will be reminded of the gauger in the story. And the thought of this old exciseman, who once lipped and fingered on his pipe and uttered clear notes from it in the mountain air, and the words of the song he affected, carry your mind "Over the hills and far away" to distant countries; and you have a vision of Edinburgh not, as you see her, in the midst of a little neighborhood, but as a boss upon the round world with all Europe and the deep sea for her sur- roundings. For every place is a center to the earth, whence highways radiate or ships set sail for foreign ports; the limit of a parish is not more imaginary than the frontier of an empire; and as a man sitting at home in his cabinet and swiftly writing books, so a city sends abroad an influence and a portrait of her- self. There is no Edinburgh emigrant, far or near, from China to Peru, but he or she carries some lively pictures of the mind, some sunset behind the Castle cliffs, some snow scene, some maze of city lamps, in- deUble in the memory and delightful to study in the intervals of toil. For any such, if this book fall in their way, here are a few more home pictures. It would be pleasant, if they should recognize a house where they had dwelt, or a walk that they had taken. END OF "EDINBURGH: PICTURESQUE NOTES" THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS "Vixerunt nonnuUi in agris, delectati re sua familiari. His idem propositum fuit quod regibus, ut ne qua re agerent, ne cui parerent, libertate uterentur: cujus proprium est sic vivere ut velis." — Cic, De Off., I. xx. (102) To VIRGIL WILLIAMS AND DORA NORTON WILLIAMS THESE SKETCHES ARE AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED BY THEIR FRIEND THE AUTHOR (103) THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS The scene of this little book is on a high moun- tain. There are, indeed, many higher; there are many of a nobler outline. It is no place of pilgrimage for the summary globe-trotter; but to one who Uves upon its sides. Mount Saint Helena soon becomes a center of interest. It is the Mont Blanc of one section of the Californian Coast Range, none of its near neighbors ris- ing to one-half ~ its altitude. It looks down on much green, intricate country. It feeds in the spring-time many splashing brooks. From its summit you must have an excellent lesson of geography: seeing, to the south, San Francisco Bay, with Tamalpais on the one hand and Monte Diablo on the other; to the west and thirty miles away, the open ocean; eastward, across the cornlands and thick tule swamps of Sacramento Valley, to where the Central Pacific railroad begins to climb the sides of the Sierras; and northward, for what I know, the white head of Shasta looking down on Oregon. Three counties, Napa County, Lake County, and Sonoma County, march across its cliffy shoulders. Its naked peak stands nearly four thousand five hun- (105) 106 U/orKs of t^obert Couis Steuerjsop dred feet above the sea; its sides are fringed with for- est; and the soil, where it is bare, glows warm with cinnabar. Life in its shadow goes rustically forward. Bucks, and bears, and rattlesnakes, and former mining opera- tions, are the staple of men's talk. Agriculture has only begun to mount above the valley. And though in a few years from now the whole district may be smiling with farms, passing trains shaking the moun- tain to the heart, many-windowed hotels lighting up the night hke factories, and a prosperous city occupy- ing the site of sleepy Calistoga; yet in the meantime, around the foot of that mountain the silence of nature reigns in a great measure unbroken, and the people of hill and valley go sauntering about their business as in the days before the flood. To reach Mount Saint Helena from San Francisco, the traveler hag twice to cross the bay: once by the busy Oakland Ferry, and again, after an hour or so of the railway, from Vallejo junction to Vallejo. Thence he takes rail once more to mount the long green strath of Napa Valley. In all the contractions and expansions of that inlaud sea, the Bay of San Francisco, there can be few drearier scenes than the Vallejo Ferry. Bald shores and a low, bald islet inclose the sea; through the nar- rows the tide bubbles, muddy like a river. When we made the passage (bound, although yet we knew it not, for Silverado) the steamer jumped, and the black buoys were dancing in the jabble; the ocean breeze blew kill- ing chill; and, although the upper sky was still un- flecked with vapor, the sea fogs were pouring in from Xl?^ Silverado Squatters 107 seaward, over the hilltops of Marin County, in one great, shapeless, silver cloud. South VaUejo is typical of many Californian towns. It was a blunder; the site has proved untenable; and, although it is stiU such a young place by the scale of Europe, it has already begun to be deserted for its neighbor and namesake, North Vallejo. A long pier, a number of drinking saloons, a hotel of a great size, marshy pools where the frogs keep up their croaking, and even at high noon the entire absence of any hu- man face or voice — these are the marks of South Val- lejo Yet there was a taU building beside the pier, labeled the Star Flour Mi Us; and sea-going, full-rigged ships lay close along shore, waiting for their cargo. Soon these would be plunging round the Horn, soon the flour from the Star Flour Mills would be landed on the wharfs of Liverpool. For that, too, is one of England's outposts; thither, to this gaunt mill, across the Atlantic and Pacific deeps and round about the icy Horn, this crowd of great, three-masted, deep-sea ships come, bringing nothing, and return with bread. The Frisby House, for that was the name of the hotel, was a place of fallen fortunes, like the town. It was now given up to laborers, and partly ruinous. At dinner there was the ordinary display of what is called in the west a two-bit house: the tablecloth checked red and white, the plague of flies, the wire hencoops over the dishes, the great variety and invariable vile- ness of the food and the rough coatless men devouring it in silence. In our bedroom, the stove would not bum, though it would smoke; and while one window would not open, the other would not shut. There was 108 U/orl^s of F^obert Couis Steuei^soi) a view on a bit of empty road, a few dark houses, a donkey wandering with its shadow on a slope, and a blink of sea, with a tall ship lying anchored in the moonlight. All about that dreary inn frogs sang their ungainly chorus. Early the next morning we mounted the hUl along a wooden footway, bridging one marish spot after an- other. Here and there, as we ascended, we passed a house embowered in white roses. More of the bay be- came apparent, and soon the blue peak of Tamalpais rose above the green level of the island opposite. It told us we were still but a little way from the city of the Golden Gates, already, at that hour, beginning to awake among the sand hills. It called to us over the waters as with the voice of a bird. Its stately head, blue as a sapphire on the paler azure of the sky, spoke to us of vrider outlooks and the bright Pacific. For Tamalpais stands sentry, like a lighthouse, over the Golden Gates, between the bay and the open ocean, and looks down indifferently on both. Even as we saw and hailed it from Vallejo, seamen, far out at sea, were scanning it with shaded eyes; and, as if to answer to the thought, one of the great ships below began silently to clothe herself vdth white sails, homeward bound for England. For some way beyond Vallejo the railway led us through bald green pastures. On the west the rough highlands of Marin shut off the ocean; in the midst, in long, straggling, gleaming arms, the bay died out among the grass; there were few trees and few inclos- ures; the sun shone wide over open uplands, the dis- plumed hills stood clear against the sky. But by-and- Jl^e Siluerado Squatter; 109 by these hills began to draw nearer on either hand, and first thicket and then wood began to clothe their sides; and soon we were away from all signs of the sea's neighborhood, mounting an inland, irrigated val- ley. A great variety of oaks stood, now severally, now in a becoming grove, among the fields and vineyards. The towns were compact, in about equal proportions, of bright, new wooden houses and great and growing forest trees; and the chapel beU on the engine sounded most festally that sunny Sunday, as we drew up at one green town after another, with the townsfolk troop- ing in their Sunday's best to see the strangers, with tho sun sparkling on the clean houses, and gi-eat domes of foHage humming overhead in the breeze. This pleasant Napa Valley is, at its north end, block- aded by our mountain. There, at Calistoga, the rail- road ceases, and the traveler who intends faring further, to the Geysers or to the springs in Lake County, must cross the spurs of the mountain by stage. Thus, Mount Saint Helena is not only a summit, but a frontier; and, up to the time of writing, it has stayed the progress of the iron horse. 110 U/orKs of I^obert Couis SteueijsoQ IN THE VALLEY CALISTOGA It is difficult for a European to imagine Calistoga, the whole place is so new, and of such an occidental pattern; the very name, I hear, was invented at a supper-party by the man who found the springs. The railroad and the highway come up the valley about parallel to one another. The street of Calistoga joins them, perpendicular to both — a wide street, with bright, clean, low houses, here and there a veranda over the sidewalk, here and there a horse-post, here and there lounging townsfolk. Other streets are marked out, and most likely named; for these towns in the New World begin with a firm resolve to grow larger, Wash- ington and Broadway, and then First and Second, and so forth, being boldly plotted out as soon as the com- munity indulges in a plan. But, in the meanwhile, all the life and most of the houses of Calistoga are con- centrated upon that street between the railway station and the road. I never heard it called by any name, but I will hazard a guess that it is either Washington or Broadway. Here are the blacksmith's, the chemist's, the general merchant's, and Kong Sam Kee, the Chinese laundryman's; here, probably, is the office of the local Jl?e Silverado Squatters 111 paper (for the place has a paper — they all have papers); and here certainly is one of the hotels, Cheeseborough's, whence the daring Foss, a man dear to legend, starts his horses for the Geysers. It must be i-emembered that we are here in a land of stage-drivers and highwaymen: a land, in that sense, like England a hundred years ago. The highway rob- ber — road-agent, he is quaintly called — ^is still busy in these parts. The fame of Vasquez is still young. Only a few years ago, the Lakeport stage was robbed a mile or two from Calistoga. In 1879, the dentist of Mendocino City, fifty miles away upon the coast, suddenly threw oflE the garments of his trade, like Grindofif, in "The Miller and his Men," and flamed forth in his second dress as a captain of banditti. A great robbery was followed by a long chase, a chase of days if not of weeks, among the intricate hill-country; and the chase was followed by much desultory fighting, in which sev- eral — and the dentist, I believe, among the number— bit the dust. The grass was springing for the first time, nourished upon their blood, when I arrived in Calis- toga. I am reminded of another highwayman of that same year. "He had been unwell," so ran his humor- ous defense, "and the doctor told him to take some- thing, so he took the express-box." The cultus of the stage-coachman always flourishes highest where there are thieves on the road, and where the guard travels armed, and the stage is not only a linb- between country and city, and the vehicle of news, but has a faint warfaring aroma, like a man who should be brother to a soldier. California boasts her famous stage-drivers, and among the famous Foss is 112 U/orl^s of F(obert Couis Steuepsoi? not forgotten. Along the unfenced, abominable mountain roads, .he launches his team with small regard to hu- man life or the doctrine of probabilities. Flinching travelers, who behold themselves coasting eternity at every corner, look with natural admiration at their driver's huge, impassive, fleshy countenance. He has the very face for the driver in Sam "Weller's anecdote, who upset the election party at the required point. Wonderful tales are current of his readiness and skill. One in particular, of how one of his horses fell at a tickHsh passage of the road, and how Foss let slip the reins, and, driving over the fallen animal, arrived at the next stage with only three. This I relate as I heard it, without guarantee. I only saw Foss once, though, strange as it may sound, I have twice talked with him. He Hves out of Calistoga, at a ranch called Fossville. One evening, after he was long gone home, I dropped into Cheese- borough's, and was asked if I should like to speak with Mr. Foss. Supposing that the interview was im- possible, and that I was merely called upon to subscribe the general sentiment, I boldly answered "Yes." Next moment, I had one instrument at my ear, another at my mouth, and found myself, with nothing in the world to say, conversing with a man several miles off among desolate hills. Foss rapidly and somewhat plain- tively brought the conversation to an end; and he re- turned to his night's grog at Fossville, while I strolled forth again on Calistoga high street. But it was an odd thing that here, on what we are accustomed to consider the very skirts of civilization, I should have used the telephone for the first time in my civilized Jl?^ Silverado Squatt^r^ 113 career. So it goes in these young countries; telephones, and telegraphs, and newspapers, and advertisements run- ning far ahead among the Indians and the grizzly bears. Alone, on the other side of the railway, stands the SiHings Hotel, with its attendant cottages. The floor of the valley is extremely level to the very roots of the hills; only here and there a hillock, crowned with pines, rises like the barrow of some chieftain famed in war; and right against one of these hillocks is the Springs Hotel — is or was; for since I was there the place has been destroyed by fire, and has risen again from its ashes. A lawn runs about the house, and the lawn is in its turn surrounded by a system of little five-roomed cottages, each with a veranda and a weedy palm before the door. Some of the cottages are let to residents, and these are wreathed in flowers. The rest are occupied by ordinary visitors to the hotel; and a very pleasant way this is, by which you have a little country cottage of your own, without domestic burdens, and by the day or week. The whole neighborhood of Mount Saint Helena is full of sulphur and of boiling springs. The Geysers are famous; they were the great health resort of the In- dians before the coming of the whites. Lake County is dotted .with spas; Hot Springs and White Sulphur Springs are the names of two stations on the Napa Valley railroad; and Calistoga itself seems to repose on a mere film above a boiling, subterranean lake. At one end of the hotel inclosure are the springs from which it takes its name, hot enough to scald a child seriously while I was there. At the other end, the 114 U/orl^s of F^obert Couis Steuerjsoij tenant of a cottage sank a well, and there also the water came up boiling. It keeps this end of the val- ley as warm as a toast. I have gone across to the hotel a little after five in the morning, when a sea fog from the Pacific was hanging thick and gray, and dark and dirty overhead, and found the thermometer had been up before me, and had already climbed among the nineties; and in the stress of the day it was some- times too hot to move about. But in spite of this heat from above and below, doing one on both sides, Cahstoga was a pleasant place to dwell in; beautifully green, f^r it was then that favored moment in the Califomian year, when the rains are over and the dusty summer has not yet set in; often visited by fresh airs, now from the mountain, now across Sonoma from the sea; very quiet, very idle, very silent but for the breezes and the cattle bells afield. And there was something satisfactory in the sight of that great mountain that inclosed us to the north: whether it stood, robed in sunshine, quak- ing to its topmost pinnacle with the heat and bright- ness of the day; or whether it set itself to weaving vapors, wisp after wisp growing, trembling, fleeting, and fading in the blue. The tangled, woody, and almost trackless foot-hUls that inclose the valley, shutting it off from Sonoma on the west, and from Yolo on the east — rough as they were in outline, dug out by winter streams, crowned by cliffy bluffs and nodding pine trees — were dwarfed into satellites by the bulk and bearing of Mount Saint Helena. She overtowered them by two-thirds of her own stature. She excelled them by the boldness of her JJ^e Silverado Squatters 115 profile. Her great bald summit, clear of trees and pasture, a cairn of quartz and cinnabar, rejected kin- ship with the dark and shaggy wilderness of lesser hUl-tops. IN THE VALLEY II THE PETRIFIED FOREST We di'ove off from the Springs Hotel about three in the afternoon. The sun warmed me to the heart. A broad, cool wind streamed pauselessly down the val- ley, laden with perfume. Up at the top stood Mount Saint Helena, a bulk of mountain, bare atop, with tree-fringed spurs, and radiating warmth. Once we saw it framed in a grove of tall and exquisitely graceful white oaks, in Une and color a finished composition. We passed a cow stretched by the roadside, her bell slowly beating time to the movement of her ruminat- ing jaws, her big red face crawled over by half a dozen flies, a monument of content. A little further, and we struck to the left up a mountain road, and for two hours threaded one valley after another, green, tangled, full of noble timber, giv- ing us every now and again a sight of Mount Saint Helena and the blue hilly distance, and crossed by many streams, through which we splashed to the car- riage-step. To the right or the left, there was scarce 116 U/orKs of Robert Couij Stcuepjoij any trace of man but the road we followed; I think we passed but one ranchero's house in the whole dis- tance, and that was closed and smokeless. But we had the society of these bright streams — dazzlingly clear, as is their wont, splashing from the wheels in diamonds, and striking a lively coolness through the sunshine. And what with the innumerable variety of greens, the masses of foliage tossing in the breeze, the glimpses of distance, the descents into seemingly impenetrable thick- ets, the continual dodging of the road which made haste to plunge again into the covert, we had a fine sense of woods, and spring-time, and the open air. Our driver gave me a lecture by the way on Cali- Tornian trees — a thing I was much in need of, having fallen among painters who know the name of nothing, and Mexicans who know the name of nothing in En- glish. He taught me the madrona, the manzanita, the buck-eye, the maple; he showed me the crested moun- tain quail; he showed me where some young redwoods were already spiring heavenward from the ruins of the old; for in this district all had already perished: red- woods and redskins, the two noblest indigenous living things, alike condemned. At length, in a lonely dell, we came on a huge wooden gate with a sign upon it like an inn. "The Petrified Forest. Proprietor: C. Evans," ran the legend. "Within, on a knoll of sward, was the house of the proprietor, and another smaller house hard by to serve as a museum, where photographs and petrifactions were retailed. It was a pure little isle of touristry among these solitary hills. The proprietor was a brave old white-faced Swede. Jife Silverado Squatters 117 He had wandered this way, Heaven knows how, and taken up his acres — I forget how many years ago — all alone, bent double with sciatica, and with six bits in his pocket and an ax upon his shoulder. Long, useless years of seafaring had thus discharged him at the end, penniless and sick. Without doubt he had tried his luck at the diggings, and got no good from that; without doubt he had loved the bottle, and lived the life of Jack ashore. But at the end of these advent- ures, here he came; and, the place hitting his fancy, down he sat to make a new life of it, far from crimps and the salt sea. And the very sight of his ranch had done him good. It was "the handsomest spot in the Califomy mountains." "Isn't it handsome, now?" he said. Every penny he makes goes into that ranch to make it handsomer. Then the climate, with the sea-breeze every afternoon in the hottest summer weather, had gradually cured the sciatica; and his sister and niece were now domesticated with him for company — or, rather, the niece came only once in the two days, teaching music the meanwhile in the valley. And then, for a last piece of luck, "the handsomest spot in the Califomy mountains" had produced a petri- fied forest, which Mr. Evans now shows at the modest figure of half a dollar a head, or two-thirds of . his capital when he first came there with an ax and a sciatica. This tardy favorite of fortune — hobbling a little, I think, as if in memory of the sciatica, but with not a trace that I can remember of the sea — thoroughly ru- ralized from head to foot, proceeded to escort us up the hill behind his house. 118 U/orKs of Robert Couis Steuei)Soi> "Who first found the forest?" asked my wife. "The first? I was that man," said he. "I was cleaning up the pasture for my beasts, when I found this"— kicking a great redwood, seven feet in diameter, that lay there on its side, hollow heart, chnging lumps of bark, all changed into gray stone, with veins of quartz between what had been the layers of the wood. "Were you surprised?" "Surprised? No! "What would I be surprised about? What did I know about petrifactions — ^following the sea? Petrifaction! There was no such word in my language! I knew about putrif action, though! I thought it was a stone; so would you, if you was cleaning up pasture." And now he had a theory of his own, which I did not quite grasp, except that the trees had not "grewed" there. But he mentioned, with evident pride, that he differed from all the scientific people who had visited the spot; and he flung about such words as "tufa" and "scilica" with careless freedom. When I mentioned I was from Scotland, "My old country," he said; "my old country" — with a smihng look and a tone of real affection in his voice. I was mightily surprised, for he was obviously Scandinavian, and begged him to explain. It seemed he had learned his English and done nearly all his sailing in Scotch ships. "Out of Glasgow," said he, "or Greenock; but that's all the same — they all hail from Glasgow." And he was so pleased with me for being a Scotsman, and his adopted compatriot, that he made me a present of a very beautiful piece of petrifaction — I believe the most beautiful and portable he had. Here was a man, at least, who was a Swede, a Xl?e Siluerado Squatters 119 Scot, and an American, acknowledging some kind al- legiance to three lands. Mr. Wallace's Scoto-Circassian will not fail to come before the reader. I have myself met and spoken with a Fifeshire German, whose com- bination of abominable accents struck me dumb. But, indeed, I think we all belong to many countries. And perhaps this habit of much travel, and the engendering of scattered friendships, may prepare the euthanasia of ancient nations. And the forest itself? Well, on a tangled, briery hillside — for the pasture would bear a little further clean- ing up, to my eyes — there lie scattered thickly various lengths of petrified trunk, such as the one already men- tioned. It is very curious, of course, and ancient enough, if that were all. Doubtless, the heart of the geologist beats quicker at the sight; but, for my part, I w^s mightily unmoved. Sightseeing is the art of disappointment. " There's nothing under heaven so blue, That's fairly worth the traveling to." But, fortunately. Heaven rewards us with many agree- able prospects and adventures by the way; and some- times, when we go out to see a petrified forest, pre- pares a far more delightful curiosity in the form of Mr. Evans, whom may all prosperity attend through- out a long and green old age. 120 U/orl^5 of I^obert Couij Steuepjoi) IN THE VALLEY III NAPA WINE I WAS interested in Californian wine. Indeed, I am interested in all wines, and have been all my life, from the raisin wine that a schoolfellow kept secreted in his play-box up to my last discovery, those notable ValtelUnes, that once shone upon the board of Caesar. Some of us, kind old Pagans, watch with dread the shadows falUng on the age: how the unconquerable worm invades the sunny terraces of France, and Bordeaux is no more, and the Rhone a mere Arabia Petrsea. Cha- teau Neuf is dead, and I have never tasted it; Hermit- age — a hermitage indeed from all life's sorrows — lies expiring by the river. And in the place of these im- perial elixirs, beautiful to every sense, gem-hued, flower- scented, dream-compellers : — behold upon the quays at Cette the chemicals arrayed; behold the analyst at Marseilles, raising hands in obsecration, attesting god LycBus, and the vats staved in, and the dishonest wines poured forth among the sea. It is not Pan only; Bac- chus, too, is dead. If wine is to withdraw its most poetic countenance, the sun of the white dinner-cloth, a deity to be in- voked by t\TO or three, all fervent, hushing their talk, Jl?^ Silu^rado Squatters 121 degusting tenderly, and storing reminiscences — for a bottle of good wine, like a good act, shines ever in the retrospect — if wine is to desert us, go thy ways, old Jack! Now we begin to have compunctions, and look back at the brave bottles squandered upon dinner- parties, where the guests drank grossly, discussing poli- tics the while, and even the schoolboy "took his whack," like liquorice water. And at the same time, we look timidly forward, with a spark of hope, to where the new lands, already weary of producing gold, begin to green with vineyards. A nice point in human history falls to be decided by Californian and Austral- ian wines. Wine in California is still in the experimental stage; and when you taste a vintage, grave economical ques- tions are involved. The beginning of vine-planting is like the beginning of mining for the precious metals: the wine-grower also "prospects." One corner of land after another is tried with one kind of grape after an- other^ This is a failure; that is better; a third best. So, bit by bit, they grope about for their Clos Vougeot and Lafite. Those lodes and pockets of earth, more precious than the precious ores, that yield inimitable fragrance and soft fire; those virtuous Bonanzas, where the soil has subUmated under sun and stars to some thing finer, and the wine is bottled poetry: these still lie undiscovered; chaparral conceals, thicket embowers them; the miner chips the rock and wanders further, and the grizzly muses undisturbed. Bat there they bide their hour, awaiting their Columbus; and nature nurses and prepares them. The smack of Californian earth shall linger on the palate of your grandson, .Stevenson. Vol. III.— 6 123 U/orKs of Robert C0UI5 Steucijjop Meanwhile the wine is merely a good wine; the best that I have tasted, better than a Beaujolais, and not unlike. But the trade is poor; it lives from hand to mouth, putting its all into experiments, and forced to sell its vintages. To find one properly matured, and beaiing its own name, is to be fortune's favorite. Bearing its own name, I say, and dwell upon the innuendo. "You want to know why California wine is not drunk in the States?" a San Francisco wine merchant said to me, after he had shown me through his prem- ises. "Well, here's the reason." And opening a large cupboard, fitted with many little drawers, he proceeded to shower me all over with a great variety of gorgeously tinted labels, blue, red, or yellow, stamped with crown or coronet, and hailing from such a profusion of clos and chateaux, that a single department could scarce have furnished forth the names. But it was strange that all looked unfamiliar. "Chateau X ?" said I. "I never heard of that." "I daresay not," said he. "I had been reading one of X 's novels." They were all castles in Spain! But that sure enough is the reason why California wine is not drunk in the States. Napa Valley has been long a seat of the wine-grow- ing industry. It did not here begin, as it does too often, in the low valley lands along the river, but took at once to the rough foot-hills, where alone it can expect to prosper. A basking inclination, and stones, to be a reservoir of the day's heat, seem necessary to the soil for wine; the grossness of the earth must be yi^ Silverado Squatters 123 evaporated, its marrow daily melted and refined for ages; until at length these clods that break below our footing, and to the eye appear but common earth, are truly, and to the perceiving mind, a masterpiece of nature. The dust of Bichebourg, which the wind car- ries away, what an apotheosis of the dust! Kot man himself can seem a stranger child of that brown, fri- able powder, than the blood and sun in that old fiask behind the fagots. A Califomian vineyard, one of man's outposts in the wilderness, has features of its own. There is noth- ing here to remind you of the Rhine or Rhone, of the low cote d'or, or the infamous and scabby deserts of Champagne; but aU is green, solitary covert. We visited two of them, Mr. Schram's and Mr. M'Eckron's, shar- ing the same glen. Some way down the vaUey below Calistoga, we turned sharply to the south and plunged into the thick of the wood. A rude trail rapidly mounting; a little stream tinkling by on the one hand, big enough per- haps after the rains, but already yielding up its life; overhead and on all sides a bower of green and tangled thicket, still fragrant and still flower-bespangled by the early season, where thimble-berry played the part of our TCng lish hawthorn, and the buck-eyes were putting forth their twisted horns of blossom: through aU. this, we struggled toughly upward, canted to and fro by the roughness of the trail, and continually switched across the face by spraLja of leaf or blossom. The last is no great inconvenience at home; but here in California it is a matter of some moment. For in all woods and by every wayside there prospers an abominable shrub 124 U/orJ^s of F^obert Couis Stet/epsop or weed, called poison-oak, whose very neighborhood is venomous to some, and whose actual touch is avoided by the most impervious. The two houses, with their vineyards, stood each in a green niche of its own in this steep and narrow for- est dell. Though they were so near, there was already a good difference in level; and Mr. M'Eckron's head must be a long way under the feet of Mr. Schram. No more had been cleared than was necessary for cul- tivation; close around each oasis ran the tangled wood; the glen enfolds them; there they lie basking in sun and silence, concealed from all but the clouds and the mountain birds. Mr. M'Eckron's is a bachelor establishment; a little bit of a wooden house, a small cellar hard by in the hillside, and a patch of vines planted and tended single- handed by himself. He had but recently begun; his vines were young, his business young also; but I thought he had the look of the man who succeeds. He hailed from Greenock: he remembered his father put- ting him inside Mons Meg, and that touched me home; and we exchanged a word or two of Scotch, which pleased me more than you would fancy. Mr. Schram's, on the other hand, is the oldest vine- yard in the valley, eighteen years old, I think; yet he began a penniless barber, and even after he had broken ground up here with his black malvoisies, continued for long to tramp the valley with his razor. Now, his place is the picture of prosperity: stuffed birds in the veranda, cellars far dug into the hillside, and resting on pillars like a bandit's cave: — all trimness, varnish, flowers, and sunshine, among the tangled wildwood. T^e Silverado Squatters 125 Stout, smiling Mrs. Schram, who has been to Europe and apparently all about the States for pleasure, enter- tained Fanny in the veranda, while I was tasting wines in the cellar. To Mr. Schram this was a solemn office; his serious gusto warmed my heart; prosperity had not yet wholly banished a certain neophyte and girlish trepi- dation, and he followed every sip and read my face with proud anxiety. I tasted aU. I tasted every va- riety and shade of Schramberger, red and white Schram- berger, Burgundy Schramberger, Schramberger Hock, Schramberger Golden Chasselas, the latter with a not- able bouquet, and I fear to think how many more. Much of it goes to London — most, I think; and Mr. Schram has a great notion of the English taste. . In this wild spot, I did not feel the sacredness of ancient cultivation. It was still raw, it was no Mara- thon, and no Johannisberg ; yet the stirring simlight, and the growing vines, and the vats and bottles in the cavern, made a pleasant music for the mind. Here, also, earth's cream was being skimmed and garnered; and the London customers can taste, such as it is, the tang of the earth in this green valley. So local, so quintessential is a wine, that it seems the very birds in the veranda might communicate a flavor, and that romantic cellar influence the bottle next to be uncorked in Pimlico, and the smile of jolly Mr. Schram might mantle in the glass. But these are but experiments. All things in this new land are moving further on: the wine- vats and the miner's blasting tools but picket for a night, like Bedouin pavilions; and to-morrow, to fresh woods! This stir of chaise and these perpetual echoes of the 136 U/orK5 of Robert Couis Steuepsoi) moving footfall, haunt the land. Men move eternally, still chasing Fortune; and, fortune found, still wander. As we drove back to Cahstoga, the road lay empty of mere passengers, but its green side was dotted with the camps of traveling families: one cumbered with a great wagonful of household stuflf, settlers going to oc- cupy a ranch they had taken up in Mendocino, or perhaps Tehama County; another, a party in dust coats, men and women, whom we found camped in a grove on the roadside, all on pleasure bent, with a Chinaman to cook for them, and who waved their hands to us as we drove by. IN THE VALLEY IV THE SCOT ABROAD A FEW pages back, I wrote that a man belonged, in these days, to a variety of countries; but the old land is still the true love, the others are but pleasant infidehties. Scotland is indefinable; it has no unity ex- cept upon the map. Two languages, many dialects, innumerable forms of piety, and countless local patriot- isms and prejudices, part us among ourselves more widely than the extreme east and west of that great continent of America. When I am at home, I feel a man from Glasgow to be something like a rival, a man Xl?i? Silu(?rado Squatters 127 from Barra to be more than half a foreigner. Yet let us meet in some far country, and, whether we hail from the braes of Manor or the braes of Mar, some ready-made affection joins us on the instant. It is not race. Look at us. One is Norse, one Celtic, and an- other Saxon. It is not community of tongue. We ha.ve it not among ourselves; and we have it almost to per- fection, with English, or Irish, or American. It is no tie of faith, for we detest each other's errors. And yet somewhere, deep down in the heart of each one of us, something yearns for the o}d land, and the old kindly people. Of all mysteries of the human heart, this is perhaps the most inscrutable. There is no special loveliness in that gray country, with its rainy, sea-beat archipelago; its fields of dark mountains; its unsightly places, black with coal; its treeless, sour, unfriendly looking corn- lands; its quaint, gray, castled city, where the bells clash of a Sunday, and the wind squalls, and the salt showers fly and beat. I do not even know if I desire to live there; but let me hear, in some far land, a kindred voice sing out, "Oh, why left I my hame?" and it seems at once as if no beauty under the kind heavens, and no society of the wise and good, can re- pay me for my absence from my country. And though I think I would rather die elsewhere, yet in my heart of hearts I long to be buried among good Scots clods. I will say it fairly, it grows on me with every year: there are no stars so lovely as Edinburgh street-lamps. When I forget thee, auld Reekie, may my right hand forget its cunning! The happiest lot on earth is to be born a Scotch- 128 U/orKs of Ho^S""' Couis Steueojoi) man. You must pay for it in many ways, as for all other advantages on earth. You have to leam the para- phrases and the shorter catechism; you generally take to drink; your youth, as far as I can find out, is a time of louder w^ar against society, of more outcry and tears and turmoil, than if you had been born, for in stance, in England. But somehow life is warmer and closer; the hearth burns more redly; the lights of home shine softer on the rainy street; the very names, endeared in verse and music, cling nearer round our hearts. An Englishman may meet an Englishman to- morrow, upon Chimborazo, and neither of them care; but when the Scotch wine-grower told me of Mona Meg, it was Uke magic. " From the dim shieling on the misty island Mountains divide us, and a world of seas; Yet still our hearts are true, our hearts are Highland, And we, in dreams, behold the Hebrides." And, Highland and Lowland, all our hearts are Scotch. Only a few days after I had seen M'Eckron, a mes- sage reached me in my cottage. It was a Scotchman who had come down a long way from the hills to market. He had heard there was a countryman in Calistoga, and came round to the hotel to see him. "We said a few words to each other; we had not much to say — ^should never have seen each other had we stayed at home, separated alike in space and in society; and then we shook hands, and he went his way again to his ranch among the hills, and that was all. Another Scotchman there was, a resident, who for Jife Slluerado Squatters 129 the mere love of the common country, douce, serious, religious man, drove me all about the valley, and took as much interest in me as if I had been his son: more, perhaps; for the son has faults too keenly felt, while the abstract countryman is perfect — like a whiff of peats. And there was yet another. Upon him I came sud- denly, as he was calmly entering my cottage, his mind quite evidently bent on plunder: a man of about fifty, filthy, ragged, roguish, with a chimney-pot hat and a tail coat, and a pursing of his mouth that might have been envied by an elder of the kirk. He had just such a face as I have seen a dozen times behind the plate. "Hullo, sir!" I cried. "Where are you going?" He turned round without a quiver. "You're a Scotchman, sir?" he said gravely. "So am I; I come from Aberdeen. This is my card," pre- senting me with a piece of pasteboard which he had raked out of some gutter in the period of the rains. "I was just examining this palm," he continued, indi- cating the misbegotten plant before our door, "which is the largest spacimen I have yet observed in Cali- foarnia." There were four or five larger within sight. But where was the use of argument? He produced a tape- line, made me help him to measure the tree at the level of the ground, and entered the figures in a large and filthy pocketbook, all with the gravity of Solomon. He then thanked me profusely, remarking that such little services were due between countrymen; shook hands with me, "for auld lang syne," as he said; and took himself solemnly away, radiating dirt and humbug as he went. 130 U/orl^s of Ftobert Couis Steuepsoij A month or two after this encounter of mine, there came a Scot to Sacramento — perhaps from Aberdeen. Anyway, there never was any one more Scotch in this wide world. He could sing and dance, and drink, I presume; and he played the pipes with vigor and suc- cess. All the Scotch in Sacx-amento became infatuated with him, and spent their spare time and money, driv- ing him about in an open cab, between drinks, while he blew himself scarlet at the pipes. This is a very sad story. After he had borrowed money from every one, he and his pipes suddenly disappeared from Sacra- mento, and when I last heard, the police were looking for him. I cannot say how this story amused me, when I felt myself so thoroughly ripe on both sides to be duped in the same way. It is at least a curious thing, to conclude, that the races which wander widest, Jews and Scotch, should be the most clannish in the world. But perhaps these two are cause and effect: "For ye were strangers in the land of Egypt." Jl?e Silverado Squatterj 131 WITH THE CHILDREN OF ISRAEL I TO INTRODUCE MB. KELMAK One thing iu this new country very particularly strikes a stranger, and that is the number of antiqui- ties. Already there have been many cycles of population succeeding each other, and passing away and leaving behind them relics. These, standing on into changed times, strike the imagination as forcibly as any pyra- mid or feudal tower. The towns, Uke the vineyards, are experimentally founded: they grow great and pros- per by passing occasions; and when the lode comes to an end, and the miners move elsewhere, the town re- mains behind them, like Palmyra in the desert. I sup- pose there are, in no country in the world, so many deserted towns as here in California. The whole neighborhood of Mount Saint Helena, now so quiet and sylvan, was once alive with mining camps and villages. Here there would be two thousand souls under canvas; there one thousand or fifteen hundred ensconced, as if forever, in a town of comfortable houses. But the luck had failed, the mines petered out; and the army of miners had departed, and left this quarter of the world to the rattlesnakes and deer 132 U/orKs of I^obert Couij Steuepjop and grizzlies, and to the slower but steadier advance of husbandry. It was with an eye on one of these deserted places, Pine Flat, on the Geysers road, that we had come first to CaUstoga. There is something singularly enticing in the idea of going, rent-free, into a ready-made house. And to the British merchant, sitting at home at ease, it may appear that, with such a roof over your head and a spring of clear water hard by, the whole problem of the squatter's existence would be solved. Food, how- ever, has yet to be considered, I will go as far as most people on tinned meats; some of the brightest moments of my life were passed over tinned mulliga- tawney in the cabin of a sixteen-ton schooner, storm- stayed in Portree Bay; but after suitable experiments, I pronounce authoritatively that man cannot live by tins alone. Fresh meat must be had on an occasion. It is true that the great Foss, driving by along the Geysers road, wooden-faced, but glorified with legend, might have been induced to bring us meat, but the great Foss could hardly bring us milk. To take a cow would have involved taking a field of grass and a milkmaid; after which it would have been hardly worth while to pause, and we might have added to our colony a flock of sheep and an experienced butcher. It is really very disheartening how we depend on other people in this life. "Mihi est propositum," as you may see by the motto, "id quod regibus"; and behold it cannot be carried out, unless I find a neigh- bor rolling in cattle. Now, my principal adviser in this matter was one whom I will call Kelmar. That was not what he Tl?^ Silu(?ra yesterday began again. The horses were not even tied with a straw rope this time — it was not worth while; and Kelmar disappeared into the bar, leaving them un- der a tree on the other side of the road. I had to devote myself. I stood under the shadow of that tree for, I suppose, hard upon an hour, and had not the heart to be angry. Once some one remembered me, and brought me out half a tumblerful of the playful, innocuous American cocktail. I drank it, and lo! veins of Uving fire ran down my leg; and then a focus of conflagration remained seated in my stomach, not un- pleasantly, for quarter of an hour. I love these sweet, fiery pangs, but I will not court them. The bulk of the time I spent in repeating as much French poetry as I could remember to the horses, who seemed to enjoy it hugely. And now it went — " O ma vieille Font-georges Od volent les rouges-gorges:" and again, to a more tramphng measure — " Et tout tremble, Irun, Coimbre, Santander, Almodovar, Sitot qu'on entend le timbre Des cymbales de Bivar.'' The redbreasts and the brooks of Europe, in that dry and songless land; brave old names and wars, strong cities, cymbals, and bright armor, in that nook of the mountain, sacred only to the Indian and the bear! This is still the strangest thing in all man's traveling, that he should carry about with him incongruous mem- Tl^e Silverado Squatters 149 ones. There is no foreign land; it is the traveler only that is foreign, and now and again, by a flash of rec- ollection, lights up the contrasts of the earth. But while I was thus wandering in my fancy, great feats had been transacted in the bar. Corwin the bold had fallen, Kelmar was again crowned with laurels, and the last of the ship's kettles had changed hands. If I had ever doubted the purity of Kelmar's motives, if I had ever suspected him of a single eye to busi- ness in his eternal dallyings, now at least, when the last kettle was disposed of, my suspicions must have been allayed. I dare not guess how much more time was wasted; nor how often we drove off, merely to drive back again and renew interrupted conversations about nothing, before the Toll House was fairly left behind. Alas! and not a mile down the grade there stands a ranch in a sunny vineyard, and here we must all dismount again and enter. Only the old lady was at home, Mrs. Guele, a brown old Swiss dame, the picture of honesty; and with her we drank a bottle of wine and had an age- long conversation, which would have been highly de- lightful if Fanny and I had not been faint with hunger. The ladies each narrated the story of her marriage, our two Hebrews with the prettiest combi- nation of sentiment and financial bathos. Abramina, specially, endeared herself with every word. She was as simple, natural and engaging as a kid that should have been brought up to the business of a money- changer. One touch was so resplendently Hebraic that I cannot pass it over. When her "old man" wrote home for her from America, her old man's family 150 U/orKs of I^obert Couij Steuepsoij would not intrust her with the money for the passage, till she had bound herself by an oath — on her knees, I think she said — not to employ it otherwise. This had tickled Abramina hugely, but I think it tickled me fully more. Mrs. Guele told of her home-sickness up here in the long winters; of her honest, countrywoman troubles and alarms upon the journey; how in the bank at Frank- fort she had feared lest the banker, after having taken her check, should deny all knowledge of it — a fear I have myself every time I go to a bank; and how crossing the Luneburger Heath, an old lady, witnessing her trouble and finding whither she was bound, had given her "the blessing of a person eighty years old, which would be sure to bring her safely to the States. And the first thing I did," added Mrs. Guele, "was to fall downstairs." At length we got out of the house, and some of us into the trap, when — ^judgment of Heaven! — here came Mr. Guele from his vineyard. So another quar- ter of an hour went by; till at length, at our earnest pleading, we set forth again in earnest, Fanny and I white-faced and silent, but the Jews still smiling. The heart fails me. There was yet another stoppage! And we drove at last into Oalistoga past two in the after- noon, Fanny and I having breakfasted at six in the morning, eight mortal hours before. "We were a pallid couple; but still the Jews were smiling. So ended our excursion with the village usurers; and, now that it was done, we had no more idea of the nature of the business, nor of the part we had been playing in it, than the child unborn. That all the '[i)<{ Silverado Squatters 151 people we had met were the slaves of Kelmar, though in various degrees of servitude; that we ourselves had been sent up the mountain in the interests of none but Kelmar; that the money we laid out, dollar by dollar, cent by cent, and through the hands of various inter- mediaries, should all hop ultimately into Kelmar's till; — these were facts that we only grew to recognize in the course of time and by the accumulation of evi- dence. At length all doubt was quieted, when one of the kettle-holders confessed. Stopping his trap in the moonlight, a little way out of Calistoga, he told me, in so many words, that he dare not show face there with an empty pocket. "You see, I don't mind if it was only five dollars, Mr. Stevens," he said, "but I must give Mr. Kelmar something." Even now, when the whole tyranny is plain to me, I cannot find it in my heart to be as angry as per- haps I should be with the Hebrew tyrant. The whole game of business is beggar my neighbor; and though perhaps that game looks uglier when played at such close quarters and on so small a scale, it is none the more intrinsically inhumane for that. The village usurer is not so sad a feature of humanity and human progress as the millionaire manufacturer, fattening on the toil and loss of thousands, and yet declaiming from the platform against the greed and dishonesty of landlords. If it were fair for Cobden to buy up land from owners whom he thought unconscious of its proper value, it was fair enough for my Russian Jew to give credit to his farmers. Kelmar, if he was unconscious of the beam in his own eye, was at least silent in the mat- ter of his brother's mote. 152 U/orK3 of I^obert Couij Sbeuepsop THE ACT OF SQUATTING There were four of us squatters — myself and my wife, the King and Queen of Silverado; Sam, the Crown Prince; and Chuchu, the Grand Duke. Chuchu, a setter crossed with spaniel, was the most unsuited for a rough life. He had been nurtured tenderly in the society of ladies; his heart was large and soft; he re- garded the sofa cushion as a bed-rock necessary of ex- istence. Though about the size of a sheep, he loved to sit in ladies' laps; he never said a bad word in all his blameless days; and if he had seen a flute, I am sure he could have played upon it by nature. It may seem hard to say it of a dog, but Chuchu was a tame cat. The king and queen, the grand duke, and a basket of cold provender for immediate use, set forth from Calistoga in a double buggy; the crown prince, on horseback, led the way like an outrider. Bags and boxes and a second-hand stove were to follow close upon our heels by Hanson's team. It was a beautiful still day; the sky was one field of azure. Not a leaf moved, not a speck appeared in heaven. Only from the summit of the mountain one Xl^e Silverado Squatters 153 little snowy wisp of cloud after another kept detaching itself, like smoke from a volcano, and blowing south- ward in some high stream of air: Mount Saint Helena stiU at her interminable task, making the weather, like a Lapland witch. By noon we had come in sight of the mill: a great brown building, half-way up the hill, big as a factory, two stories high, and with tanks and ladders along the roof; which, as a pendicle of Silverado mine, we held to be an outlying province of our own. Thither, then, we went, crossing the vaUey by a grassy trail; and there lunched out of the basket, sitting in a kind of portico, and wondering, while we ate, at this great bulk of useless building. Through a chink we could look far down into the interior, and see sunbeams float- ing in the dust and striking on tier after tier of silent, rusty machinery. It cost six thousand dollars, twelve hundred English sovereigns; and now, here it stands deserted, like the temple of a forgotten reUgion, the busy millers toiling somewhere else. All the time we were there, rnill and mill town showed no sign of life; that part of the mountain-side, which is very open and green, was tenanted by no living creature but ourselves and the insects; and nothing stirred but the cloud manufactory upon the mountain summit. It was odd to compare this with the former days, when the engine was in fuU blast, the miU palpitating to its strokes, and the carts came rattling down from Silverado, charged with ore. By two we had been landed at the mine, the buggy was gone again, and we were left to our own reflec- tions and the basket of cold provender, until Hanson 154 U/orKs of P^obert Couis Steuerjsop should arrive. Hot as it was by the sun, there was something chill in such a home-coming, in that world of wreck and rust, splinter and rolling gravel, where for so many years no fire had smoked. Silverado platform filled the whole width of the canyon. Above, as I have said, this was a wild, red, stony guUy in the mountains; but below it was a wooded dingle. And through this, I was told, there had gone a path between the mine and the ToU House — our natural northwest passage to civilization. I found and followed it, clearing my way as I went through fallen branches and dead trees. It went straight down that steep canyon, till it brought you out abruptly over the roofs of the hotel. There was nowhere any break in the descent. It almost seemed as if, were you to drop a stone down the old iron chute at our platform, it would never rest until it hopped upon the ToU House shingles. Signs were not wanting of the ancient greatness of Silverado. The footpath was well marked, and had been well trodden in the old days by thirsty miners. And far down, buried in foliage, deep out of sight of Silverado, I came on a last outpost of the mine— a mound of gravel, some wreck of wooden aqueduct, and the mouth of a tunnel, like a treasure grotto in a fairy story. A stream of water, fed by the invisible leakage from our shaft, and dyed red with cinnabar or iron, ran trippingly forth out of the bowels of the cave; and, looking far under the arch, I could see something like an iron lantern fastened on the rocky wall. It was a promising spot for the imagination. No boy could have left it unexplored. Jl^e Siluerado Squatters 155 The stream thenceforward stole along the bottom of the dingle, and made, for that dry land, a pleasant warbUng in the leaves. Once, I suppose, it ran splash- ing down the whole length of the canyon, but now its head waters had been tapped by the shaft at Silverado, and for a great part of its course it wandered sunless among the joints of the mountain. No wonder that it should better its pace when it sees, far before it, day- light whitening in the arch, or that it should come trotting forth into the sunlight with a song. The two stages had gone by when I got down, and the Toll House stood, do2dng in sun and dust and si- lence, Uke a place enchanted. My mission was after hay for bedding, and that I was readily promised. But when I mentioned that we were waiting for Rufe, the people shook their heads. Rufe was not a regtdar man any way, it seemed; and if he got playing poker — Well, poker was too many for Rufe. I had not yet heard them bracketed together; but it seemed a natural conjunction, and commended itself swiftly to my fears; and as soon as I returned to Silverado and had told my story, we practically gave Hanson up, and set our- selves to do what we could find do-able in our desert- island state. The lower room had been the assayer's office. The floor was thick with debris — part himian, from the for- mer occupants; part natural, sifted in by mountain winds. In a sea of red dust there swam or floated sticks, boards, hay, straw, stones, and paper; ancient newspapers, above all — for the newspaper, especially when torn, soon becomes an antiquity— and bills of the Silverado boarding-house, some dated Silverado, some 156 U/orKs of I^obert Couij Steuepjoi) Calistoga Mine. Here is one, verbatim; and if any one can calculate the scale of charges, he has my en- vious admiration. Calistoga Mine, May 3d, 1876. John Stanley To S. Chapman, Or. To hoard from April 1st to April 30 $35.75 " " " May 1st to 3d 2.00 $37.75 Where is John Stanley mining now? "Where is S. Chapman, within whose hospitable walls we were to lodge? The date was but five years old, but in that time the world had changed for Silverado; like Palmyra in the desert, it had outhved its people and its purpose; we camped, Hke Layard, amid ruins, and these names spoke to us of pre-historic time. A bootjack, a pair of boots, a dog-hutch, and these bills of Mr. Chap- man's were the only speaking relics that we disinterred from all that vast Silverado rubbish-heap; but what would I not have given to unearth a letter, a pocket- book, a diary, only a ledger, or a roll of names, to take me back, in a more personal manner, to the past? It pleases me, besides, to fancy that Stanley or Chap- man, or one of their companions, may light upon this chronicle, and be struck by the name, and read some news of their anterior home, coming, as it were, out of a subsequent epoch of history in that quarter of the world. As we were tumbling the mingled rubbish on the floor, kicking it with our feet, and groping for these written evidences of the past, Sam, with a somewhat Xlyi; Silverado Squatb^rs 157 whitened face, produced a paper bag. "What's this?" said he. It contained a granulated powder, something the color of Gregory's Mixture, but rosier; and as there were several of the bags, and each more or less broken, the powder was spread widely on the floor. Had any of us ever seen giant powder? No, nobody had; and in- stantly there grew up in my mind a shadowy belief, verging with every moment nearer to certitude, that I had somewhere heard somebody describe it as just such a powder as the one around us. I have learned since that it is a substance not unlike tallow, and is made up in rolls for all the world like tallow candles. Fanny, to add to our happiness, told us a story of a gentleman who had camped one night, Uke ourselves, by a deserted mine. He was a handy, thrifty fellow, and looked right and left for plunder, but all he could lay his hands on was a can of oil. After dark he had to see to the horses with a lantern; and not to miss an opportunity, filled up his lamp from the oil can. Thus equipped, he set forth into the forest. A little while after, his friends heard a loud explosion; the mountain echoes bellowed, and then all was still. On examination, the can proved to contain oil, with the trifling addition of nitro-glycerine ; but no research dis- closed a trace of either man or lantern. It was a pretty sight, after this anecdote, to see ua sweeping out the giant powder. It seemed never to be far enough away. And, after all, it was only some rock pounded for assay. So much for the lower room. We scraped some of the rougher dirt off the floor, and left it. That was our sitting-room and kitchen, though there was nothing 158 U/orl^s of I^obert Couis Steuepgoij > to sit upon but the table, and no provision for a fire except a hole irl the roof of the room above, which had once contained the chimney of a stove. To that upper room we now proceeded. There were the eighteen bunks in a double tier, nine on either hand, where from eighteen to thirty-six miners had once snored together all night long, John Stanley, per- haps, snoring loudest. There was the roof, with a hole in it through which the sun now shot an arrow. There was the floor, in much the same state as the one be- low, though, perhaps, there was more hay, and certainly there was the added ingredient of broken glass, the man who stole the window-frames having apparently made a miscarriage with this one. Without a broom, without hay or bedding, we could but look about us with a beginning of despair. The one bright arrow of day, in that gaunt and shattered barrack, made the rest look dirtier and darker, and the sight drove us at last into the open. Here, also, the handiwork of man lay ruined: but the plants were all alive and thriving; the view below was fresh with the colors of nature; and we had ex- changed a dim, human garret for a corner, even al- though it were untidy, of the blue hall of heaven. Not a bird, not a beast, not a reptile. There was no noise in that part of the world, save when we passed beside the staging, and heard the water musically fall- ing in the shaft. We wandered to and fro. We searched among that drift of lumber — wood and iron, nails and rails, and sleepers and the wheels of trucks. We gazed up the cleft into the bosom of the mountain. We sat by the Tl?e Silverado Squatterj 159 margin of the dump and saw, far below us, the green treetops standing still in the clear air. Beautiful per- fumes, breaths of bay, resin, and nutmeg, came to us more often and grew sweeter and sharper as the after- noon declined. But still there was no word of Hanson. I set to with pick and shovel, and deepened the pool behind the shaft, till we were sure of sufficient water for the morning; and by the time I had fin- ished, the sun had begun to go down behind the mountain shoulder, the platform was plunged in quiet shadow, and a chill descended from the sky. Night began early in our cleft. Before us, over the margin of the dump, we could see the sun still striking aslant into the wooded nick below, and on the battlemented, pine-bescattered ridges on the further side. There was no stove, of course, and no hearth in our lodging, so we betook ourselves to the blacksmith's forge across the platform. If the platform be taken as a stage, and the outcurving margin of the dump to represent the line of the footlights, then our house would be the first wing on the actor's left, and this blacksmith's forge, although no match for it in size, the foremost on the right. It was a low, brown cot- tage, planted close against the hill, and overhung by the foliage and peeling boughs of a madrona thicket. Within it was full of dead leaves and mountain dust, and rubbish from the mine. But we soon had a good fire brightly blazing, and sat close about it on im- promptu seats. Chuchu, the slave of sofa-cushions, whimpered for a softer bed; but the rest of us were greatly revived and comforted by that good creature- fire, which gives us warmth and light and companion- 160 U/orl^8 of I^obert Couis Steueijsoi) able sounds, aad colors up the emptiest building with better than frescoes. For a while it was even pleasant in the forge, with the blaze in the midst, and a look over our shoulders on the woods and mountains where the day was dying like a dolphin. It was between seven and eight before Hanson ar- rived, with a wagonful of our effects and two of his wife's relatives to lend him a hand. The elder showed surpiising strength. He would pick up a huge packing- case, full of books of all things, swing it on his shoul- der, and away up the two crazy ladders and the break- neck spout of rolling mineral, familiarly termed a path, that led from the cart-track to our house. Even for a man unburdened, the ascent was toilsome and precari- ous; but Irvine scaled it with a light foot, carrying box after box, as the hero whisks the stage child up the practicable footway beside the waterfall of the fifth act. "With so strong a helper, the business was speed- ily transacted. Soon the assayer's office was thronged with our belongings, piled higgledy-piggledy, and upside down, about the floor. There were our boxes, indeed, but my wife had left her keys in Calistoga. There was the stove, but, alas! our carriers had forgot the chim- ney, and lost one of the plates along the road. The Silverado problem was scarce solved. Rufe himself was grave and good-natured over his share of blame; he even, if I remember right, ex- pressed regret. But his crew, to my astonishment and anger, grinned from ear to ear, and laughed aloud at our distress. They thought it "real funny" about the stovepipe they had forgotten; "real funny" that they should have lost a plate. As for hay, the whole party T^e Siluerado Squatters 161 refused to bring us any till they should have supped. See how late they were! Never had there been such a job as coming up that grade! Nor often, I suspect, such a game of poker as that before they started. But about nine, as a particular favor, we should have some hay. So they took their departure, leaving me still star- ing, and we resigned ourselves to wait for their return. The fire in the forge had been suffered to go out, and we were one and aU too weary to kindle another. We dined, or, not to take that word in vain, we ate after a fashion, in the nightmare disorder of the assayer's office, perched among boxes. A single candle lighted us. It could scarce be called a house-warming; for there was, of course, no fire, and with the two open doors and the open window gaping on the night, Mke breaches in a fortress, it began to grow rapidly chill. Talk ceased; nobody moved but the unhappy Chuchu, still in quest of sofa-cushions, who tumbled complain- ingly among the trunks. It required a certain happi- ness of disposition to look forward hopefully, from so dismal a beginning, across the brief hours of night, to the warm shining of to-morrow's sun. But the hay arrived at last, and we turned, with our last spark of courage, to the bedroom. We had improved the entrance, but it was still a kind of rope- walking; and it would have been droll to see us mounting, one after another, by candle-light, under the open stars. The western door — that which looked up the canyon, and through which we entered by our bridge of flying plank — ^was still entire, a handsome, paneled door, the 163 U/orK5 of Robert Couis Steueijjoi) most finished piece of carpentry in Silverado. And the two lowest bunks next to this we roughly filled with hay for that night's use. Through the opposite, or eastern-looking gable, with its open door and window, a faint, diffused starshine came into the room like mist; and when we were once in bed, we lay, awaiting sleep, in a haunted, incomplete obscurity. At first the silence of the night was utter. Then a high wind began in. the distance among the treetops, and for hours con- tinued to grow higher. It seemed to me much such a wind as we had found on our visit; yet here in our open chamber we were fanned only by gentle and re- freshing draughts, so deep was the canyon, so close our house was planted under the overhanging rock. Ji}^ Silverado Squatters 163 THE HUNTER'S FAMILY There is quite a large race or class of people in America for whom we scarcely seem to have a parallel in England. Of pure white blood, they are unknown or unrecognizable in towns; inhabit the fringe of settle- ments and the deep, quiet places of the country; rebel- lious to all labor, and pettily thievish, like the English gypsies; rustically ignorant, but with a touch of wood- lore and the dexterity of the savage. Whence they came is a moot point. At the time of the war, they poured north in crowds to escape the conscription; lived during summer on fruits, wild animals, and petty theft; and at the approach of winter, when these supplies failed, built great fires in the forest, and, there died stoically by starvation. They are widely scattered, how- ever, and easily recognized. Loutish, but not ill-look- ing, they will sit all day, swinging their legs on a field fence, the mind seemingly as devoid of all reflec- tion as a Suffolk peasant's, careless of politics, for the most part incapable of reading, but with a rebellious vanity and a strong sense of independence. Hunting is their most congenial business, or, if the occasion offers, a little amateur detection. In tracking a criminal, fol- 164 U/orK5 of F^obert Couij Steueijjoi) lowing a particular horse along a beaten highway, and drawing inductions from a hair or a footprint, one of those somnolent, grinning Hodges will suddenly display activity of body and finesse of mind. By their names ye may know them, the women figuring as Loveina, Larsenia, Serena, Leanna, Orreana; the men answering to Alvin, Alva, or Orion, pronounced Orrion, with the accent on the first. Whether they are indeed a race, or whether this is the form of degeneracy common to all backwoodsmen, they are at least known by a generic byword, as Poor Whites or Low downers. I wiU not say that the Hanson family was Poor White, because the name savors of offense; but I may go as far as this — they were, in many points, not un- similar 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 pur- sued 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 hay-field. Rus- sel, a drunken Scotch carpenter, was even an acquaint- ance of his own, and he expressed much grave com- miseration 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 delibera- tion, 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 Ji)<{ Silu^rado Squatters 165 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 re- cently lost the schoolhouse key. His wagon 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 counseled her in the making of a patchwork quilt, always, as she thought, wrongly, but to the more educated eye, always with bizarre and admirable taste — the taste of an In- dian. With all this, he was a perfect, unoffending gen- tleman 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 (n^e, if you please, Lovelands) was more commonplace than her lord. She was a comely woman, too, plump, fair colored, with wonderful white teeth; and in her print dresses (chosen by Rufe) and with a large sun-bonnet shading her valued complexion, made, I assure you, a very agreeable figure. But she was on the surface, what there was of her, outspoken and loudspoken. 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 — 166 U/orKs of I^obert iCouis Steueijsoi? 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 shoul- der 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 a while during our stay; and they had besides a perma- nent 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 an- cestors of all these Alvins and Alvas, Loveinas, Love- lands, 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 Jl?^ Silu^rado Squatt(?r8 167 be clear upon the point. And anyway, and however his name should be spelled, 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, mak- ing beds and seats, and getting our rough lodging into shape, Irvine and his sister made their appearance to- gether, she for neighborliness and general curiosity; he, because he was working for me, to my sorrow, cut- ting 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 hUl and down dale, laughing, tossing her head, showing her brilliant teeth. He looked on in si- lence, 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 color 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 168 U/orl^s of {Robert Couis SteuepsoQ 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 schoolma'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 hun- dred 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 a while looking down; and then he would toss back his shock of hair, and laugh hoarsely, and spit, and bring forward a n6w 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 poisoned Ms dog." His clumsy ut- terance, 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 cum- Xl?e Silverado Squatterj 169 brously at work, revolving the problem of existence like a quid of gum, and in his own cloudy manner enjoy- ing hfe, 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 woi'k, and even kept at work, by ilattery. 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 mo- ment 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 achieve- meints, warmed his heart hke 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, "foolen' 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 stead- ily 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 per- haps 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 _^TEVENS0N. Vol. III.— 8 170 U/orl^s of r^obert Couis Steuepsoi) 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 vigor of his body, that he broke his strong prison with such imper- fect implements, turning the very obstacles to service. 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 favored in their birth, that this creature, endowed — to use the language of theaters — with extraordinary "means," should so manage to misemploy them that lie 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 bowlders to be plucked up bodily, bushes to be uprooted, and other occasions for athletic display: but cutting wood was a different matter. Any- body 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 re- mained 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, Tl?e Slluerado Squatters 171 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 con- tinue 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 em- barrassed. Rufe announced there was nobody in the neighborhood 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 dis- missed with insult: but I took the high hand in de- spair, said there must be no talk of Irvine coming back unless matters were to be dififerently 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 172 U/orl^s of I^obcrt Couis Steuerjsop more industrious. The . promise, I am bound to say, was kept. We soon had a fine pile of firewood at om- 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, see- ing 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 perceive that croquet or poker were in any way less important than, for in- stance, mending his wagon. Even his own profession, hunting, was dear to him mainly as a sort of play; even that he would have neglected, had it not ap- pealed to his imagination. His hunting-suit, for in- stance, 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 enthu- siasm, his dark blue eyes growing perceptibly larger, Ji)®''t Couij Steuepjoi) breathless, crystal stillness over all. Even in its gen- tlest 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 sur- face, and as it had already caught the sun, it shone on the horizon Mke the topsails of some giant ship. There were huge waves, stationary, as it seemed, hke waves in a frozen sea; and yet, as I looked again, I was not sure but they were moving after aU, with a slow and august advance. And while I was yet doubt- ing, a promontory of the hills some four or five milea away, conspicuous by a bouquet of tall pines, was in a single instant overtaken and swallowed up. It reap- peared 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 prog- ress, one pine tree first growing hazy and then disap- pearing after another; although sometimes there was none of this forerunning 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 Xl?e Siluerado Squaccerj 177 came so beautifully that my first thought was of wel- come. 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 side- wise, as if to look abroad on that unwonted desolation, Bpying, perhaps with terror, for the eyries of her com- rades. Then, with a long cry, she disappeared again toward Lake County and the . clearer air. At length it seemed to me as if the flood were beginning to sub- side. 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 hght 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. 178 U/orKs of lioberfc Couij Steuepjoij 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 treetops appearing and disappearing in the spray. The air struck with a little chill, and set me coughing. It smelled strong of the fog, hke 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 occu- pied 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 famil- iar 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 Jlpe Siluerado Squatters 179 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 worie a different appearance from what I had beheld at day- break. 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 unsub- merged; 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 in- stantly into the bottom of the valleys, following the water-shed; and the hilltops 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 vapor 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 dissatis- fied, still the ear waited for something more. Had this indeed been water (as it seemed so, to the eye), with 180 U/orK5 of F^obert Couij Steuepgoij what a plunge of reverberating thunder would it have roUed upon its course, disemboweling mountains and deracinating pines! And yet water it was, and sea- water at that — true Pacific billows, only somewhat rare- fied, 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 favored nook in which it lay. The sunny plain of fog was several hundred feet higher; behind the protecting spur a gigantic accumulation of cottony vapor threat- ened, with every second, to blow over and submerge our homestead; biit the vortex setting past the ToU House was too strong; and there lay our little plat- foi-m, 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 moun- tain 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 inhabit- ing 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 Eussian campaign for that sea- son. 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. 7^^ Silu^rado Squatters 181 THE TOLL HOUSE The Toll House, standing alone by the wayside un- der nodding pines, with its streamlet and water-tank; its backwoods, toll-bar, and well-trodden croquet ground; the hostler 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 neighbors, except the Han- sons up the hill. The trafiSc on the road was infini- tesimal; only, at rare intervals, a couple in a wagon, or a dusty farmer on a spring-board, toihng over "the gr§,de" 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 schoolma'am boarded at the Toll House, walking thence in the morning to the httle brown shanty, where she taught the young ones of the dis- trict, and returning thither pretty weary in the after- noon. She had chosen this outlying situation, I under- stood, for her health. Mr. Corwin was consvunptive ; so was Bufe; so was Mr. Jennings, the engineer. In 183 U/orK5 of I^obert Couij Steuepjoi) short, the place was a kind of small Davos: consump- tive 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. Cor win and Rufe did as little as possible; and if the schoolma'am, poor lady, had to work pretty hard all morning, she subsided when it was oyer into much the same dazed beatitude as all the rest. Her special corner was the parlor — a very genteel room, with Bible prints, a crayon portrait of Mrs. Cor- win 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 traveler had ill requited his reception. His book, in short, was a capital in- stance of the Penny Messalina school of literature; and there arose from it, in that cool parlor, 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 an- other 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 Pat- 7^e Siluerado Squatters 183 terson, director of the Evangelical Society." To follow the evolutions of that reverend gentleman, who goes through scenes in which even Mr. Duffield would hesi- tate 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 six- penny "Ouida" figured. So literature, you see, was not unrepresented. The schoolma'am had friends to stay with her, other schoolma'ams enjoying their hohdays, quite a bevy of damsels. They seemed never to go out or not beyond the veranda, but sat close in the little parlor, quietly talking or hstening 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 news- paper, and the resting schoolma'ams in the parlor 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 hostler 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 184 U/orKs of F^obert Couis SteuepsoQ 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 upoa 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 slumber- ing hostlery, 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 I The heartfelt bustle of that hour is hardly credible; the thrill of the great shower of let- ters 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 pres- ence; gauged and divined them, loved and hated; and stood light-headed in tbat storm of human electricity. Yes, like Piccadilly Circus, this is also one of life's Jlje Siluerado Squatterj 185 crossing-placjes. Here I beheld one man, already famous or infamous, a center of pistol-shots: and another who, if not yet known to rumor, 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 Mp; redolent of whisky, playing cards, and pis- tols; swaggering in the bar with the lowest assumption of the lowest European manners; rapping out black- guard English oaths in his canorous oriental voice; and combining in one person the depravities of two races and two civilizations. For all his lust and vigor, he seemed to look cold upon me from the vaUey 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 feU in talk with another of these flitting strangers — like the rest, in his shirt-sleeves and aU berimed with dust — and the next minute we were discussing Paris and London, theaters and wines. To him, journeying from one human place to another, this was a trifle; but to me! No, Mr. LiUie, I have not forgotten it. And presently the city-tide was at its flood and be- gan to ebb. Life runs in Piccadilly Circus, say, from nine to one, and then, there also, ebbs into the small hours of the echoing pohceman 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 van- ished, the towering dust subsided in the woods; but there was still an interval before the flush had fallen 186 U/orl^5 of f^oberfc Couis Stcuepjop on your cheeks, before the ear became once more con- tented with the silence, or the seven sleepers of the Toll House dozed back to their accustomed corners. Yet a little, and the hostler 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 gray, 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. Jlpi; Silu^rado Squatters 187 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 realize the difficulties of our position. "We had found what an amount of labor 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 re- turned. We could have given him a whole house to himself, self-contained, as they say in the advertise- ments; and on the money question we were prepared to go far. Kong Sam Kee, the Calistoga washerman, was intrusted with the affair; and from day to day it languished on, with protestations on our part and mel- lifluous excuses on the part of Kong Sam Kee. At length, about half- past eight of our last evening, with the wagon 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 rumors of Silverado. 188 U/orKs of H°'*®'^t Coui5 Steuepjop 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 Utle earnings at the game of tan; and he first backed out for more money; and then, when that demand was satisfied, refused to come pointblank. He was wedded to his wash-houses; he had no taste for the rural life; and we must go to our mountain serv- antless. 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 in- flections. We were not, however, to return alone; for we brought vnth us Joe Strong, the painter, a most good- natured comrade and a capital hand at an omelette. I do not know in what 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 un- duly; it must have been half -past nine before we left Calistoga, and night came fully ere we struck the bot- tom of the grade. I have never seen such a night. It seemed to throw calumny in the teeth of all the paint- ers that ever dabbled in starlight. The sky itself was of a ruddy, powerful, nameless, changing color, dark and glossy Hke a serpent's back. The stars, by in- numerable 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 Jl^e Silverado Squatterj 189 dyed in every sort of color — red, like fire; blue, like steel; green, like the tracks of sunset; and so sharply did each stand forth in its own luster that there was no appearance of that flat, star-spangled arch we know so well in pictures, but all the hoUow of heaven was one chaos of contesting luminaries — a burly 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 suc- cessive 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 splendor 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 a while, 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 wagonful; and, swim- ming low among the trees, we beheld a strange, mis- shapen, 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." 190 U/orKs of F^obert Couis Stcuepsop So sings Mr. Trowbridge, with a noble inspiration. And so had the sunlight flooded that pale islet of the moon, and her lighted 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 traveled, we had seen for a little while that brave display of the mid- night 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 hur icane, 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 splendor that shone upon us in that drive. Two in our wagon knew night as she shines upon the tropics, but even that bore no comparison. The name- less color 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. Sam, 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 wagon turned and drove away, the noise gently dying in the woods, and we clambered up the rough path, Caliban's Jife Siluerado Squatters 191 great feat of engineering, and came home to Silve- rado. The moon shone in at the eastern doors and win- dows, 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 dis- cordant squalls. But once we had lighted 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 Strong, 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 honor of our return, and trooped at length one after another -up the flying bridge of plank, and lay 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 peo- ple. 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. 19-Z U/orKs of Robert Couij Steuepsoij EPISODES IN THE STQRY 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 pre- cariously nodded — these stood for its greatness; while, the dog-hutch, bootjacks, old boots, old tavern bills, and the very beds that we inherited from bygone miners, put in human touches and realized for us the story of the past. I have sat on an old sleeper, under the thick ma- dronas near the forge, with just a look over the dump 7^^ Silverado Squatters 193 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, ham- mer 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, mak- ing 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 suc- ceeded 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 dwelHng under canvas, and one roofed house for the sale of whisky. Round on the western side of Mount Saint Helena there was, at the lame date, a second large encampment, its name, if it 'ever had one, lost for me. Both of these have per- ished, 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 Stevenson. Vol. III.— 9 194 U/orKs of H°^®''t Couij Steuepjoi) these slaps and shafts and tunnels, and in turn declined and died away. " Our noisy years seem moments in the wake 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 fol- lowed, in quest of the remainder, a great drifting and tunneling in all directions, and a great consequent effusion of doUars, 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 devi- ous 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 be- fore 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 dis- patched to the city as the proper product of the mine. Jl?<5 Silverado Squatters 196 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 hav- ing 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 reflec- tion, 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 a while with better and worse fortune. So, through a defective window-pane, you may see the passerby shoot up into a hunchbacked 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 196 U/orKs of r^obert Couis Steuepsoi? 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 tak- ing 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 remem- bered? 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 27 th 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 X??^ Silverado Squatters 197 idea what it was to be. And suppose Ronalds came? we asked. She received the idea with derision, laughing aloud with aU 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 de- spair, and bid Rufe, "Jump into your pants and shoes, and show me where this old mine is, anyway!" See- ing that Ronalds had laid out so much money in the spot, and that a beaten road led right up to the bot- tom of the dump, I thought this a remarkable ex- ample. The sense of locality must be singularly in abeyance in the case of Ronalds. That same evening, supper comfortably over, Joe Strong busy at work on a drawing of the duipp and the opposite hills, we were all out on the platform to- gether, sitting there, under the tented heavens, with the same sense of privacy as if we had been cabined in a parlor, 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 neighbors. And presently, sure enough, two town gentlemen, with cigars and kid gloves, came debouching past the house. They looked in that place hke 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." 198 U/orl^s of I^obert Couis Steuepsoij 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 Uke favors, and strode magisteri- ally by us toward the shaft and tunnel. Presently we heard his voice raised to his com- panion. "We drifted every sort of way, but couldn't strike the ledge." Thei 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 apologized. 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 cham- pagne, and hope the order of the day. Ninety thou- sand 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 Xl?e Siluerado Squatters 199 was cut at 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 toward 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 po- sition as Old Rowley, that royal humorist, 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 coun- try — with doggerel rhymes and contumelious pictures, and announcing, in terms unnecessarily figurative, that the trick was already played, the claim already jumped, and Master Sam the legitimate successor of Mr. Ron- alds. 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, 300 U/orKs of F^obert Couis Steuepsoi} with a hundredth part as many holes in it as our bar- rack, must long ago have gone to her last port. Up to that time I had always imagined Mrs. Hanson's lo- quacity 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 noth-~ ing, 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, hovTOver, 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 oldest to the youngest; — arrived in a procession, tailing one behind another up the path. Call- Jl^e Silverado Squatters 201 ban 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, an- other on the wagon 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. Meantime 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 volu- bility, 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 high- way 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, follow- ing his example, led him up the plank into our bar- rack. There he bestowed himself on a box, and un- rolled his papers with fastidious deliberation. There were two sheets of note-paper, and an old mining no- tice, dated May 30, 1879, part print, part manuscript, 202 U/orl^s of F^obert Couis Steuepsop 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 busi- ness, 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, tiU 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 "depytize," with a strong accent on the last. So friendly and so free are popular institutions. When I had done my scnvening, 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 Xl?^ Silu<5rado Squatt^rj 203 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 CaUs- toga before, and he seemed to feel safety in returning to that. And BO the history of that mine became once more plunged in darkness, Ughted only by some monster py- rotechnical 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 moun- tains, with not a dozen neighbors, and yet struggled all the while, like desperate swimmers, in this sea of falsities and contradictions. "Wherever a man is, there will be a he. 204 U/orl^s of I^obert Couis SteuepsoQ 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 dwelhng-place, always airy and dry, and haunted by the outdoor per- fumes of the glen. Within, it had the look of habi- tation, the human look. You had only to go into the third room, which we did not use, and see its stones, its sifting 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 lit- tle 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 shat- tered, 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 Tl^e Silverado Squatter^ 205 time, some of the comforts of a roof and much of the gayety and brightness of al fresco life. A single shower of rain, to be sure, and we should have been drowned out Uke mice. But ours was a Californian summer, and an earthquake was a far Ukeher 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 parlor. 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 com- manded some of Napa Valley, where the train ran, and the httle 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 visi- tors. 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 la- borious, dAvindled into mere islets of business in a sea of sunny day-time; 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 morn- ing. I rose before any one else, lighted the stove, put on the water to boil, and strolled forth upon the plat- form 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 206 U/orK5 of Robert Coufj Steuepjoi) 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, Uke a blackbird or a nightingale; it was mere woodland prat- tle, 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 la- bored single handed in the palace, and I lay or wan- dered on the platform at my own sweet will. The lit- tle 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 en- counters over Euclid, and the Latin Grammar. These were known as Sam'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 civilization, and the sound of his la- bors 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 T^e Siluerado Squafcterj 207 platform in any direction, it was usual to lay a course, following as much as possible the line of wagon 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 hked to draw water. It was pleasant to dip the gray metal pail into the clean, colorless, cool water; pleas- ant 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 Sam's deUght 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 ap- proach the margin of the dump. Anywhere else, you took your life in your right hand when you came U/orKs of P^obert Couis Steueijsop 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 neigh- borhood of an old mine is a place beset with dangers. For as still as Silverado was, at any moment the re- port 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 up- right 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 bowlder. 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 moist- ure 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 neigh- borhood 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 Tl?e Silverado Squatterj 309 stones sparkled white in the sunshine with quartz; they were all stained red with cinnabar. Here, doubt- less, came the Indians of yore to paint their faces for the warpath; and cinnabar, if I remember rightly, was one of the few articles of Indian commerce. Now, Sam 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 flavor of poetry, compounded out of Indian story and Hawthornden's allusion: " Desire, alas ! desire a Zeuxis new, From Indies borrowing gold, from Eastern skies Most bright oinoper . . ." Yet this is but half the picture; our Silverado plat- form 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 bowlders, a flower garden bloomed as at home in a conservatory. Cal- canthus crept, like a hardy weed, all over our rough parlor, 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 Medi- terranean 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 chapar- ral 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 hun- dreds of feet into the outer air. 210 U/orKs of Robert Couij Sfceuepsop 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 pros- perous 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 moun- tain, a laboratory of poignant scents. It was an end- less wonder to my mind, as I dreamed about the plat- form, following the progress of the shadows, where the madrona with its leaves, the azalea and calcanthus with their blossoms, could fine moisture to support such thick, wet, waxy growths, or the bay tree collect the ingredi- ents 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 en- thralling about his performance. You listened and Ust- ened,' thinking each time he must surely get it right; but no, it was always wrong, and always wrong the Xl?i? Silui?rado Squatters 211 same way. Yet he seemed proud of his song, deliv- ered 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 emi- grants 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 rat- tlesnakes — the rattlesnake's 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 forever 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 cer- tain pleasant nook among azalea and calcanthus, the rattles whizzing on every side like spinning-wheels, and 312 U/orKs of F(obert Couis Steuepsoi) 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 toward 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 re- turn, we attacked the Hansons on the subject. They had formerly assured us that our canyon was favored, 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 monstroiis 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 stone and gravel scaurs, Here and there a big bowlder sat quiescent on a knoll, hav- Ji)e Silverado Squatterg 213 ing 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 honor, 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, igno- rantly 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 California lions on the mountain; and a grizzly visited Rufe's poultry yard not long before, to the unspeakable alann 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 northwest of Silverado, spending his sum- mer 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 mum- mified 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 214 U/orKs of F^obert Couis Steuepsoij 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 sun- shine. 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 acci- dent. 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 neighbors; 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 Ufe so shadowed and troubled, continually shaken with alarm, and the tear of elegant sentiment permanently in his eye. There was another neighbor 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 7^e Silverado Squatterj 215 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 storehouse, 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 labors, and from time to time a dainty shower of saw- dust would faU 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 wUl 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 mo- tionless 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 pei*iod as he ranged westward through the heavens. The two birds cackled a while 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 216 U/orKs of r^obert Couis Stev/epjop 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 civilization. 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 an- nounced 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 dawn- ing of the stars, as they increased their glittering com- pany; good, too, to gather stones, and send them crash- ing down the chute, a wave of light. It seemed, in some way, the reward and the fulfillment 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, ^Iso, 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. Tl;^ Silverado Squatters 217 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 hlipu- tian 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 plat- form, 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 bedward 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 Stevenson. Voi,. III. — 10 218 U/orKs of I^obert Couis Steuepjop 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 fellowmen. Miles and miles away upon the opposite hilltops, if there were any hunter belated or any traveler who had lost his way, he must have stood, and watched and wondered, from the time the candle issued from the door of the as- sayer's office till it had mounted the plank and disap- peared again into the miners' dormitory. END OF "the SILVERADO SQUATTERS" WILL O' THE MILL WILL O' THE MILL THE PLAIN AND THE STARS The Mill where Will lived with his adopted parents stood in a falling valley between pinewoods and great mountains. Above, hill after hill soared upward until they soared out of the depth of the hardiest timber, and stood naked against the sky. Some way up, a long gray village lay Uke a seam or a rag of vapor on a wooded hillside; and when the wind was favorable, the sound of the church bells would drop down, thin and silvery, to "Will. Below, the valley grew ever steeper and steeper, and at the same time widened out on either hand; and from an eminence beside the mill it was pos- sible to see its whole length and away beyond it over a wide plain, where the river turned and shone, and moved on from city to city on its voyage toward the sea. It chanced that over this valley there lay a pass into a neighboring kingdom; so that, quiet and rural as it was, the road that ran along beside the river was a high thoroughfare between two splendid and powerful societies. All through the summer, traveling-carriages came crawl- ing up, or went plunging briskly downward past the mill; and as it happened that the other side was very much easier of ascent, the path was not much frequented, (321) 2'i'i U/orK5 of I^obert Couig Steuepjop except by people going in one direction; and of all the carriages that Will saw go by, five-sixths were plung- ing briskly downward and only one-sixth crawling up. Much more was this the case with foot-passengers. All the light-footed tourists, all the peddlers laden with strange wares, were tending downward like the river that accompanied their path. Nor was this all; for when Will was yet a child a disastrous war arose over a great part of the world. The newspapers were full of defeats and victories, the earth rang with cavalry hoofs, and often for days together and for miles around the coil of battle terrified good people from their labors in the field. Of all this, nothing was heard for a long time in the valley; but at last one of the commanders pushed an army over the pass by forced marches, and for three days horse and foot, cannon and tumbril, drum and standard, kept pouring downward past the mill. All day the child stood and watched them on their passage — the rhythmical stride, the pale, unshaven faces tanned about the eyes, the discolored regimentals and the tattered flags, filled him with a sense of weariness, pity, and wonder; and all night long, after he was in bed, he could hear the cannon pounding and the feet trampling, and the great armament sweeping onward and down- ward past the mill. No one in the valley ever heard the fate of the expedition, for they lay out of the way of gossip in those troublous times; but Will saw one thing plainly, that not a man returned. Whither had they all gone? Whither went all the tourists and ped- dlers with strange wares? whither all the brisk barouches with servants in the dicky? whither the water of the stream, ever coursing downward and ever renewed from U/ill o' tl7(? /I\ill 223 above? Even the 'wind blew oftener down the valley, and carried the dead leaves along with it in the fall. It seemed like a great conspiracy of things animate and inanimate; they all went downward, fleetly and gayly downward, and only he, it seemed, remained behind, like a stock upon the wayside. It sometimes made him glad when he noticed how the fishes kept their heads up stream. They, at least, stood faithfully by him, while aU else were posting downward to the unknown world. One evening he asked the miller where the river went. "It goes down the valley," answered he, "and turns a power of mills — six score mills, they say, from here to Unterdeck — and it none the wearier after all. And then it goes out into the lowlands, and waters the great corn country, and runs through a sight of fine cities (so they say) where kings live all alone in great palaces, with a sentry walking up and down before the door. And it goes under bridges with stone men upon them, looking down and smiling so curious at the water, and living folks leaning their elbows on the wall and look- ing over too. And then it goes on and on, and down through marshes and sands, until at last it falls into the sea, where the ships are that bring parrots and to- bacco from the Indies. Ay, it has a long trot before it as it goes singing over our weir, bless its heart!" "And what is the sea?" asked Will. "The sea!" cried the miller. "Lord help us all, it is the greatest thing God madel That is where all the water in the world runs down into a great salt lake. There it lies, as flat as my hand and as innocent-like as a child; but they do say when the wind blows it 5*24 U/orKs of I^obert Couis Stcuepsoi) gets up into water-mountains bigger than any of ours, and swallows down great ships bigger than our mill> and makes such a roaring that you can hear it miles away upon the land. There are great fish in it five times bigger than a bull, and one old serpent as long as our river and as old as all the world, with whiskers like a man, and a crown of silver on her head." Will thought he had never heard anything like this, and he kept on asking question after question about the world that lay away down the rvier, with all its perils and marvels, until the old miller became quite interested himself, and at last took him by the hand 'and led him to the hilltop that overlooks the valley and the plain. The sun was near setting, and hung low down in a cloudless sky. Everything was defined and glorified in golden light. Will had never seen so great an expanse of country in his life; he stood and gazed with all his eyes. He could see the cities, and the woods and fields, and the bright curves of the river, and far away to where the rim of the plain trenched along the shining heavens. An overmastering emotion seized upon the boy, soul and body; his heart beat so thickly that he could not breathe; the scene swam before his eyes; the sun seemed to wheel round and round, and throw off, as it turned, strange shapes which disappeared with the rapid- ity of thought, and were succeeded by others. Will cov- ered his face with his hands, and burst into a violent fit of tears; and the poor miller, sadly disappointed and perplexed, saw nothing better for it than to take him up in his arms and carry him home in silence. From that day forward Will was full of new hopes and longings. Something kept tugging at his heart- strings; the running water carried his desires along with it as he dreamed over its fleeting surface; the wind, as it ran over innumerable treetops, hailed him with encouraging words; branches beckoned downward; the- open road, as it shouldered round the angles and went turning and vanishing fast and faster down the valley, tortured him with its solicitations. He spent long whiles on the eminence, looking down the rivershed and abroad on the fat lowlands, and watched the clouds that traveled fjrth upon the sluggish wind and trailed their purple shadows on the plain; or he would linger by the wayside, and follow the carriages with his eyes as they rattled downward by the river. It did not matter what it was; everything that went that way, were it cloud or carriage, bird or brown water in the stream, he felt his heart flow out after it in an ecstasy of longing. "We are told by men of science that all the ventures of mariners on the sea, all that counter-marching of tribes and races that confounds old history with its dust and rumor, sprang from nothing more abstruse than the laws of supply and demand, and a certain natural in- stinct for cheap rations. To any one thinking deeply, this will seem a dull and pitiful explanation. The tribes that came swarming out of the North and East, if they were indeed pressed onward from behind by others, were drawn at the same time by the magnetic influence of the South and West. The fame of other lands had reached them; the name of the Eternal City rang in their ears; they were not colonists, but pilgrims; they traveled toward wine and gold and sunshine, but their hearts were set on something higher. That divine un- rest, that old stinging trouble of humanity that makes 226 U/orKs of Robert Couij Steueijsoi) all high achievements and all miserable failmre, the same that spread wings with Icarus, the same that sent Co- lumbus into the desolate Atlantic, inspired and supported these barbarians on their perilous march. There is one legend which profoundly represents their spirit, of how a flying party of these wanderers encountered a very old man shod with iron. The old man asked them whither they were going; and they answered with one voice: "To the Eternal City!" He looked upon them gravely. "I have sought it," he said, "ovei the most part of the world. Three such pairs as I now carry on my feet have I worn out upon this pilgrimage, and now the fourth is growing slender underneath my steps. And all this while I have not found the city." And he turned and went his own way alone, leaving them astonished. And yet this would scarcely parallel the intensity of Will's feeling for the plain. If he could only go far enough out there, he felt as if his eyesight would be purged and clarified, as if his hearing would grow more deUcate, and his very breath would come and go with luxury. He was transplanted and withering where he was; he lay in a strange country and was sick for home. Bit by bit, he pieced together broken notions of the world below: of the river, ever moving and grow- ing until it sailed forth into the majestic ocean; of the cities, full of brisk and beautiful people, playing foun- tains, bands of music and marble palaces, and lighted up at night from end to end with artificial stars of gold; of the great churches, wise universities, brave armies, and untold money lying stored in vaults; of the high-flying vice that moved in the sunshine, and U/ill o' tl?(? /I\ill 237 the stealth and swiftness of midnight murder. I have said he was sick as if for home: the figure halts. He was like some one lying in twilighted, formless pre-ex- istence, and stretching out his hands lovingly toward many-colored, many-sounding life. It was no wonder he was unhappy, he would go and tell the fish: they were made for their life, wished for no more than worms and running water, and a hole below a falling bank; but he was differently designed, full of desires and as- pirations, itching at the fingers, lusting with the eyes, whom the whole variegated world could not satisfy with aspects. The true life, the true bright sunshine, lay far out upon the plain. And, oh! to see this sunlight once before he died! to move with a jocund spirit in a golden land! to hear the trained singers and sweet church bells, and see the holiday gardens! "And, oh, fish!" he would cry, "if you would only turn your noses down stream^ you could swim so easily into the fabled waters and see the vast ships passing over your head like clouds, and hear the great water-hills making music over you all day long!" But the fish kept looking patiently in their own direction, until Will hardly knew whether to laugh or cry. Hitherto the traffic on the road had passed by Will, like something seen in a picture: he had perhaps ex- changed salutations with a tourist, or caught sight of an old gentleman in a traveling cap at a carriage win- dow; but for the most part it had been a mere sym- bol, which he contemplated from apart and with some- thing of a superstitious feeling. A time came at last when this was to be changed. The miller, who was a greedy man in his way, and never forewent an oppor- 328 U/orl^s of F^obert Couis Steueijsop tunity of honest profit, turned the mill-house into a lit- tle wayside inn, and, several pieces of good fortune fall- ing in opportunely, built stables and got the position of post master on the road. It now became Will's duty to wait upon people, as they sat to break their fasts in the little arbor at the top of the mill garden; and you may be sure that he kept his ears open, and learned many new things about the outside world as he brought the omelette or the wine. Nay, he would often get into conversation with single guests, and by adroit questions and poUte attention, not only gratify his own curiosity, but win the goodwill of the travelers. Many compli- mented the old couple on their serving-boy; and a pro- fessor was eager to take him away with him, and have him properly educated in the plain. The miller and his wife were mightily astonished and even more pleased. They thought it a very good thing that they should have opened their inn. "You see," the old man would're- mark, "he has a kind of talent for a publican; he never would have made anything else!" And so life wagged on in the valley, with high satisfaction to all concerned but Will. Every carriage that left the inn door seemed to take a part of him away with it; and when people jestingly offered him a lift, he could with difficulty command his emotion. Mght after night he would dream that he was awakened by flustered servants, and that a splendid equipage waited at the door to carry him down into the plain; night after night; until the dream, which had seemed all jollity to him at first, began to take on a color of gravity, and the nocturnal summons and waiting equipage occupied a place in his mind as something to be both feared and hoped for. U/ill o' tl7(? /I\!n 239 One day, when Will was about sixteen, a fat young man arrived at sunset to pass the night. He was a contented-looking fellow, with a jolly eye, and carried a knapsack. "While dinner was preparing, he sat in the arbor to read a book; but as soon as he had begun to observe Will, the book was laid aside; he was plainly one of those who prefer living people to people made of ink and paper. WiU, on his part, although he had not been much interested in the stranger at first sight, soon began to take a great deal of pleasure in his talk, which was full of good nature and good sense, and at last conceived a great respect for his character and wisdom. They sat far into the night; and about two in the morning Will opened his heart to the young man, and told him how he longed to leave the valley and what bright hopes he had connected with the cities of the plain. The young man whistled, and then broke into a smile. "My young friend," he remarked, "you are a very curious little fellow to be sure, and wish a great many things which you will never get. Why, you would feel quite ashamed if you knew how the Uttle fellows in these fairy cities of yours are all after the same sort of nonsense, and keep breaking their hearts to get up into the mountains. And let me teU you, those who go down into the plains are a very short while there be- fore they wish themselves heartily back again. The air is not so light nor so pure; nor is the sun any brighter. As for the beautiful men and women, you would see many of them in rags and many of them deformed with horrible disorders; and a city is so hard a place for people who are poor and sensitive that many choose to die by their own hand." ^30 U/orKe of I^obert Couis Steuei)800 "You must think me very simple," answered WilL "Although I have never been out of this valley, believe me, I have used my eyes. I know how one thing lives on another; for instance, how the fish hangs in the eddy to catch his fellows; and the shepherd, who makes so pretty a picture cairying home the lamb, is only carry- ing it home for dinner. I do not expect to find all things right in your cities. That is not what troubles me; it might have been that once upon a time; but although I live here always, I have asked many ques- tions and learned a great deal in these last years, and certainly enough to cure me of my old fancies. But you would not have me die Uke a dog and not see all that is to be seen, and do all that a man can do, let it be good or evil? you would not have me spend all my days between this road here and the river, and not so much as make a motion to be up and live my life? — I would rather die out of hand," he cried, "than linger on as I am doing." "Thousands of people," said the young man, "live and die like you, and are none the less happy." "Ah!" said Will, "if there are thousands who would like, why should not one of them have my place?" It was quite dark; there was a hanging lamp in the arbor which lighted up the table and the face of the speakers; and along the arch, the leaves upon the trellis stood out illuminated against the night sky, a pattern of transparent green upon a dusky purple. The fat young man rose, and, taking Will by the arm, led him out under the open heavens. "Did you ever look at the stars?" he asked, point- ing upward. U/ill o' tl?(? /I\lll 231 "Often and often," answered . WilL "And- do you know what they are?" "I have fancied many things." "They are worlds Hke ours," said the young man. "Some of them less; many of them a miUion times greater; and some of the least sparkles that you see are not only worlds, but whole clusters of worlds turn- ing about each other in the midst of space. We do not know what there may be in any of them; perhaps the answer to all our difficulties or the cure of aU our suf- ferings: and yet we can never reach them; not all the skill of the craftiest of men can fit out a ship for the nearest of these our neighbors, nor would the life of the most aged suffice for such a journey. When a great battle h£is been lost or a dear friend is dead, when we are hipped or in high spirits, there they are unweariedly shining overhead. We may stand down here, a whole army of us together, and shout until we break our hearts, and not a whisper reaches them. We may chmb the highest mountain, and we are no nearer them. All we can do is to stand down here in the garden and take off our hats; the starshine hghts upon our heads, and where mine is a little bald, I daresay you can see it ghsten in the darkness. The mountain and the mouse. That is like to be all we shall ever have to do with Arcturus or Aldebaran. Can you apply a parable?" he added, laying his hand upon Will's shoul- der. "It is not the same thing as a reason, but usually vastly more convincing." WiU hung his head a little, and then raised it once more to heaven. The stars seemed to expand and emit a sharper brilliancy; and as he kept turning his eyes 332 U/orl^5 of Robert Couij Steuepjop higher and higher, they seemed to increase in multitude under his gaze. "I see," he said, turning to the young man. "We are in a rat trap." "Something of that size. Did you ever see a squirrel turning in a cage? and another squirrel sitting philo- sophically over his nuts? I needn't ask you which of them looked more of a fool." THE PARSON'S MARJORY After some years the old people died, both in one winter, very carefully tended by their adopted son, and very quietly mourned when they were gone. People who had heard of his roving fancies supposed he would hasten to sell the property, and go down the river to push his fortunes. But there was never any sign of such an in- tention on the part of Will. On the contrary, he had the inn set on a better footing, and hired a couple of servants to assist him in carrying it on; and there he settled down, a kind, talkative, inscrutable young man, six feet three in his stockings, with an iron constitution and a friendly voice. He soon began to take rank in the district as a bit of an oddity: it was not much to be wondered at from the first, for he was always full of notions, and kept calling the plainest common-sense in question; but what most raised the report upon him was the odd circumstance of his courtship with the par- son's Marjory. The parson's Marjory was a lass about nineteen, U/ill o' tl?<{ /I^ill 233 when Will would be about thirty; well enough looking, and much better educated than any other girl in that part of the country, as became her parentage. She held her head very high, and had already refused several offers of marriage with a grand air, which had got her hard names among the neighbors. For all that she was a good girl, and one that would have made any man well contented. "Will had never seen much of her; for although the church and parsonage were only two miles from his own door, he was never known to go there but on Sundays. It chanced, however, that the parsonage fell into disre- pair, and had to be dismantled; and the parson and his daughter took lodgings for a month or so, on very much reduced terms, at Will's inn. Now, what with the inn, and the miU, and the old miller's savings, our friend was a man of substance; and besides that, he had a name for good temper and shrewdness, which make a capital portion in marriage; and so it was cur- rently gossiped, among their ill-wishers, that the parson and his daughter had not chosen their temporary lodg- ing with their eyes shut. Will was about the last man in the world to be cajoled or frightened into marriage. You had only to look into his eyes, limpid and stiU like pools of water, and yet with a sort of clear light that seemed to come from within, and you would un- derstand at once that here was one who knew his own mind, and would stand to it immovably. Marjory her- self was no weakling by her looks, with strong, steady eyes and a resolute and quiet bearing. It might be a question whether she was not Will's match in steadfast- ness, after all, or which of them would rule the roast 334 U/or^s of I^obert Couis Steueijsoi) in marriage. But Marjory had never given it a thought, and accompanied her father with the most unshaken in- nocence and unconcern. The season was still so early that Will's customers were few and far between; but the lilacs were already flowering, and the weather was so mild that the party took dinner under the treUis, with the noise of the river in their ears and the woods ringing about them with the songs of birds. Will soon began to take a particular pleasure in these dinners. The parson was rather a dull companion, with a habit of dozing at table; but nothing rude or cruel ever fell from his lips. And as for the parson's daughter, she suited her sur- roundings with the best grace imaginable; and what- ever she said seemed so pat and pretty that Will con- ceived a great idea of her talents. He could see her face, as she leaned forward, against a background of rising pinewoods; her eyes shone peaceably; the light lay around her hair like a kerchief; something that was hardly a smile rippled her pale cheeks, and Will could not contain himself from gazing on her in an agreeable dismay. She looked, even in her quietest moments, so complete in herself, and so quick with life down to her finger-tips and the very skirts of her dress, that the re- mainder of created things became no more than a blot by comparison; and if Will glanced away from her to her surroundings, the trees looked inanimate and seuse- less, the clouds hung in heaven like dead things, and even the mountain tops were disenchanted. The whole valley could not compare in looks with this one girl. Will was always observant in the society of his fel- low-creatures; but his observation became almost pain- U/ill o' ti)80i> "Since Marjory was taken," returned Will, "I de- clare before God you were the only friend I had to look for." So the pair went arm-in-arm across the courtyard. One of the servants awoke about this time and heard the noise of horses pawing before he dropped asleep again; all down the valley that night there was a rushing as of a smooth and steady wind descending toward the plain; and when the world rose next morning, sure enough Will o' the Mill had gone at last upon hia travels. $M END OF VOLUME THREE .^