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[
THE BIOGRAPHICAL EDITION
OF THE WORKS OF
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
THE BIOGRAPHICAL EDITION
OF STEVENSON'S WORKS
NOVELS AND ROMANCES
TREASURE ISLAND
PRINCE OTTO
KIDNAPPED
THE BLACK ARROW
THE MASTER OF BALLANTRAE
THE WRONG BOX
THE WRECKER
DAVID BALE OUR
THE EBB-TIDE
WEIR OF HERMISTON
ST. IVES
SHORTER STORIES
NEW ARABIAN NIGHTS
THE DYNAMITER
THE MERRY MEN, containing DR. JEKYLL
AND MR. HYDE
ISLAND NIGHTS' ENTERTAINMENTS
ESSA YS, TRA VELS &> SKETCHES
AN INLAND VOYAGE
TRAVELS WITH A DONKEY
VIRGINIBUS PUERISQUE
FAMILIAR STUDIES
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT, containing THE
SILVERADO SQUATTERS
MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS
IN THE SOUTH SEAS
ACROSS THE PLAINS
ESSAYS OF TRAVEL AND IN THE ART OF
WRITING
LAY MORALS AND OTHER PAPERS
POEMS
COMPLETE POEMS
THE LETTERS OF ROBERT LOUIS
STEVENSON. 4 vols.
THE LIFE OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
By Graham Balfour. Abridged Edition in one volume
Thirty-one vohimes. Sold singly or in sets
Per volume. Cloth, $1.00; Limp Leather, $1.25 net
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, NEW YORK
71 U ^,,
BIOGRAPHICAL EDlT^Ow^\ *
THE p*"'""
AMATEUR EMIGRANT
THE
SILVERADO SQUATTERS
BY
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
WITH A PREFACE BT MRS. STEVENSON
DISCARDED
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1911
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT
Copyright, 1895
BY STONE & KIMBALL
Copyright, IQOJ
BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
PREFACE
TO
THE BIOGRAPHICAL EDITION
ONE of the closest friends of my husband's
youth was a clever young man whose life,
up to that time, had been mostly spent in
hospitals. Embittered by poverty and suffering,
his turbulent spirit revolted against law and society,
and he had become an ardent socialist. I remember
meeting, in his house, a party of Russian anar-
chists, Stepniak among them, who greeted him as
" brother," shouting and laughing like schoolboys
on a holiday, and declaring that if they could only
meet my husband face to face they would soon make
a convert of him. Indeed, up to a certain point, he
sympathized with the socialists. He could not think
of the innocent victims of civilization the men
who only asked for work, and could get none, while
their children were starving without raging
against the existing order of things ; while his own
comfortable circumstances filled him with shame
when he contemplated the hardships of those less
fortunate than himself. But, unlike his friend, he
Copyright, 1905, by Charles Scribner's Sons
vi PREFACE
could suggest no remedy; the assassination of
individuals and bomb-throwing seeming to him
not only barbaric, but silly and futile.
While he could see no royal road for others, the
path for himself showed plainly enough before him,
and it was his duty to swerve neither to the right
nor the left. He believed he had no rights, only
undeserved indulgences. He must not eat unearned
bread, but must pay the world, in some fashion, for
what it gave him, first, materially, then in kind-
ness, sympathy, and love. Class distinctions, so
strictly observed in England, he could not tolerate
and never gave the slightest heed to their limita-
tions. " Ladies?" he said in reply to an obser-
vation by a visitor, " one of the truest ladies in
Bournemouth, Mrs. Waats, is at this moment wash-
ing my study windows." Once, coming upon a
crowd of young roughs who were tormenting a
wretched drunken creature of the streets, he pushed
his way through them, and amid their jeers offered
his arm to the woman and escorted her to the place
she called home. " Don Quixote," he once said to
my son, with a startled look, " why, I am Don
Quixote ! " Too much ease frightened him ; he
would occasionally insist on some sharp discomfort,
such as sleeping on a mat on the floor, or dining
on a ship's biscuit, to awaken him, as he said, to
realities; and nothing pleased him more than to
PREFACE vii
risk his life or health to serve another. Yet he
never succeeded in wholly subduing the " old
Adam " within him. Meanness or falsity or
cruelty set his eyes blazing, and his language on
such occasions became far from parliamentary.
Naturally his first visit to America, a land
without class distinctions, was to him an event of
extraordinary interest. The privations he endured
as an amateur emigrant caused him much less
suffering than his friends, who could not imagine
themselves in a similar position, supposed. It was
not the first time he had associated with the work-
ing-man on terms of equality ; nor did it occur to
him that it was a condescension on his part to join
with his fellow-passengers in their attempts to
make the time pass pleasantly, or to do for them
what little kindly offices came in his way. One
thing he did resent with bitterness the visits of
the first-class passengers, who came out of curios-
ity into the steerage, looking about as though they
were passing through a menagerie. He never for-
gave "your wife, my good man?" "Why," he
would ask, " should I be her good man any more
than she my good woman? Her question, and
manner of putting it, made me understand a great
many things."
I remember, when we were living in Hyeres, his
receiving a letter from England that enclosed a
viii PREFACE
petition asking for the release of a noted anarchist
who was said to be dying in a French prison. This
man, said the letter, had thrown everything away
for the " cause," his entire fortune, his title,
and his birthright as a subject of Russia, to which
he could never return; while comparatively young
in years, he presented the appearance of an old
man, with hair prematurely white and his health
broken by confinement in a damp, unsanitary prison.
My husband's name was to head the list. " Poor
devil," he said, as he dipped his pen in the ink.
But he laid it down again thoughtfully, and, in-
stead of signing the petition, wrote a letter stating
that he had read the trial, and asking why the
Russian gentleman had refused to say whether he
had had a hand in the blowing up of a working-
man's cafe in Lyons, in which catastrophe many
persons, mostly peasants with their families, had
been killed or shockingly injured. He could not,
he said, withhold his admiration for a man who had
given so much, but he could and would withhold
his signature until he was satisfied on this point.
No such assurance being forthcoming, the petition
was returned with the remark " I think Monsieur
had better complete his sacrifice by dying in
prison."
For street musicians and wandering performers
acrobats, jugglers, etc. my husband showed
PREFACE ix
an understanding and sympathy that always won
their confidence. " We 're in the same boat," he
would say, " earning our bread by amusing the
public." " I always divide with a brother artist,"
he would remark, as he emptied his pockets into
their hands. His acquaintance with such people,
and his knowledge of the lives they led, gave him
an almost morbid sense of the pitiless cruelty of
modern civilization. It was only his strong intelli-
gence and common sense that kept him from the
ranks of the anarchists. He came to America with
exaggerated views of the meaning of democracy,
believing that there he would find the ideal social
as well as political life. In the beginning he en-
countered many rude shocks, but he soon readjusted
his point of view, though he never ceased regretting
that this great country should have been lost to
England. The name of George the Third was
hardly to be spoken in his presence. " Had it not
been for that idiot," he would cry, " we should now
be one nation." Of New York, at this time, he
saw very little, but on a later visit grew to love it
as he would not have thought possible when he
first arrived in America. A particularly attractive
spot to him was Washington Square, where he
spent many hours sitting on the benches under the
trees enjoying the frank conversation of the chil-
dren who used the park as a playground. On one
ri
x PREFACE
memorable occasion he passed an afternoon there
with Mark Twain.
At first the apparent rudeness of the average
American repelled him, but when he found that
the gentlest, most kindly acts accompanied the
off-hand address, his heart warmed towards his
" younger brother." In San Francisco he made
many friendships that were only broken by death,
Mr. and Mrs. Virgil Williams, to whom he dedi-
cated The Silverado Squatters: Dr. Chismore, Dr.
Willy, Judge Rearden, who recognized a kindred
spirit in the unknown, shabbily dressed young Scot
living in the poor little lodging house on Bush
Street kept by Mr. and Mrs. Carson. For the last
few years on each thirteenth of November a small
band of those who love to do honour to my hus-
band's memory have met in San Francisco to
celebrate his birthday. Nor would the party be
considered complete without Jules Simoneau, now
far past eighty years of age, but still as clear in
mind and as strong in heart as when my husband
first knew him in Monterey, the best beloved of all
the friends of that time of adversity.
The journey by emigrant train across the conti-
nent was an experience far worse than that on
shipboard, but through all the fatigue and active
misery of it my husband managed to keep his diary
posted up to date, and two months later, in Mon-
PREFACE xi
terey, he wrote to Mr. Colvin : " The Amateur
Emigrant is about half drafted. It was from
Monterey that he also wrote to Mr. Colvin : " I
am a reporter for the Monterey Calif ornian at a
salary of two dollars a week ! " From this feeble
joke the most foolish tales have arisen, and grown
in the re-telling, of his having been a reporter con-
nected with a San Francisco paper. The Monterey
Calif ornian was a tiny sheet that was hardly in a
position to pay any one so much as two dollars a
week. The editor was also the printer and did all
the work on his paper with his own hands. The
idea of a reporter in a place where " the popula-
tion is about that of a dissenting chapel on a wet
Sunday . . . mostly Mexican and Indian," was
thought very amusing by both my husband and
Mr. Bronson, the editor, but some one seems to
have taken it very seriously.
The Amateur Emigrant was partly written in
Monterey, and almost finished in San Francisco
under the most depressing circumstances of ill
health, poverty, and letters of adverse criticism
from friends in England. In an unfinished letter
dated Calistoga, June 4, 1880, he writes: "To-
day at last I send the last of the Double Damned
Emigrant. It was all written, after a fashion,
months ago, before I caved in ; yet I have not had
the pluck and strength to finish copying these few
xii PREFACE
sheets before to-day. The attempt has cost me
many a heavy heart. ... I have done a quaint
action I have sent three of my poems to the
Atlantic Monthly, and a fourth, heaven of heavens !
to Stephen ! 1 I am not mad ; only a poet."
F. V. DE G. S.
1 Leslie Stephen, at that time editing an English magazine.
TO
ROBERT ALAN MOWBRAY STEVENSON
Our friendship was not only founded before we were born
by a community of blood, but is in itself near as old as my
life. It began with our early ages, and, like a history, has
been continued to the present time. Although we may not be
old in the world, we are old to each other, having so long been
intimates. We are now widely separated, a great sea and con-
tinent intervening; but memory, like care, mounts into iron
ships and rides post behind the horseman. Neither time nor
space nor enmity can conquer old affection ; and as I dedicate
these sketches, it is not to you only, but to all in the old
country, that I send the greeting of my heart.
R. L. S.
1879.
CONTENTS
PAGE
THE SECOND CABIN , 3
EARLY IMPRESSIONS 14
STEERAGE SCENES 27
STEERAGE TYPES 39
THE SICK MAN 55
THE STOWAWAYS 69
PERSONAL EXPERIENCE AND REVIEW 88
NEW YORK 104
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT
FROM THE CLYDE TO SANDY HOOK
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT
THE SECOND CABIN
I FIRST encountered my fellow-passengers on
the Broomielaw in Glasgow. Thence we
descended the Clyde in no familiar spirit,
but looking askance on each other as on possible
enemies. A few Scandinavians, who had already
grown acquainted on the North Sea, were friendly
and voluble over their long pipes; but among
English speakers distance and suspicion reigned
supreme. The sun was soon overclouded, the wind
freshened and grew sharp as we continued to de-
scend the widening estuary; and with the falling
temperature the gloom among the passengers in-
creased. Two of the women wept. Any one
who had come aboard might have supposed we
were all absconding from the law. There was
scarce a word interchanged, and no common senti-
ment but that of cold united us, until at length,
having touched at Greenock, a pointing arm and
a rush to the starboard now announced that our
ocean steamer was in sight. There she lay in
mid-river, at the tail of the Bank, her sea-signal
4 THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT
flying: a wall of bulwark, a street of white deckr
houses, an aspiring forest of spars, larger than
a church, and soon to be as populous as many an
incorporated town in the land to which she was to
bear us.
I was not, in truth, a steerage passenger. Al-
though anxious to see the worst of emigrant life,
I had some work to finish on the voyage, and was
advised to go by the second cabin, where at least
I should have a table at command. The advice
was excellent; but to understand the choice, and
what I gained, some outline of the internal disposi-
tion of the ship will first be necessary. In her very
nose is Steerage No. i, down two pair of stairs.
A little abaft, another companion, labelled Steer-
age No. 2 and 3, gives admission to three galleries,
two running forward towards Steerage No. i ; and-
the third aft towards the engines. The starboard
forward gallery is the second cabin. Away abaft
the engines and below the officers' cabins, to com-
plete our survey of the vessel, there is yet a third
nest of steerages, labelled 4 and 5. The second
cabin, to return, is thus a modified oasis in the very
heart of the steerages. Through the thin partition
you can hear the steerage passengers being sick,
the rattle of tin dishes as they sit at meals, the
varied accents in which they converse, the crying
of their children terrified by this new experience,
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 5
or the clean flat smack of the parental hand in
chastisement.
There are, however, many advantages for the
inhabitant of this strip. He does not require to
bring his own bedding or dishes, but finds berths
and a table completely if somewhat roughly fur-
nished. He enjoys a distinct superiority in diet;
but this, strange to say, differs not only on different
ships, but on the same ship according as her head
is to the east or west. In my own experience, the
principal difference between our table and that of
the true steerage passenger was the table itself,
and the crockery plates from which we ate. But
lest I should show myself ungrateful, let me re-
capitulate every advantage. At breakfast, we had
a choice between tea and coffee for beverage; a
choice not easy to make, the two were so surpris-
ingly alike. I found that I could sleep after the
coffee and lay awake after the tea, which is proof
conclusive of some chemical disparity; and even
by the palate I could distinguish a smack of snuff
in the former from a flavour of boiling and dish-
cloths in the second. As a matter of fact, I have
seen passengers, after many sips, still doubting
which had been supplied them. In the way of eat-
ables at the same meal we were gloriously favoured ;
for in addition to porridge, which was common
to all, we had Irish stew, sometimes a bit of fish,
6 THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT
and sometimes rissoles. The dinner of soup, roast
fresh beef, boiled salt junk, and potatoes, was,
I believe, exactly common to the steerage and the
second cabin; only I have heard it rumoured that
our potatoes were of a superior brand ; and twice a
week, on pudding-days, instead of duff, we had a
saddle-bag filled with currants under the name of
a plum-pudding. At tea we were served with some
broken meat from the saloon; sometimes in the
comparatively elegant form of spare patties or ris-
soles; but as a general thing, mere chicken-bones
and flakes of fish, neither hot nor cold. If these
were not the scrapings of plates their looks belied
them sorely; yet we were all too hungry to be
proud, and fell to these leavings greedily. These,
the bread, which was excellent, and the soup and
porridge, which were both good, formed my whole
diet throughout the voyage, so that except for the
broken meat and the convenience of a table I might
as well have been in the steerage outright. Had
they given me porridge again in the evening, I
should have been perfectly contented with the fare.
As it was, with a few biscuits and some whisky
and water before turning in, I kept my body going
and my spirits up to the mark.
The last particular in which the second cabin
passenger remarkably stands ahead of his brother
of the steerage is one altogether of sentiment. In
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 7
the steerage there are males and females; in the
second cabin ladies and gentlemen. For some time
after I came aboard I thought I was only a male;
but in the course of a voyage of discovery between
decks, I came on a brass plate, and learned that I
was still a gentleman. Nobody knew it, of course.
I was lost in the crowd of males and females, and
rigorously confined to the same quarter of the deck.
Who could tell whether I housed on the port or
starboard side of steerage No. 2 and 3 ? And it was
only there that my superiority became practical;
everywhere else I was incognito, moving among
my inferiors with simplicity, not so much as a
swagger to indicate that I was a gentleman after
all, and had broken meat to tea. Still, I was like
one with a patent of nobility in a drawer at home ;
and when I felt out of spirits I could go down and
refresh myself with a look of that brass plate.
For all these advantages I paid but two guineas.
Six guineas is the steerage fare; eight that by the
second cabin; and when you remember that the
steerage passenger must supply bedding and dishes,
and, in five cases out of ten, either brings some
dainties with him, or privately pays the steward
for extra rations, the difference in price becomes
almost nominal. Air comparatively fit to breathe,
food comparatively varied, and the satisfaction of
being still privately a gentleman, may thus be had
8 THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT
almost for the asking. Two of my fellow-pas-
sengers in the second cabin had already made the
passage by the cheaper fare, and declared it was
an experiment not to be repeated. As I go on to
tell about my steerage friends, the reader will
perceive that they were not alone in their opinion.
Out of ten with whom I was more or less intimate,
I am sure not fewer than five vowed, if they
returned, to travel second cabin; and all who had
left their wives behind them assured me they would
go without the comfort of their presence until
they could afford to bring them by saloon.
Our party in the second cabin was not perhaps
the most interesting on board. Perhaps even in
the saloon there was as much good-will and char-
acter. Yet it had some elements of curiosity.
There was a mixed group of Swedes, Danes, and
Norsemen, one of whom, generally known by the
name of " Johnny," in spite of his own protests,
greatly diverted us by his clever, cross-country
efforts to speak English, and became on the
strength of that an universal favourite it takes
so little in this world of shipboard to create a popu-
larity. There was, besides, a Scots mason, known
from his favourite dish as " Irish Stew," three or
four nondescript Scots, a fine young Irishman,
O'Reilly, and a pair of young men who deserve a
special word of condemnation. One of them was
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 9
Scots ; the other claimed to be American ; admitted,-
after some fencing, that he was born in England;
and ultimately proved to be an Irishman born and
nurtured, but ashamed to own his country. He
had a sister on board, whom he faithfully neglected
throughout the voyage, though she was not only
sick, but much his senior, and had nursed and
cared for him in childhood. In appearance he was
like an imbecile Henry the Third of France. The
Scotsman, though perhaps as big an ass, was not so
dead of heart; and I have only bracketed them
together because they were fast friends, and dis-
graced themselves equally by their conduct at
the table.
Next, to turn to topics more agreeable, we had
a newly married couple, devoted to each other, with
a pleasant story of how they had first seen each
other years ago at a preparatory school, and that
very afternoon he had carried her books home for
her. I do not know if this story will be plain to
Southern readers ; but to me it recalls many a school
idyll, with wrathful swains of eight and nine con-
fronting each other stride-legs, flushed with jeal-
ousy ; for to carry home a young lady's books was
both a delicate attention and a privilege.
Then there was an old lady, or, indeed I am not
sure that she was as much old as antiquated and
strangely out of place, who had left her husband,
io THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT
and was travelling all the way to Kansas by her-
self. We had to take her own word that she was
married; for it was sorely contradicted by the tes-
timony of her appearance. Nature seemed to have
sanctified her for the single state; even the colour
of her hair was incompatible with matrimony, and
her husband, I thought, should be a man of saintly
spirit and phantasmal bodily presence. She was ill,
poor thing; her soul turned from the viands; the
dirty tablecloth shocked her like an impropriety;
and the whole strength of her endeavour was bent
upon keeping her watch true to Glasgow time till
she should reach New York. They had heard
reports, her husband and she, of some unwarrant-
able disparity of hours between these two cities;
and with a spirit commendably scientific, had
seized on this occasion to put them to the proof.
It was a good thing for the old lady ; for she passed
much leisure time in studying the watch. Once,
when prostrated by sickness, she let it run down.
It was inscribed on her harmless mind in letters ,
of adamant that the hands of a watch must never
be turned backwards; and so it behoved her to lie
in wait for the exact moment ere she started it
again. When she imagined this was about due,
she sought out one of the young second-cabin Scots-
men, who was embarked on the same experiment
as herself and had hitherto been less neglectful.
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT n
She was in quest of two o'clock; and when she
learned it was already seven on the shores of
Clyde, she lifted up her voice and cried " Gravy ! "
I had not heard this innocent expletive since I was
a young child; and I suppose it must have been
the same with the other Scotsmen present, for we
all laughed our fill.
Last but not least, I come to my excellent friend
Mr. Jones. It would be difficult to say whether
I was his right-hand man, or he mine, during the
voyage. Thus at table I carved, while he only
scooped gravy; but at our concerts, of which more
anon, he was the president who called up perform-
ers to sing, and I but his messenger who ran his
errands and pleaded privately with the over-modest.
I knew I liked Mr. Jones from the moment I saw
him. I thought him by his face to be Scottish;
nor could his accent undeceive me. For as
there is a lingua franca of many tongues on the
moles and in the feluccas of the Mediterranean, so
there is a free or common accent among English-
speaking men who follow the sea. They catch a
twang in a New England port; from a cockney
skipper, even a Scotsman sometimes learns to drop
an h; a word of a dialect is picked up from another
hand in the forecastle; until often the result is
undecipherable, and you have to ask for the man's
place of birth. So it was with Mr. Jones. I
12 THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT
thought him a Scotsman who had been long to sea ;
and yet he was from Wales, and had been most of
his life a blacksmith at an inland forge; a few
years in America and half a score of ocean voyages
having sufficed to modify his speech into the com-
mon pattern. By his own account he was both
strong and skilful in his trade. A few years back,
he had been married and after a fashion a rich man ;
now the wife was dead and the money gone. But
his was the nature that looks forward, and goes
on from one year to another and through all the
extremities of fortune undismayed; and if the sky
were to fall to-morrow, I should look to see Jones,
the day following, perched on a step-ladder and
getting things to rights. He was always hovering
round inventions like a bee over a flower, and
lived in a dream of patents. He had with him a
patent medicine, for instance, the composition of
which he had bought years ago for five dollars
from an American pedlar, and sold the other day
for a hundred pounds (I think it was) to an
English apothecary. It was called Golden Oil,
cured all maladies without exception; and I am
bound to say that I partook of it myself with good
results. It is a character of the man that he was
not only perpetually dosing himself with Golden
Oil, but wherever there was a head aching or a
finger cut, there would be Jones with his bottle.
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 13
If he had one taste more strongly than another,
it was to study character. Many an hour have we
two walked upon the deck dissecting our neighbours
in a spirit that was too purely scientific to be called
unkind; whenever a quaint or human trait slipped
out in conversation, you might have seen Jones and
me exchanging glances; and we could hardly go
to bed in comfort till we had exchanged notes and
discussed the day's experience. We were then like
a couple of anglers comparing a day's kill. But
the fish we angled for were of a metaphysical
species, and we angled as often as not in one
another's baskets. Once, in the midst of a serious
talk, each found there was a scrutinising eye upon
himself; I own I paused in embarrassment at this
double detection; but Jones, with a better civility,
broke into a peal of unaffected laughter, and
declared, what was the truth, that there was a pair
of us indeed.
EARLY IMPRESSIONS
WE steamed out of the Clyde on Thurs-
day night, and early on the Friday fore-
noon we took in our last batch of
emigrants at Lough Foyle, in Ireland, and said
farewell to Europe. The company was now com-
plete, and began to draw together, by inscrutable
magnetisms, upon the decks. There were Scots
and Irish in plenty, a few English, a few Ameri-
cans, a good handful of Scandinavians, a German
or two, and one Russian; all now belonging for
ten days to one small iron country on the deep.
As I walked the deck and looked round upon my
fellow-passengers, thus curiously assorted from all
northern Europe, I began for the first time to
understand the nature of emigration. Day by day
throughout the passage, and thenceforward across
all the States, and on to the shores of the Pacific,
this knowledge grew more clear and melancholy.
Emigration, from a word of the most cheerful
import, came to sound most dismally in my ear.
There is nothing more agreeable to picture and
nothing more pathetic to behold. The abstract
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 15
idea, as conceived at home, is hopeful and adventur-
ous. A young man, you fancy, scorning restraints
and helpers, issues forth into life, that great battle,
to fight for his own hand. The most pleasant
stories of ambition, of difficulties overcome, and of
ultimate success, are but as episodes to this great
epic of self-help. The epic is composed of indi-
vidual heroisms; it stands to them as the victori-
ous war which subdued an empire stands to the
personal act of bravery which spiked a single can-
non and was adequately rewarded with a medal.
For in emigration the young men enter direct
and by the shipload on their heritage of work;
empty continents swarm, as at the bo'sun's whistle,
with industrious hands, and whole new empires
are domesticated to the service of man.
This is the closet picture, and is found, on trial,
to consist mostly of embellishments. The more I
saw of my fellow-passengers, the less I was tempted
to the lyric note. Comparatively few of the men
were below thirty ; many were married, and encum-
bered with families; not a few were already up in
years; and this itself was out of tune with my
imaginations, for the ideal emigrant should cer-
tainly be young. Again, I thought he should offer
to the eye some bold type of humanity, with bluff
or hawk-like features, and the stamp of an eager
and pushing disposition. Now those around me
16 THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT
were for the most part quiet, orderly, obedient
citizens, family men broken by adversity, elderly
youths who had failed to place themselves in life,
and people who had seen better days. Mildness
was the prevailing character; mild mirth and mild
endurance. In a word, I was not taking part in
an impetuous and conquering sally, such as swept
over Mexico or Siberia, but found myself, like
Marmion, " in the lost battle, borne down by the
flying."
Labouring mankind had in the last years, and
throughout Great Britain, sustained a prolonged
and crushing series of defeats. I had heard
vaguely of these reverses ; of whole streets of houses
standing deserted by the Tyne, the cellar-doors
broken and removed for firewood; of homeless
men loitering at the street-corners of Glasgow
with their chests beside them; of closed factories,
useless strikes, and starving girls. But I had never
taken them home to me or represented these dis-
tresses livingly to my imagination. A turn of the
market may be a calamity as disastrous as the
French retreat from Moscow; but it hardly lends
itself to lively treatment, and makes a trifling figure
in the morning papers. We may struggle as we
please, we are not born economists. The individual
is more affecting than the mass. It is by the scenic
accidents, and the appeal to the carnal eye, that for
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 17
the most part we grasp the significance of trage-
dies. Thus it was only now, when I found myself
involved in the rout, that I began to appreciate
how sharp had been the battle. We were a com-
pany of the rejected; the drunken, the incom-
petent, the weak, the prodigal, all who had been
unable to prevail against circumstances in the one
land, were now fleeting pitifully to another; and
though one or two might still succeed, all had
already failed. We were a shipful of failures, the
broken men of England. Yet it must not be sup-
posed that these people exhibited depression. The
scene, on the contrary, was cheerful. Not a tear
was shed on board the vessel. All were full of
hope for the future, and showed an inclination
to innocent gaiety. Some were heard to sing,
and all began to scrape acquaintance with small
jests and ready laughter.
The children found each other out like dogs, and
ran about the decks scraping acquaintance after
their fashion also. " What do you call your
mither ? " I heard one ask. " Mawmaw," was the
reply, indicating, I fancy, a shade of difference in
the social scale. When people pass each other on
the high seas of life at so early an age, the contact
is but slight, and the relation more like what we
may imagine to be the friendship of flies than that
of men ; it is so quickly joined, so easily dissolved,
18 THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT
so open in its communications and so devoid of
deeper human qualities. The children, I observed,
were all in a band, and as thick as thieves at a
fair, while their elders were still ceremoniously
manoeuvring on the outskirts of acquaintance.
The sea, the ship, and the seamen were soon as
familiar as home to these half-conscious little ones.
It was odd to hear them, throughout the voyage,
employ shore words to designate portions of the
vessel. " Go' 'way doon to yon dyke," I heard
one say, probably meaning the bulwark. I often
had my heart in my mouth, watching them climb
into the shrouds or on the rails, while the ship
went swinging through the waves; and I admired
and envied the courage of their mothers, who sat
by in the sun and looked on with composure at
these perilous feats. " He '11 maybe be a sailor,"
I heard one remark ; " now 's the time to learn." I
had been on the point of running forward to inter-
fere, but stood back at that, reproved. Very few
in the more delicate classes have the nerve to look
upon the peril of one dear to them ; but the life of
poorer folk, where necessity is so much more imme-
diate and imperious, braces even a mother to this
extreme of endurance. And perhaps, after all, it is
better that the lad should break his neck than that
you should break his spirit.
And since I am here on the chapter of the
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 19
children, I must mention one little fellow, whose
family belonged to Steerage No. 4 and 5, and who,
wherever he went, was like a strain of music
round the ship. He was an ugly, merry, unbreeched
child of three, his lint-white hair in a tangle, his
face smeared with suet and treacle; but he ran to
and fro with so natural a step, and fell and picked
himself up again with such grace and good-
humour, that he might fairly be called beautiful
when he was in motion. To meet him, crowing
with laughter and beating an accompaniment to
his own mirth with a tin spoon upon a tin cup,
was to meet a little triumph of the human species.
Even when his mother and the rest of his family
lay sick and prostrate around him, he sat upright
in their midst and sang aloud in the pleasant
heartlessness of infancy.
X Throughout the Friday, intimacy among us men
made but a few advances. We discussed the
probable duration of the voyage, we exchanged
pieces of information, naming our trades, what
we hoped to find in the new world, or what we
were fleeing from in the old; and, above all, we
condoled together over the food and the vileness
of the steerage. One or two had been so near
famine that you may say they had run into the
ship with the devil at their heels; and to these all
seemed for the best in the best of possible steamers.
20 THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT
But the majority were hugely discontented. Com-
ing as they did from a country in so low a state
as Great Britain, many of them from Glasgow,
which commercially speaking was as good as dead,
and many having long been out of work, I was
surprised to find them so dainty in their notions.
I myself lived almost exclusively on bread, por-
ridge, and soup, precisely as it was supplied to
them, and found it, if not luxurious, at least suffi-
cient. But these working men were loud in their
outcries. It was not " food for human beings,"
it was " only fit for pigs," it was " a disgrace."
Many of them lived almost entirely upon biscuit,
others on their own private supplies, and some paid
extra for better rations from the ship. This mar-
vellously changed my notion of the degree of
luxury habitual to the artisan. I was prepared to
hear him grumble, for grumbling is the traveller's
pastime; but I was not prepared to find him turn
away from a diet which was palatable to myself.
Words I should have disregarded, or taken with
a liberal allowance; but when a man prefers dry
biscuit there can be no question of the sincerity
of his disgust.
With one of their complaints I could most
heartily sympathise. A single night of the
steerage had filled them with horror. I had myself
suffered, even in my decent second-cabin berth,
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 21
from the lack of air ; and as the night promised to
be fine and quiet, I determined to sleep on deck,
and advised all who complained of their quarters
to follow my example. I dare say a dozen of others
agreed to do so, and I thought we should have
been quite a party. Yet, when I brought up my
rug about seven bells, there was no one to be
seen but the watch. That chimerical terror of good
night-air, which makes men close their windows,
list their doors, and seal themselves up with their
own poisonous exhalations, had sent all these
healthy workmen down below. One would think
we had been brought up in a fever country; yet in
England the most malarious districts are in the
bedchambers.
I felt saddened at this defection, and yet half
pleased to have the night so quietly to myself. The
wind had hauled a little ahead on the starboard
bow, and was dry but chilly. I found a shelter
near the fire-hole, and made myself snug for the
night. The ship moved over the uneven sea with
a gentle and cradling movement. The ponderous,
organic labours of the engine in her bowels occu-
pied the mind, and prepared it for slumber. From
time to time a heavier lurch would disturb me as
I lay, and recall me to the obscure borders of con-
sciousness; or I heard, as it were through a veil,
the clear note of the clapper on the brass and the
22 THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT
beautiful sea-cry, " All 's well ! " I know nothing,
whether for poetry or music, that can surpass the
effect of these two syllables in the darkness of a
night at sea.
The day dawned fairly enough, and during the
early part we had some pleasant hours to improve
acquaintance in the open air ; but towards nightfall
the wind freshened, the rain began to fall, and the
sea rose so high that it was difficult to keep one's
footing on the deck. I have spoken of our con-
certs. We were indeed a musical ship's company,
and cheered our way into exile with the fiddle, the
accordion, and the songs of all nations. Good, bad,
or indifferent Scottish, English, Irish, Russian,
German, or Norse, the songs were received with
generous applause. Once or twice, a recitation,
very spiritedly rendered in a powerful Scottish
accent, varied the proceedings ; and once we sought
in vain to dance a quadrille, eight men" of us
together, to the music of the violin. The per-
formers were all humourous, frisky fellows, who
loved to cut capers in private life; but as soon as
they were arranged for the dance, they conducted
themselves like so many mutes at a funeral. I
have never seen decorum pushed so far; and as
this was not expected, the quadrille was soon
whistled down, and the dancers departed under a
cloud. 7 Eight Frenchmen, even eight Englishmen
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 23
from another rank of society, would have dared
to make some fun for themselves and the spec-
tators ; but the working man, when sober, takes an
extreme and even melancholy view of personal
deportment. A fifth-form schoolboy is not more
careful of dignity. He dares not be comical; his
fun must escape from him unprepared, and above
all, it must be unaccompanied by any physical
demonstration. I like his society under most cir-
cumstances, but let me never again join with him
in public gambols.
But the impulse to sing was strong, and tri-
umphed over modesty and even the inclemencies
of sea and sky. On this rough Saturday night, we
got together by the main deck-house, in a place
sheltered from the wind and rain. Some cling-
ing to a ladder which led to the hurricane-deck,
and the rest knitting arms or taking hands, we
made a ring to support the women in the violent
lurching of the ship; and when we were thus dis-
posed, sang to our hearts' content. Some of the
songs were appropriate to the scene; others strik-
ingly the reverse. Bastard doggrel of the music-
hall, such as, " Around her splendid form, I weaved
the magic circle," sounded bald, bleak, and pitifully
silly. " We don't want to fight, but, by Jingo, if
we do," was in some measure saved by the vigour
and unanimity with which the chorus was thrown
24 THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT
forth into the night. I observed a Platt-Deutsch
mason, entirely innocent of English, adding
heartily to the general effect. And perhaps the
German mason is but a fair example of the sin-
cerity with which the song was rendered; for
nearly all with whom I conversed upon the sub-
ject were bitterly opposed to war, and attributed
their own misfortunes, and frequently their own
taste for whisky, to the campaigns in Zululand
and Afghanistan.
Every now and again, however, some song that
touched the pathos of our situation was given
forth ; and you could hear by the voices that took up
the burden how the sentiment came home to each.
" The Anchor 's Weighed " was true for us. We
were indeed " Rocked on the bosom of the stormy
deep." How many of us could say with the singer,
" I 'm lonely to-night, love, without you," or " Go,
some one, and tell them from me, to write me a
letter from home ! " And when was there a more
appropriate moment for " Auld Lang Syne " than
now, when the land, the friends, and the affections
of that mingled but beloved time were fading
and fleeing behind us in the vessel's wake? It
pointed forward to the hour when these labours
should be overpast, to the return voyage, and to
many a meeting in the sanded inn, when those
who had parted in the spring of youth should again
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 25
drink a cup of kindness in their age. Had not
Burns contemplated emigration, I scarce believe
he would have found that note.
All Sunday the weather remained wild and
cloudy ; many were prostrated by sickness ; only five
sat down to tea in the second cabin, and two of
these departed abruptly ere the meal was at an end.
The Sabbath was observed strictly by the majority
of the emigrants. I heard an old woman express
her surprise that " the ship didna gae doon," as she
saw some one pass her with a chess-board on the
holy day. Some sang Scottish psalms. Many
went to service, and in true Scottish fashion came
back ill pleased with their divine. " I didna think
he was an experienced preacher," said one girl
to me.
It was a bleak, uncomfortable day ; but at night,
by six bells, although the wind had not yet moder-
ated, the clouds were all wrecked and blown away
behind the rim of the horizon, and the stars came
out thickly overhead. I saw Venus burning as
steadily and sweetly across this hurly-burly of the
winds and waters as ever at home upon the summer
woods. The engine pounded, the screw tossed
out of the water with a roar, and shook the ship
from end to end; the bows battled with loud
reports against the billows : and as I stood in the
lee-scuppers and looked up to where the funnel
26 THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT
leaned out, over my head, vomiting smoke, and
the black and monstrous topsails blotted, at each
lurch, a different crop of stars, it seemed as if all
this trouble were a thing of small account, and that
just above the mast reigned peace unbroken and
eternal.
STEERAGE SCENES
OUR companion (Steerage No. 2 and 3)
was a favourite resort. Down one flight
of stairs there was a comparatively large
open space, the centre occupied by a hatchway,
which made a convenient seat for about twenty
persons, while barrels, coils of rope, and the car-
penter's bench afforded perches for perhaps as
many more. The canteen, or steerage bar, was on
one side of the stair ; on the other, a no less attrac-
tive spot, the cabin of the indefatigable interpreter.
I have seen people packed into this space like
herrings in a barrel, and, many merry evenings
prolonged there until five bells, when the lights
were ruthlessly extinguished and all must go to
roost.
It had been rumoured since Friday that there
was a fiddler aboard, who lay sick and unmelo-
dious in Steerage No. I ; and on the Monday fore-
noon, as I came down the companion, I was saluted
by something in Strathspey time. A white-faced
Orpheus was cheerily playing to an audience of
white-faced women. It was as much as he could
28 THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT
do to play, and some of his hearers were scarce able
to sit ; yet they had crawled from their bunks at the
first experimental flourish, and found better than
medicine in the music. Some of the heaviest
heads began to nod in time, and a degree of anima-
tion looked from some of the palest eyes. Humanly
speaking, it is a more important matter to play
the fiddle, even badly, than to write huge works
upon recondite subjects. What could Mr. Darwin
have done for these sick women? But this fellow
scraped away; and the world was positively a bet-
ter place for all who heard him. We have yet to
understand the economical value of these mere
accomplishments. I told the fiddler he was a happy
man, carrying happiness about with him in his
fiddle-case, and he seemed alive to the fact.
" It is a privilege," I said. He thought awhile
upon the word, turning it over in his Scots head,
and then answered with conviction, " Yes, a
privilege."
That night I was summoned by " Merrily danced
the Quaker's wife " into the companion of Steerage
No. 4 and 5. This was, properly speaking, but a
strip across a deck-house, lit by a sickly lantern
which swung to and fro with the motion of the ship.
Through the open slide-door we had a glimpse of a
grey night sea, with patches of phosphorescent
foam flying, swift as birds, into the wake, and the
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 29
horizon rising and falling as the vessel rolled to
the wind. In the centre the companion ladder
plunged down sheerly like an open pit. Below, on
the first landing, and lighted by another lamp,
lads and lasses danced, not more than three at
a time for lack of space, in jigs and reels and horn-
pipes. Above, on either side, there was a recess
railed with iron, perhaps two feet wide and four
long, which stood for orchestra and seats of
honour. In the one balcony, five slatternly Irish
lasses sat woven in a comely group. In the other
was posted Orpheus, his body, which was con-
vulsively in motion, forming an odd contrast to
his somnolent, imperturbable Scots face. His
brother, a dark man with a vehement, interested
countenance, who made a god of the fiddler,
sat by with open mouth, drinking in the gen-
eral admiration and throwing out remarks to
kindle it.
" That 's a bonny hornpipe now," he would say,
" it 's a great favourite with performers ; they
dance the sand dance to it." And he expounded the
sand dance. Then suddenly, it would be a long
"Hush ! " with uplifted finger and glowing, sup-
plicating eyes; "he's going to play * Auld Robin
Gray ' on one string ! " And throughout this
excruciating movement, " On one string, that 's
on one string!" he kept crying. I would have
3 o THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT
given something myself that it had been on none ;
but the hearers were much awed. I called for a
tune or two, and thus introduced myself to the
notice of the brother, who directed his talk to me
for some little while, keeping, I need hardly men-
tion, true to his topic, like the seamen to the star.
" He 's grand of it," he said confidentially. " His
master was a music-hall man." Indeed the music-
hall man had left his mark, for our fiddler was
ignorant of many of our best old airs ; " Logic
o' Buchan," for instance, he only knew as a
quick, jigging figure in a set of quadrilles,
and had never heard it called by name. Perhaps,
after all, the brother was the more interesting
performer of the two. I have spoken with him
afterwards repeatedly, and found him always the
same quick, fiery bit of a man, not without brains ;
but he never showed to such advantage as when
he was thus squiring the fiddler into public note.
. There is nothing more becoming than a gen-
uine admiration; and it shares this with love,
that it does not become contemptible although
misplaced.
The dancing was but feebly carried on. The
space was almost impracticably small ; and the
Irish wenches combined the extreme of bashfulness
about this innocent display with a surprising impu-
dence and roughness of address. Most often, either
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 31
the fiddle lifted up its voice unheeded, or only a
couple of lads would be footing it and snapping
fingers on the landing. And such was the eager-
ness of the brother to display all the acquirements
of his idol, and such the sleepy indifference of
the performer, that the tune would as often as
not be changed, and the hornpipe expire into
a ballad before the dancers had cut half-a-dozen
shuffles.
In the meantime, however, the audience had been
growing more and more numerous every moment;
there was hardly standing-room round the top of
the companion; and the strange instinct of the
race moved some of the new-comers to close both
the doors, so that the atmosphere grew insupport-
able. It was a good place, as the saying is, to
leave.
Y The wind hauled ahead with a head sea. By ten
at night heavy sprays were flying and drumming
over the forecastle; the companion of Steerage
No. i had to be closed, and the door of communica-
tion through the second cabin thrown open. Either
from the convenience of the opportunity, or because
we had already a number of acquaintances in that
part of the ship, Mr. Jones and I paid it a late
visit. Steerage No. i is shaped like an isosceles
triangle, the sides opposite the equal angles bulg-
ing outward with the contour of the ship. It is
32 THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT
lined with eight pens of sixteen bunks apiece,
four bunks below and four above on either side.
At night the place is lit with two lanterns, one
to each table. As the steamer beat on her way
among the rough billows, the light passed through
violent phases of change, and was thrown to and
fro and up and down with startling swiftness.
You were tempted to wonder, as you looked, how
so thin a glimmer could control and disperse such
solid blackness. When Jones and I entered we
found a little company of our acquaintances
seated together at the triangular foremost table.
A more forlorn party, in more dismal circum-
stances, it would be hard to imagine. The motion
here in the ship's nose was very violent ; the uproar
of the sea often overpoweringly loud. The yellow
flicker of the lantern spun round and round and
tossed the shadows in masses. The air was hot,
but it struck a chill from its foetor. From all
round in the dark bunks, the scarcely human
noises of the sick joined into a kind of farmyard
chorus. In the midst, these five friends of mine
were keeping up what heart they could in company.
Singing was their refuge from discomfortable
thoughts and sensations. One piped, in feeble
tones, " Oh why left I my hame? " which seemed
a pertinent question in the circumstances. Another,
from the invisible horrors of a pen where he lay
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 33
dog-sick upon the upper shelf, found courage, in
a blink of his sufferings, to give us several verses
of the " Death of Nelson " ; and it was odd and
eerie to hear the chorus breathe feebly from all
sorts of dark corners, and " this day has done his
dooty " rise and fall and be taken up again in this
dim inferno, to an accompaniment of plunging,
hollow-sounding bows and the rattling spray-
showers overhead. X
All seemed unfit for conversation; a certain
dizziness had interrupted the activity of their
minds; and except to sing they were tongue-
tied. There was present, however,, one tall, power-
ful fellow of doubtful nationality, being neither
quite Scotsman nor altogether Irish, but of sur-
prising clearness of conviction on the highest
problems. He had gone nearly beside himself
on the Sunday, because of a general backward-
ness to indorse his definition of mind as " a
living, thinking substance which cannot be felt,
heard, or seen " nor, I presume, although he
failed to mention it, smelt. Now he came for-
ward in a cause with another contribution to our
culture.
" Just by way of change," said he, " I '11 ask
you a Scripture riddle. There 's profit in them
too," he added ungrammatically.
This was the riddle
3
34 THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT
CandP
Did agree
To cut down C ;
But C and P
Could not agree
Without the leave of G
All the people cried to see
The crueltie
Of C and P.
Harsh are the words of Mercury after the
songs of Apollo ! We were a long while over the
problem, shaking our heads and gloomily wonder-
ing how a man could be such a fool ; but at length
he put us out of suspense and divulged the fact
that C and P stood for Caiaphas and Pontius
Pilate.
I think it must have been the riddle that settled
us; but the motion and the close air likewise hur-
ried our departure. We had not been gone long,
we heard next morning, ere two or even three out
of the five fell sick. We thought it little wonder
on the whole, for the sea kept contrary all night.
I now made my bed upon the second cabin floor,
where, although I ran the risk of being stepped
upon, I had a free current of air, more or less
vitiated indeed, and running only from steerage to
steerage, but at least not stagnant; and from this
couch, as well as the usual sounds of a rough
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 35
night at sea, the hateful coughing and retching
of the sick and the sobs of children, I heard a man
run wild with terror beseeching his friend for
encouragement. " The ship's going down!" he
cried with a thrill of agony. " The ship 's going
down ! " he repeated, now in a blank whisper,
now with his voice rising towards a sob; and his
friend might reassure him, reason with him,
joke at him all was in vain, and the old cry
came back, " The ship 's going down ! " There
was something panicky and catching in the emo-
tion of his tones; and I saw in a clear flash what
an involved and hideous tragedy was a disaster
to an emigrant ship. If this whole parishful of
people came no more to land, into how many
houses would the newspaper carry woe, and what
a great part of the web of our corporate human
life would be rent across for ever !
The next morning when I came on deck I found
a new world indeed. The wind was fair; the sun
mounted into a cloudless heaven; through great
dark blue seas the ship cut a swath of curded
foam. The horizon was dotted all day with com-
panionable sails, and the sun shone pleasantly
on the long, heaving deck.
We had many fine-weather diversions to beguile
the time. There was a single chess-board and a
single pack of cards. Sometimes as many as
36 THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT
twenty of us would be playing dominoes for love.
Feats of dexterity, puzzles for the intelligence,
some arithmetical, some of the same order as the
old problem of the fox and goose and cabbage,
were always welcome; and the latter, I observed,
more popular as well as more conspicuously well
done than the former. We had a regular daily
competition to guess the vessel's progress; and
twelve o'clock, when the result was published in the
wheel-house, came to be a moment of considerable
interest. But the interest was unmixed. Not a bet
was laid upon our guesses. From the Clyde to
Sandy Hook I never heard a wager offered or
taken. We had, besides, romps in plenty. Puss
in the Corner, which we had rebaptised, in more
manly style, Devil and four Corners, was my own
favourite game; but there were many who pre-
ferred another, the humour of which was to box
a person's ears until he found out who had cuffed
him.
This Tuesday morning we were all delighted
with the change of weather, and in the highest
possible spirits. We got in a cluster like bees,
sitting between each other's feet under lee of the
deck-houses. Stories and laughter went around.
The children climbed about the shrouds. White
faces appeared for the first time, and began to
Lake on colour from the wind. I was kept hard
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 37
at work making cigarettes for one amateur after
another, and my less than moderate skill was
heartily admired. Lastly, down sat the fiddler in
our midst and began to discourse his reels, and jigs,
and ballads, with now and then a voice or two to
take up the air and throw in the interest of human
speech.
Through this merry and good-hearted scene
there came three cabin passengers, a gentleman
and two young ladies, picking their way with little
gracious titters of indulgence, and a Lady-Bounti-
ful air about nothing, which galled me to the quick.
I have little of the radical in social questions, and
have always nourished an idea that one person was
as good as another. But I began to be troubled by
this episode. It was astonishing what insults these
people managed to convey by their presence. They
seemed to throw their clothes in our faces. Their
eyes searched us all over for tatters and incongrui-
ties. A laugh was ready at their lips; but they
were too well-mannered to indulge it in our hear-
ing. Wait a bit, till they were all back in the
saloon, and then hear how wittily they would depict
the manners of the steerage. We were in truth
very innocently, cheerfully, and sensibly engaged,
and there was no shadow of excuse for the sway-
ing elegant superiority with which these damsels
passed among us, or for the stiff and waggish
38 THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT
glances of their squire. Not a word was said;
only when they were gone Mackay sullenly damned
their impudence under his breath; but we were
all conscious of an icy influence and a dead break
in the course of our enjoyment.
STEERAGE TYPES
WE had a fellow on board, an Irish-
American, for all the world like a
beggar in a print by Callot; one-
eyed, with great, splay crow's-feet round the
sockets; a knotty squab nose coming down over
his mustache; a miraculous hat; a shirt that
had been white, ay, ages long ago; an alpaca
coat in its last sleeves; and, without hyperbole,
no buttons to his trousers. Even in these rags and
tatters, the man twinkled all over with impudence
like a piece of sham jewellery; and I have heard
him offer a situation to one of his fellow-passengers
with the air of a lord. Nothing could overlie
such a fellow; a kind of base success was written
on his brow. He was then in his ill days; but I
can imagine him in Congress with his mouth full
of bombast and sawder. As we moved in the
same circle, I was brought necessarily into his
society. I do not think I ever heard him say any-
thing that was true, kind, or interesting; but there
was entertainment in the man's demeanour. You
might call him a half-educated Irish Tigg.
40 THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT
Our Russian made a remarkable contrast to this
impossible fellow. Rumours and legends were cur-
rent in the steerages about his antecedents. Some
said he was a Nihilist escaping; others set him
down for a harmless spendthrift, who had squan-
dered fifty thousand roubles, and whose father had
now despatched him to America by way of penance.
Either tale might flourish in security; there was
no contradiction to be feared, for the hero spoke
not one word of English. I got on with him lum-
beringly enough in broken German, and learnt
from his own lips that he had been an apothecary.
He carried the photograph of his betrothed in a
pocket-book, and remarked that it did not do her
justice. The cut of his head stood out from among
the passengers with an air of startling strangeness.
The first natural instinct was to take him for a
desperado; but although the features, to our
Western eyes, had a barbaric and unhomely cast,
the eye both reassured and touched. It was large
and very dark and soft, with an expression of
dumb endurance, as if it had often looked on des-
perate circumstances and never looked on them
without resolution.
He cried out when I used the word. " No, no,"
he said, " not resolution."
' The resolution to endure," I explained.
And then he shrugged his shoulders, and said,
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 41
" Ach, ja" with gusto, like a man who has been
flattered in his favourite pretensions. Indeed, he
was always hinting at some secret sorrow ; and his
life, he said, had been one of unusual trouble and
anxiety; so the legends of the steerage may have
represented at least some shadow of the truth.
Once, and once only, he sang a song at our con-
certs; standing forth without embarrassment, his
great stature somewhat humped, his long arms
frequently extended, his Kalmuck head thrown
backward. It was a suitable piece of music, as
deep as a cow's bellow and wild like the White
Sea. He was struck and charmed by the freedom
and sociality of our manners. At home, he said,
no one on a journey would speak to him, but those
with whom he would not care to speak ; thus un-
consciously involving himself in the condemnation
of his countrymen. But Russia was soon to be
changed; the ice of the Neva was softening under
the sun of civilisation; the new ideas, " wie einc
feine Violine," were audible among the big empty
drum notes of Imperial diplomacy; and he looked
to see a great revival, though with a somewhat in-
distinct and childish hope.
We had a father and son who made a pair of
Jacks-of-all-trades. It was the son who sang the
" Death of Nelson " under such contrarious cir-
cumstances. He was by trade a shearer of ship
42 THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT
plates; but he could touch the organ, had led two
choirs, and played the flute and piccolo in a profes-
sional string band. His repertory of songs was,
besides, inexhaustible, and ranged impartially from
the very best to the very worst within his reach.
Nor did he seem to make the least distinction be-
tween these extremes, but would cheerfully follow
up " Tom Bowling " with " Around her splendid
form."
The father, an old, cheery, small piece of man-
hood, could do everything connected with tinwork
from one end of the process to the other, use almost
every carpenter's tool, and make picture frames to
boot. "I sat down with silver plate every Sun-
day," said he, " and pictures on the wall. I have
made enough money to be rolling in my carriage.
But, sir," looking at me unsteadily with his bright
rheumy eyes, " I was troubled with a drunken
wife." He took a hostile view of matrimony in
consequence. " It 's an old saying," he remarked :
" God made 'em, and the devil he mixed 'em."
I think he was justified by his experience. It
was a dreary story. He would bring home three
pounds on Saturday, and on Monday all the clothes
would be in pawn. Sick of the useless struggle,
he gave up a paying contract, and contented him-
self with small and ill-paid jobs. " A bad job was
as good as a good job for me," he said; " it all
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 43
went the same way." Once the wife showed signs
of amendment ; she kept steady for weeks on end ;
it was again worth while to labour and to do one's
best. The husband found a good situation some
distance from home, and, to make a little upon
every hand, started the wife in a cook-shop; the
children were here and there, busy as mice ; savings
began to grow together in the bank, and the golden
age of hope had returned again to that unhappy
family. But one week my old acquaintance,
getting earlier through with his work, came home
on the Friday instead of the Saturday, and there
was his wife to receive him reeling drunk. He
" took and gave her a pair o' black eyes," for
which I pardoned him, nailed up the cook-shop
door, gave up his situation, and resigned himself
to a life of poverty, with the workhouse at the end.
As the children came to their full age they fled the
house, and established themselves in other coun-
tries; some did well, some not so well; but the
father remained at home alone with his drunken
wife, all his sound-hearted pluck and varied accom-
plishments depressed and negatived.
Was she dead now ? or, after all these years, had
he broken the chain, and run from home like a
schoolboy? I could not discover which ; but here at
least he was out on the adventure, and still one of
the bravest and most youthful men on board.
44 THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT
" Now, I suppose, I must put my old bones to
work again," said he; " but I can do a turn yet."
And the son to whom he was going, I asked, was
he not able to support him?
" Oh yes," he replied. " But I 'm never happy
without a job on hand. And I 'm stout; I can eat
a'most anything. You see no craze about me."
This tale of a drunken wife was paralleled on
board by another of a drunken father. He was
a capable man, with a good chance in life; but he
had drunk up two thriving businesses like a bottle
of sherry, and involved his sons along with him in
ruin. Now they were on board with us, fleeing his
disastrous neighbourhood.
Total abstinence, like all ascetical conclusions,
is unfriendly to the most generous, cheerful, and
human parts of man; but it could have adduced
many instances and arguments from among our
ship's company. I was one day conversing with
a kind and happy Scotsman, running to fat and
perspiration in the physical, but with a taste for
poetry and a genial sense of fun. I had asked him
his hopes in emigrating. They were like those of
so many others, vague and unfounded ; times were
bad at home; they were said to have a turn for
the better in the States; and a man could get on
anywhere, he thought. That was precisely the
weak point of his position ; for if he could get on
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 45
in America, why could he not do the same in Scot-
land? But I never had the courage to use that
argument, though it was often on the tip of my
tongue, and instead I agreed with him heartily,
adding, with reckless originality, " If the man stuck
to his work, and kept away from drink."
" Ah ! " said he slowly, " the drink ! You see,
that 's just my trouble."
He spoke with a simplicity that was touching,
looking at me at the same time with something
strange and timid in his eye, half ashamed, half
sorry, like a good child who knows he should be
beaten. You would have said he recognised a des-
tiny to which he was born, and accepted the conse-
quences mildly. Like the merchant Abudah, he
was at the same time fleeing from his destiny and
carrying it along with him, the whole at an expense
of six guineas.
As far as I saw, drink, idleness, and incompe-
tency were the three great causes of emigration,
and for all of them, and drink first and foremost,
this trick of getting transported overseas appears to
me the silliest means of cure. You cannot run
away from a weakness ; you must some time fight
it out or perish ; and if that be so, why not
now, and where you stand? Ccelum non animam.
Change Glenlivet for Bourbon, and it is still whisky,
only not so good. A sea-voyage will not give a
46 THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT
man the nerve to put aside cheap pleasure; emi-
gration has to be done before we climb the vessel ;
an aim in life is the only fortune worth the finding ;
and it is not to be found in foreign lands, but in
the heart itself.
Speaking generally, there is no vice of this kind
more contemptible than another; for each is but
a result and outward sign of a soul tragically ship-
wrecked. In the majority of cases, cheap pleasure
is resorted to by way of anodyne. The pleasure-
seeker sets forth upon life with high and difficult
ambitions; he meant to be nobly good and nobly
happy, though at as little pains as possible to him-
self ; and it is because all has failed in his celestial
enterprise that you now behold him rolling in the
garbage. Hence the comparative success of the tee-
total pledge; because to a man who had nothing it
sets at least a negative aim in life. Somewhat as
prisoners beguile their days by taming a spider, the
reformed drunkard makes an interest out of abstain-
ing from intoxicating drinks, and may live for that
negation. There is something, at least, not to be
done each day; and a cold triumph awaits him
every evening.
We had one on board with us, whom I have
already referred to under the name of Mackay,
who seemed to me not only a good instance of this
failure in life of which we have been speaking, but
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 47
a good type of the intelligence which here sur-
rounded me. Physically he was a small Scotsman,
standing a little back as though he were already
carrying the elements of a corporation, and his
looks somewhat marred by the smallness of his
eyes. Mentally, he was endowed above the aver-
age. There were but few subjects on which he
could not converse with understanding and a dash
of wit; delivering himself slowly and with gusto,
like a man who enjoyed his own sententiousness.
He was a dry, quick, pertinent debater, speaking
with a small voice, and swinging on his heels to
launch and emphasise an argument. When he
began a discussion, he could not bear to leave it
off, but would pick the subject to the bone, with-
out once relinquishing a point. An engineer by
trade, Mackay believed in the unlimited perfecti-
bility of all machines except the human machine.
The latter he gave up with ridicule for a compound
of carrion and perverse gases. He had an appetite
for disconnected facts which I can only compare
to the savage taste for beads. What is called in-
formation was indeed a passion with the man, and
he not only delighted to receive it, but could pay
you back in kind.
With all these capabilities, here was Mackay,
already no longer young, on his way to a new
country, with no prospects, no money, and but little
48 THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT
hope. He was almost tedious in the cynical dis-
closures of his despair. " The ship may go down
for me," he would say, " now or to-morrow. I
have nothing to lose and nothing to hope." And
again : " I am sick of the -whole damned perform-
ance." He was, like the kind little man already
quoted, another so-called victim of the bottle. But
Mackay was miles from publishing his weakness
to the world; laid the blame of his failure on cor-
rupt masters and a corrupt State policy ; and after
he had been one night overtaken and had played
the buffoon in his cups, sternly, though not without
tact, suppressed all reference to his escapade. It
was a treat to see him manage this; the various
jesters withered under his gaze, and you were
forced to recognise in him a certain steely force, and
a gift of command which might have ruled a senate.
In truth it was not whisky that had ruined him ;
he was ruined long before for all good human pur-
poses but conversation. His eyes were sealed by
a cheap, school-book materialism. He could see
nothing in the world but money and steam-engines.
He did not know what you meant by the word hap-
piness. He had forgotten the simple emotions of
childhood, and perhaps never encountered the de-
lights of youth. He believed in production, that
useful figment of economy, as if it had been real
like laughter; and production, without prejudice to
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 49
liquor, was his god and guide. One day he took me
to task a novel cry to me upon the over-pay-
ment of literature. Literary men, he said, were
more highly paid than artisans; yet the artisan
made threshing-machines and butter-churns, and
the man of letters, except in the way of a few use-
ful handbooks, made nothing worth the while.
He produced a mere fancy article. Mackay's
notion of a book was Hoppus's Measurer. Now
in my time I have possessed and even studied
that work; but if I were to be left to-morrow on
Juan Fernandez, Hoppus's is not the book that I
should choose for my companion volume.
I tried to fight the point with Mackay. I made
him own that he had taken pleasure in reading
books otherwise, to his view, insignificant; but he
was too wary to advance a step beyond the ad-
mission. It was in vain for me to argue that here
was pleasure ready-made and running from the
spring, whereas his ploughs and butter-churns were
but means and mechanisms to give men the neces-
sary food and leisure before they start upon the
search for pleasure ; he j ibbed and ran away from
such conclusions. The thing was different, he de-
clared, and nothing was serviceable but what had
to do with food. " Eat, eat, eat ! " he cried ; " that 's
the bottom and the top." By an odd irony of
circumstance, he grew so much interested in this
4
5 o THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT
discussion that he let the hour slip by unnoticed
and had to go without his tea. He had enough
sense and humour, indeed he had no lack of either,
to have chuckled over this himself in private ; and
even to me he referred to it with the shadow of a
smile.
Mackay was a hot bigot. He would not hear
of religion. I have seen him waste hours of time
in argument with all sort of poor human creatures
who understood neither him nor themselves, and he
had had the boyishness to dissect and criticise even
so small a matter as the riddler's definition of mind.
He snorted aloud with zealotry and the lust for
intellectual battle. Anything, whatever it was, that
seemed to him likely to discourage the continued
passionate production of corn and steam-engines
he resented like a conspiracy against the people.
Thus, when I put in the plea for literature, that it
was only in good books, or in the society of the
good, that a man could get help in his conduct, he
declared I was in a different world from him.
" Damn my conduct ! " said he. " I have given
it up for a bad job. My question is, ' Can I drive
a nail ? ' And he plainly looked upon me as one
who was insidiously seeking to reduce the people's
annual bellyful of corn and steam-engines.
It may be argued that these opinions spring from
the defect of culture; that a narrow and pinching
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 51
way of life not only exaggerates to a man the im-
portance of material conditions, but indirectly, by
denying him the necessary books and leisure, keeps
his mind ignorant of larger thoughts; and that
hence springs this overwhelming concern about
diet, and hence the bald view of existence professed
by Mackay. Had this been an English peasant the
conclusion would be tenable. But Mackay had
most of the elements of a liberal education. He
had skirted metaphysical and mathematical studies.
He had a thoughtful hold of what he knew, which
would be exceptional among bankers. He had been
brought up in the midst of hot-house piety, and
told, with incongruous pride, the story of his own
brother's deathbed esctasies. Yet he had somehow
failed to fulfil himself, and was adrift like a dead
thing among external circumstances, without hope
or lively preference or shaping aim. And further,
there seemed a tendency among many of his fellows
to fall into the same blank and unlovely opinions.
One thing, indeed, is not to be learned in Scotland,
and that is the way to be happy. Yet that is the
whole of culture, and perhaps two-thirds of moral-
ity. Can it be that the Puritan school, by divorcing
a man from nature, by thinning out his instincts,
and setting a stamp of its disapproval on whole
fields of human activity and interest, leads at last
directly to material greed?
52 THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT
Nature is a good guide through life, and the love
of simple pleasures next, if not superior, to virtue;
and we had on board an Irishman who based his
claim to the widest and most affectionate popu-
larity precisely upon these two qualities, that he
was natural and happy. He boasted a fresh colour,
a tight little figure, unquenchable gaiety, and in-
defatigable good-will. His clothes puzzled the
diagnostic mind, until you heard he had been once
a private coachman, when they became eloquent
and seemed a part of his biography. His face con-
tained the rest, and, I fear, a prophecy of the fu-
ture; the hawk's nose above accorded so ill with
the pink baby's mouth below. His spirit and his
pride belonged, you might say, to the nose; while
it was the general shiftlessness expressed by the
other that had thrown him from situation to situa-
tion, and at length on board the emigrant ship.
Barney ate, so to speak, nothing from the galley;
his own tea, butter and eggs supported him through-
out the voyage; and about mealtime you might
often find him up to the elbows in amateur cookery.
His was the first voice heard singing among all the
passengers; he was the first who fell to dancing.
From Loch Foyle to Sandy Hook, there was not a
piece of fun undertaken but there was Barney in
the midst.
You ought to have seen him when he stood up
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 53
to sing at our concerts his tight little figure step-
ping to and fro, and his feet shuffling to the air, his
eyes seeking and bestowing encouragement and
to have enjoyed the bow, so nicely calculated be-
tween jest and earnest, between grace and clumsi-
ness, with which he brought each song to a con-
clusion. He was not only a great favourite among
ourselves, but his songs attracted the lords of the
saloon, who often leaned to hear him over the rails
of the hurricane-deck. He was somewhat pleased,
but not at all abashed by this attention; and one
night, in the midst of his famous performance of
" Billy Keogh," I saw him spin half round in a
pirouette and throw an audacious wink to an old
gentleman above.
This was the more characteristic, as, for all his
daffing, he was a modest and very polite little fellow
among ourselves.
He would not have hurt the feelings of a fly,
nor throughout the passage did he give a shadow
of offence ; yet he was always, by his innocent free-
doms and love of fun, brought upon that narrow
margin where politeness must be natural to walk
without a fall. He was once seriously angry, and
that in a grave, quiet manner, because they sup-
plied no fish on Friday; for Barney was a con-
scientious Catholic. He had likewise strict notions
of refinement; and when, late one evening, after
54 THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT
the women had retired, a young Scotsman struck
up an indecent song, Barney's drab clothes were
immediately missing from the group. His taste
was for the society of gentlemen, of whom, with
the reader's permission, there was no lack in our
five steerages and second cabin ; and he avoided the
rough and positive with a girlish shrinking. Mac-
kay, partly from his superior powers of mind,
which rendered him incomprehensible, partly from
his extreme opinions, was especially distasteful to
the Irishman. I have seen him slink off with back-
ward looks of terror and offended delicacy, while
the other, in his witty, ugly way, had been profess-
ing hostility to God, and an extreme theatrical
readiness to be shipwrecked on the spot. These
utterances hurt the little coachman's modesty like
a bad word.
THE SICK MAN
ONE night Jones, the young O'Reilly, and
myself were walking arm-in-arm and
briskly up and down the deck. Six bells
had rung ; a head-wind blew chill and fitful, the fog
was closing in with a sprinkle of rain, and the fog-
whistle had been turned on, and now divided time
with its unwelcome outcries, loud like a bull, thrill-
ing and intense like a mosquito. Even the watch
lay somewhere snugly out of sight.
For some time we observed something lying
black and huddled in the scuppers, which at last
heaved a little and moaned aloud. We ran to the
rails. An elderly man, but whether passenger or
seaman it was impossible in the darkness to deter-
mine, lay grovelling on his belly in the wet scuppers,
and kicking feebly with his outspread toes. We
asked him what was amiss, and he replied inco-
herently, with a strange accent and in a voice
unmanned by terror, that he had cramp in the
stomach, that he had been ailing all day, had seen
the doctor twice, and had walked the deck against
fatigue till he was overmastered and had fallen
where we found him.
56 THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT
Jones remained by his side, while O'Reilly and I
hurried off to seek the doctor. We knocked in vain
at the doctors cabin; there came no reply; nor
could we find any one to guide us. It was no time
for delicacy ; so we ran once more forward ; and I,
whipping up a ladder and touching my hat to the
officer of the watch, addressed him as politely as
I could:
" I beg your pardon, sir ; but there is a man lying
bad with cramp in the lee scuppers; and I can't
find the doctor."
He looked at me peeringly in the darkness ; and
then, somewhat harshly, " Well, / can't leave the
bridge, my man," said he.
" No, sir ; but you can tell me what to do," I
returned.
" Is it one of the crew ? " he asked.
" I believe him to be a fireman," I replied.
I dare say officers are much annoyed by com-
plaints and alarmist information from their freight
of human creatures ; but certainly, whether it was
the idea that the sick man was one of the crew, or
from something conciliatory in my address, the
officer in question was immediately relieved and
mollified ; and speaking in a voice much freer from
constraint, advised me to find a steward and de-
spatch him in quest of the doctor, who would now
be in the smoking-room over his pipe.
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 57
One of the stewards was often enough to be
found about this hour down our companion, Steer-
age No. 2 and 3 ; that was his smoking-room of a
night. Let me call him Blackwood. O'Reilly and
I rattled down the companion, breathing hurry;
and in his shirt-sleeves and perched across the car-
penter's bench upon one thigh, found Blackwood;
a neat, bright, dapper, Glasgow-looking man, with
a bead of an eye and a rank twang in his speech.
I forget who was with him, but the pair were en-
joying a deliberate talk over their pipe's. I dare
say he was tired with his day's work, and eminently
comfortable at that moment; and the truth is, I
did not stop to consider his feelings, but told my
story in a breath.
" Steward," said I, " there 's a man lying bad
with cramp, and I can't find the doctor."
He turned upon me as pert as a sparrow, but
with a black look that is the prerogative of man;
and taking his pipe out of his mouth
" That 's none of my business," said he. " I
don't care."
I could have strangled the little ruffian where he
sat. The thought of his cabin civility and cabin
tips filled me with indignation. I glanced at
O'Reilly; he was pale and quivering, and looked
like assault and battery, every inch of him. But
we had a better card than violence.
58 THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT
" You will have to make it your business," said
I, " for I am sent to you by the officer on the
bridge."
Blackwood was fairly tripped. He made no
answer, but put out his pipe, gave me one murder-
ous look, and set off upon his errand strolling.
From that day forward, I should say, he improved
to me in courtesy, as though he had repented his
evil speech and were anxious to leave a better
impression.
When we got on deck again, Jones was still
beside the sick man; and two or three late strag-
glers had gathered round and were offering sug-
gestions. One proposed to give the patient water,
which was promptly negatived. Another bade us
hold him up; he himself prayed to be let lie; but
as it was at least as well to keep him off the stream-
ing decks, O'Reilly and I supported him between
us. It was only by main force that we did so, and
neither an easy nor an agreeable duty ; for he fought
in his paroxysms like a frightened child, and
moaned miserably when he resigned himself to
our control.
"O let me lie!" he pleaded. "I'll no' get
better anyway." And then, with a moan that went
to my heart, " O why did I come upon this miser-
able journey? "
I was reminded of the song which I had heard
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 59
a little while before in the close, tossing steerage :
"O why left I my name?"
Meantime Jones, relieved of his immediate
charge, had gone off to the galley, where we could
see -a light. There he found a belated cook scour-
ing pans by the radiance of two lanterns, and one
of these he sought to borrow. The scullion was
backward. " Was it one of the crew? " he asked.
And when Jones, smitten with my theory, had
assured that it was a fireman, he reluctantly left
his scouring and came towards us at an easy pace,
with one of the lanterns swinging from his finger.
The light, as it reached the spot, showed us an
elderly man, thick-set, and grizzled with years;
but the shifting and coarse shadows concealed
from us the expression and even the design of
his face.
So soon as the cook set eyes on him he gave
a sort of whistle.
"It's only a passenger!" said he; and turning
about, made, lantern and all, for the galley.
" He 's a man anyway," cried Jones in indig-
nation.
" Nobody said he was a woman," said a gruff
voice, which I recognised for that of the bo's'un.
All this while there was no word of Blackwood
or the doctor ; and now the officer came to our side
of the ship and asked, over the hurricane-deck
60 THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT
rails, if the doctor were not yet come. We told him
not.
" No? " he repeated with a breathing of anger;
and we saw him hurry aft in person.
Ten minutes after the doctor made his appear-
ance deliberately enough and examined our patient
with the lantern. He made little of the case, had
the man brought aft to the dispensary, dosed him,
and sent him forward to his bunk. Two of his
neighbours in the steerage had now come to our
assistance, expressing loud sorrow that such " a
fine cheery body " should be sick ; and these, claim-
ing a sort of possession, took him entirely under
their own care. The drug had probably relieved
him, for he struggled no more, and was led along
plaintive and patient, but protesting. His heart
recoiled at the thought of the steerage. "O let
me lie down upon the bieldy side," he cried ; " O
dinna take me down ! " And again : " O why did
ever I come upon this miserable voyage?" And
yet once more, with a gasp and a wailing prolonga-
tion of the fourth word : " I had no call to come."
But there he was; and by the doctor's orders and
the kind force of his two shipmates disappeared
down the companion of Steerage No. i into the
den allotted him.
At the foot of our own companion, just where
I found Blackwood, Jones and the bo's'un were
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 61
now engaged in talk. This last was a gruff, cruel-
looking seaman, who must have passed near half
a century upon the seas; square-headed, goat-
bearded, with heavy blond eyebrows, and an eye
without radiance, but inflexibly steady and hard.
I had not forgotten his rough speech ; but I remem-
bered also that he had helped us about the lantern ;
and now seeing him in conversation with Jones,
and being choked with indignation, I proceeded to
blow off my steam.
" Well," said I, " I make you my compliments
upon your steward," and furiously narrated what
had happened.
" I 've nothing to do with him," replied the
bo's'un. "They're all alike. They wouldn't
mind if they saw you all lying dead one upon the
top of another."
This was enough. A very little humanity went
a long way with me after the experience of the even-
ing. A sympathy grew up at once between the
bo's'un and myself; and that night, and during the
next few days, I learned to appreciate him better.
He was a remarkable type, and not at all the kind
of man you find in books. He had been at Sebas-
topol under English colours; and again in a States
ship, " after the Alabama, and praying God we
should n't find her." He was a high Tory and a
high Englishman. No manufacturer could have
62 THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT
held opinions more hostile to the working man
and his strikes. " The workmen/' he said, " think
nothing of their country. They think of nothing
but themselves. They 're damned greedy, selfish
fellows." He would not hear of the decadence of
England. " They say they send us beef from
America," he argued; " but who pays for it? All
the money in the world 's in England." The Royal
Navy was the best of possible services, according
to him. " Anyway the officers are gentlemen," said
he ; " and you can't get hazed to death by a damned
non-commissioned as you can in the army."
Among nations, England was the first; then came
France. He respected the French navy and liked
the French people; and if he were forced to make
a new choice in life, " by God, he would try French-
men ! " For all his looks and rough, cold manners,
I observed that children were never frightened by
him ; they divined him at once to be a friend ; and
one night when he had chalked his hand and went
about stealthily setting his mark on people's clothes,
it was incongruous to hear this formidable old
salt chuckling over his boyish monkey trick.
In the morning my first thought was of the sick
man. I was afraid I should not recognise him,
so baffling had been the light of the lantern ; and
found myself unable to decide if he were Scots,
English, or Irish. He had certainly employed
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 63
north-country words and elisions; but the accent
and the pronunciation seemed unfamiliar and in-
congruous in my ear.
To descend on an empty stomach into Steerage
No. i, was an adventure that required some nerve.
The stench was atrocious; each respiration tasted
in the throat like some horrible kind of cheese ; and
the squalid aspect of the place was aggravated by
so many people worming themselves into their
clothes in the twilight of the bunks. You may
guess if I was pleased, not only for him, but for
myself also, when I heard that the sick man was
better and had gone on deck.
The morning was raw and foggy, though the sun
suffused the fog with pink and amber ; the fog-horn
still blew, stertorous and intermittent; and to add
to the discomfort, the seamen were just beginning
to wash down the decks. But for a sick man this
was heaven compared to the steerage. I found him
standing on the hot-water pipe, just forward of
the saloon deck house. He was smaller than I had
fancied, and plain-looking; but his face was dis-
tinguished by strange and fascinating eyes, limpid
grey from a distance, but, when looked into, full
of changing colours and grains of gold. His man-
ners were mild and uncompromisingly plain ; and
I soon saw that, when once started, he delighted to
talk. His accent and language had been formed in
64 THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT
the most natural way, since he was born in Ireland,
had lived a quarter of a century on the banks of
Tyne, and was married to a Scots wife. A fisher-
man in the season, he had fished the east coast from
Fisherrow to Whitby. When the season was over,
and the great boats, which required extra hands,
were once drawn up on shore till the next spring, he
worked as a labourer about chemical furnaces, or
along the wharves unloading vessels. In this com-
paratively humble way of life he had gathered a
competence, and could speak of his comfortable
house, his hayfield, and his garden. On this ship,
where so many accomplished artisans were fleeing
from starvation, he was present on a pleasure trip
to visit a brother in New York.
Ere he started, he informed me, he had been
warned against the steerage and the steerage fare,
and recommended to bring with him a ham and tea
and a spice loaf. But he laughed to scorn such
counsels. "I'm not afraid," he had told his
adviser ; " / '// get on for ten days. I 've not been a
fisherman for nothing." For it is no light matter,
as he reminded me, to be in an open boat, perhaps
waist-deep with herrings, day breaking with a
scowl, and for miles on every hand lee-shores,
unbroken, iron-bound, surf -beat, with only here
and there an anchorage where you dare not lie, or
a harbour impossible to enter with the wind that
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 65
blows. The life of a North Sea fisher is one long
chapter of exposure and hard work and insufficient
fare ; and even if he makes land at some bleak fisher
port, perhaps the season is bad or his boat has been
unlucky, and after fifty hours' unsleeping vigilance
and toil, not a shop will give him credit for a loaf
of bread. Yet the steerage of the emigrant ship had
been too vile for the endurance of a man thus rudely
trained. He had scarce eaten since he came on
board, until the day before, when his appetite was
tempted by some excellent pea-soup. We were all
much of the same mind on board, and begin-
ning with myself, had dined upon pea-soup not
wisely but too well; only with him the excess
had been punished, perhaps because he was weak-
ened by former abstinence, and his first meal had
resulted in a cramp. He had determined to live
henceforth on biscuit; and when, two months
later, he should return to England, to make the
passage by saloon. The second cabin, after due
inquiry, he scouted as another edition of the
steerage.
He spoke apologetically of his emotion when ill.
" Ye see, I had no call to be here," said he; " and
I thought it was by with me last night. I Ve a good
house at home, and plenty to nurse me, and I had
no real call to leave them." Speaking of the atten-
tions he had received from his shipmates generally,
5
66 THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT
" they were all so kind," he said, " that there 's
none to mention." And except in so far as I might
share in this, he troubled me with no reference to
my services.
But what affected me in the most lively manner
was the wealth of this day-labourer, paying a two
months' pleasure visit to the States, and preparing
to return in the saloon, and the new testimony
rendered by his story, not so much to the horrors
of the steerage as to the habitual comfort of the
working classes. One foggy, frosty December
evening, I encountered on Liberton Hill, near Edin-
burgh, an Irish labourer trudging homeward from
the fields. Our roads lay together, and it was nat-
ural that we should fall into talk. He was covered
with mud; an inoffensive, ignorant creature, who
thought the Atlantic Cable was a secret contrivance
of the masters the better to oppress labouring man-
kind; and I confess I was astonished to learn that
he had nearly three hundred pounds in the bank.
But this man had travelled over most of the world,
and enjoyed wonderful opportunities on some
American railroad, with two dollars a shift and
double pay on Sunday and at night; whereas my
fellow-passenger had never quitted Tyneside, and
had made all that he possessed in that same
accursed, down-falling England, whence skilled
mechanics, engineers, millwrights, and carpenters
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 67
were fleeing as from the native country of
starvation.
Fitly enough, we slid off on the subject of strikes
and wages and hard times. Being from the Tyne,
and a man who had gained and lost in his own
pocket by these fluctuations, he had much to say,
and held strong opinions on the subject. He spoke
sharply of the masters, and, when I led him on, of
the men also. The masters had been selfish and
obstructive ; the men selfish, silly, and light-headed.
He rehearsed to me the course of a meeting at which
he had been present, and the somewhat long dis-
course which he had there pronounced, calling into
question the wisdom and even the good faith of the
Union delegates ; and although he had escaped him-
self through flush times and starvation times with
a handsomely provided purse, he had so little faith
in either man or master, and so profound a terror
for the unerring Nemesis of mercantile affairs,
that he could think of no hope for our country
outside of a sudden and complete political subver-
sion. Down must go Lords and Church and Army ;
and capital, by some happy direction, must change
hands from worse to better, or England stood con-
demned. Such principles, he said, were growing
" like a seed."
From this mild, soft, domestic man, these words
sounded unusually ominous and grave. I had
C8 THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT
heard enough revolutionary talk among my work-
men fellow-passengers ; but most of it was hot and
turgid, and fell discredited from the lips of unsuc-
cessful men. This man was calm ; he had attained
prosperity and ease; he disapproved the policy
which had been pursued by labour in the past;
and yet this was his panacea, to rend the old
country from end to end, and from top to bottom,
and in clamour and civil discord remodel it with
the hand of violence.
THE STOWAWAYS
ON the Sunday, among a party of men who
were talking in our companion, Steerage
Nos. 2 and 3, we remarked a new figure.
He wore tweed clothes, well enough made if not
very fresh, and a plain smoking-cap. His face
was pale, with pale eyes, and spiritedly enough
designed ; but though not yet thirty, a sort of black-
guardly degeneration had already overtaken his
features. The fine nose had grown fleshy towards
the point, the pale eyes were sunk in fat. His hands
were strong and elegant ; his experience of life evi-
dently varied ; his speech full of pith and nerve ; his
manners forward, but perfectly presentable. The
lad who helped in the second cabin told me, in
answer to a question, that he did not know who
he was, but thought, " by his way of speaking, and
because he was so polite, that he was some one
from the saloon."
I was not so sure, for to me there was something
equivocal in his air and bearing. He might have
been, I thought, the son of some good family who
had fallen early into dissipation and run from home.
yo THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT
But, making every allowance, how admirable was
his talk ! I wish you could have heard him tell his
own stories. They were so swingingly set forth,
in such dramatic language, and illustrated here and
there by such luminous bits of acting, that they
could only lose in any reproduction. There were
tales of the P. and O. Company, where he had been
an officer; of the East Indies, where in former
years he had lived lavishly; of the Royal Engi-
neers, where he had served for a period; and of a
dozen other sides of life, each introducing some
vigorous thumb-nail portrait. He had the talk to
himself that night, we were all so glad to listen.
The best talkers usually address themselves to some
particular society; there they are kings, elsewhere
camp-followers, as a man may know Russian and
yet be ignorant of Spanish; but this fellow had
a frank, headlong power of style, and a broad,
human choice of subject, -that would have turned
any circle in the world into a circle of hearers. He
was a Homeric talker, plain, strong, and cheerful ;
and the things and the people of which he spoke be-
came readily and clearly present to the minds of
those who heard him. This, with a certain added
colouring of rhetoric and rodomontade, must have
been the style of Burns, who equally charmed the
ears of duchesses an4 hostlers.
Yet freely and personally as he spoke, many
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 71
points remained obscure in his narration. The
Engineers, for instance, was a service which he
praised highly; it is true there would be trouble
with the sergeants ; but then the officers were gentle-
men, and his own, in particular, one among ten
thousand. It sounded so far exactly like an epi-
sode in the rakish, topsy-turvy life of such an one
as I had imagined. But then there came incidents
more doubtful, which showed an almost impudent
greed after gratuities, and a truly impudent disre-
gard for truth. And then there was the tale of his
departure. He had wearied, it seems, of Woolwich,
and one fine day, with a companion, slipped up to
London for a spree. I have a suspicion that spree
was meant to be a long one; but God disposes all
things; and one morning, near Westminister
Bridge, whom should he come across but the very
sergeant who had recruited him at first! What
followed? He himself indicated cavalierly that
he had then resigned. Let us put it so. But these
resignations are sometimes very trying.
At length, after having delighted us for hours,
he took himself away from the companion; and I
could ask Mackay who and what he was. " That? "
said Mackay. " Why, that's one of the stow-
aways."
" No man," said the same authority, " who has
had anything to do with the sea, would ever think
7 i THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT
of paying for a passage." I give the statement as
Mackay's, without endorsement; yet I am tempted
to believe that it contains a grain of truth ; and if
you add that the man shall be impudent and thiev-
ish, or else dead-broke, it may even pass for a fair
representation of the facts. We gentlemen of Eng-
land who live at home at ease have, I suspect,
very insufficient ideas on the subject. All the
world over, people are stowing away in coal-holes
and dark corners, and when ships are once out to
sea, appearing again, begrimed and bashful, upon
deck. The career of these sea-tramps partakes
largely of the adventurous. They may be poisoned
by coal-gas, or die by starvation in their place of
concealment; or when found they may be clapped
at once and ignominiously into irons, thus to be
carried to their promised land, the port of destina-
tion, and alas! brought back in the same way to
that from which they started, and there delivered
over to the magistrates and the seclusion of a
county jail. Since I crossed the Atlantic, one
miserable stowaway was found in a dying state
among the fuel, uttered but a word or two, and
departed for a farther country than America.
When the stowaway appears on deck, he has but
one thing to pray for: that he be set to work,
which is the price and sign of his forgiveness.
After half an hour with a swab or a bucket, he
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 73
feels himself as secure as if he had paid for his
passage. It is not altogether a bad thing for the
company, who get more or less efficient hands for
nothing but a few plates of junk and duff; and
every now and again find themselves better paid
than by a whole family of cabin passengers. Not
long ago, for instance, a packet was saved from
nearly certain loss by the skill and courage of a
stowaway engineer. As was no more than just,
a handsome subscription rewarded him for his suc-
cess ; _ but even without such exceptional good-for-
tune, as things stand in England and America, the
stowaway will often make a good profit out of his
adventure. Four engineers stowed away last sum-
mer on the same ship, the Circassia; and before two
days after their arrival each of the four had found
a comfortable berth. This was the most hopeful
tale of emigration that I heard from first to last;
and as you see, the luck was for stowaways.
My curiosity was much inflamed by what I heard ;
and the next morning, as I was making the round
of the ship, I was delighted to find the ex-Royal
Engineer engaged in washing down the white paint
of a deck-house. There was another fellow at work
beside him, a lad not more than twenty, in the most
miraculous tatters, his handsome face sown with
grains of beauty and lighted up by expressive eyes.
Four stowaways had been found aboard our ship
74 THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT
before she left the Clyde, but these two had alone
escaped the ignominy of being put ashore. Alick,
my acquaintance of last night, was Scots by birth,
and by trade a practical engineer; the other was
from Devonshire, and had been to sea before the
mast. Two people more unlike by training, char-
acter, and habits, it would be hard to imagine ; yet
here they were together, scrubbing paint.
Alick had held all sorts of good situations, and
wasted many opportunities in life. I have heard
him end a story with these words : " That was in
my golden days, when I used finger-glasses."
Situation after situation failed him; then followed
the depression of trade, and for months he had
hung round with other idlers, playing marbles all
day in the West Park, and going home at night to
tell his landlady how he had been seeking for a job.
I believe this kind of existence was not unpleasant
to Alick himself, and he might have long continued
to enjoy idleness and a life on tick; but he had a
comrade, let us call him Brown, who grew restive.
This fellow was continually threatening to slip his
cable for the States, and at last, one Wednesday,
Glasgow was left widowed of her Brown. Some
months afterwards, Alick met another old chum in
Sauchiehall Street.
" By-the-bye, Alick," said he, " I met a gentle-
man in New York who was asking for you."
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 75
" Who was that? " asked Alick.
" The new second engineer on board the So-and-
so," was the reply.
"Well, and who is he?"
" Brown, to be sure."
For Brown had been one of the fortunate quar-
tette aboard the Cir cassia. If that was the way of
it in the States, Alick thought it was high time to
follow Brown's example. He spent his last day, as
he- put it, " reviewing the yeomanry," and the next
morning says he to his landlady, " Mrs. X., I '11
not take porridge to-day, please; I'll take some
eggs."
"Why, have you found a job?" she asked,
delighted.
"Well, yes," returned the perfidious Alick;
" I think I '11 start to-day."
And so, well lined with eggs, start he did, but
for America. I am afraid that landlady has seen
the last of him.
It was easy enough to get on board in the con-
fusion that attends a vessel's departure ; and in one
of the dark corners of Steerage No. I, flat in a
bunk and with an empty stomach, Alick made the
voyage from the Broomielaw to Greenock. That
night, the ship's yeoman pulled him out by the heels
and had him before the mate. Two other stow-
aways had already been found and sent ashore;
76 THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT
but by this time darkness had fallen, they were out
in the middle of the estuary, and the last steamer
had left them till the morning.
" Take him to the forecastle and give him a
meal," said the mate, " and see and pack him off
the first thing to-morrow."
In the forecastle he had supper, a good night's
rest, and breakfast; and was sitting placidly with
a pipe, fancying all was over and the game up for
good with that ship, when one of the sailors grum-
bled out an oath at him, with a " What are you
doing there? " and " Do you call that hiding, any-
way? " There was need of no more; Alick was in
another bunk before the day was older. Shortly
before the passengers arrived, the ship was cur-
sorily inspected. He heard the round come down
the companion and look into one pen after another,
until they came within two of the one in which he
lay concealed. Into these last two they did not
enter, but merely glanced from without ; and Alick
had no doubt that he was personally favoured in
this escape. It was the character of the man to
attribute nothing to luck and but little to kind-
ness; whatever happened to him he had earned in
his own right amply; favours came to him from
his singular attraction and adroitness, and misfor-
tunes he had always accepted with his eyes open.
Half an hour after the searchers had departed, the
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 77
steerage began to fill with legitimate passengers,
and the worst of Alick' s troubles was at an end.
He was soon making himself popular, smoking
other people's tobacco, and politely sharing their
private stock of delicacies, and when night came
he retired to his bunk beside the others with
composure.
Next day by afternoon, Lough Foyle being
already far behind, and only the rough north-
western hills of Ireland within view, Alick appeared
on deck to court inquiry and decide his fate. As
a matter of fact, he was known to several on board,
and even intimate with one of the engineers; but
it was plainly not the etiquette of such occasions
for the authorities to avow their information.
Every one professed surprise and anger on his ap-
pearance, and he was led prisoner before the
captain.
" What have you got to say for yourself? " in-
quired the captain.
" Not much," said Alick ; " but when a man has
been a long time out of a job, he will do things
he would not under other circumstances.'*
"Are you willing to work?"
Alick swore he was burning to be useful.
" And what can you do? " asked the captain.
He replied composedly that he was a brass-fitter
by trade.
7 8 THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT
"I think you will be better at engineering?"
suggested the officer, with a shrewd look.
" No, sir," says Alick simply. " There 's few
can beat me at a lie," was his engaging commen-
tary to me as he recounted the affair.
"Have you been to sea?" again asked the
captain.
" I 've had a trip on a Clyde steamboat, sir, but
no more," replied the unabashed Alick.
" Well, we must try and find some work for you,"
concluded the officer.
And hence we behold Alick, clear of the hot
engine-room, lazily scraping paint and now and
then taking a pull upon a sheet. " You leave me
alone," was his deduction. " When I get talking
to a man, I can get round him."
The other stowaway, whom I will call the De-
vonian it was noticeable that neither of them
told his name had both been brought up and
seen the world in a much smaller way. His father,
a confectioner, died and was closely followed by
his mother. His sisters had taken, I think, to dress-
making. He himself had returned from sea about
a year ago and gone to live with his brother, who
kept the " George Hotel " " it was not quite a
real hotel," added the candid fellow " and had
a hired man to mind the horses." At first the
Devonian was very welcome ; but as time went on
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 79
his brother not unnaturally grew cool towards him,
and he began to find himself one too many at the
" George Hotel." " I don't think brothers care
much for you," he said, as a general reflection
upon life. Hurt at this change, nearly penniless,
and too proud to ask for more, he set off on foot
and walked eighty miles to Weymouth, living on
the journey as he could. He would have enlisted,
but he was too small for the army and too old for
the navy; and thought himself fortunate at last to
find a berth on board a trading dandy. Somewhere
in the Bristol Channel, the dandy sprung a leak
and went down ; and though the crew were picked
up and brought ashore by fishermen, they found
themselves with nothing but the clothes upon their
back. His next engagement was scarcely better
starred; for the ship proved so leaky, and fright-
ened them all so heartily during a short passage
through the Irish Sea, that the entire crew deserted
and remained behind upon the quays of Belfast.
Evil days were now coming thick on the De-
vonian. He could find no berth in Belfast, and
had to work a passage to Glasgow on a steamer.
She reached the Broomielaw on a Wednesday:
the Devonian had a bellyful that morning, laying
in breakfast manfully to provide against the future,
and set off along the quays to seek employment.
But he was now not only penniless, his clothes
80 THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT
had begun to fall in tatters; he had begun to have
the look of a street Arab; and captains will have
nothing to say to a ragamuffin; for in that trade,
as in all others, it is the coat that depicts the man.
You may hand, reef, and steer like an angel, but
if you have a hole in your trousers, it is like a
millstone round your neck. The Devonian lost
heart at so many refusals. He had not the im-
pudence to beg; although, as he said, " when I
had money of my own, I always gave it." It was
only on Saturday morning, after three whole days
of starvation, that he asked a scone from a milk-
woman, who added of her own accord a glass of
milk. He had now made up his mind to stow
away, not from any desire to see America, but
merely to obtain the comfort of a place in the
forecastle and a supply of familiar sea-fare. He
lived by begging, always from milkwomen, and
always scones and milk, and was not once refused.
It was vile wet weather, and he could never have
been dry. By night he walked the streets, and by
day slept upon Glasgow Green, and heard, in the
intervals of his dozing, the famous theologians
of the spot clear up intricate points of doctrine
and appraise the merits of the clergy. He had
not much instruction ; he could " read bills on
the street," but was " main bad at writing " ; yet
these theologians seem to have impressed him
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 81
with a genuine sense of amusement. Why he
did not go to the Sailor's Home I know not; I
presume there is in Glasgow one of these institu-
tions, which are by far the happiest and the wisest
effort of contemporaneous charity; but I must
stand to my author, as they say in old books, and
relate the story as I heard it. In the meantime,
he had tried four times to stow away in different
vessels, and four times had been discovered and
handed back to starvation. The fifth time was
lucky; and you may judge if he were pleased to
be aboard ship again, at his old work, and with
duff twice a week. He was, said Alick, " a devil
for the duff." Or if devil was not the word; it was
one if anything stronger.
The difference in the conduct of the two was
remarkable. The Devonian was as willing as any
paid hand, swarmed aloft among the first, pulled his
natural weight and firmly upon a rope, and found
work for himself when there was none to show him.
Alick, on the other hand, was not only a skulker in
the grain, but took a humourous and fine gentle-
manly view of the transaction. He would speak to
me by the hour in ostentatious idleness ; and only if
the bo's'un or a mate came by, fell-to languidly for
just the necessary time till they were out of sight.
" I 'm not breaking my heart with it," he remarked.
Once there was a hatch to be opened near where
82 THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT
he was stationed; he watched the preparations for
a second or so suspiciously, and then, " Hullo," said
he, "here's some real work coming I'm off,"
and he was gone that moment. Again, calculating
the six guinea passage-money, and the probable
duration of the passage, he remarked pleasantly
that he was getting six shillings a day for this job,
" and it 's pretty dear to the company at that."
" They are making nothing by me," was another
of his observations ; " they 're making something
by that fellow." And he pointed to the Devonian,
who was just then busy to the eyes.
The more you saw of Alick, the more, it must be
owned, you learned to despise him. His natural
talents were of no use either to himself or others;
for his character had degenerated like his face, and
become pulpy and pretentious. Even his power of
persuasion, which was certainly very surprising,
stood in some danger of being lost or neutralised
by over-confidence. He lied in an aggressive,
brazen manner, like a pert criminal in the dock ; and
he was so vain of his own cleverness that he could
not refrain from boasting, ten minutes after, of the
very trick by which he had deceived you. " Why,
now I have more money than when I came on
board," he said one night, exhibiting a sixpence,
" and yet I stood myself a bottle of beer before
I went to bed yesterday. And as for tobacco, T
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 83
have fifteen sticks of it." That was fairly suc-
cessful indeed; yet a man of his superiority, and
with a less obtrusive policy, might, who knows?
have got the length of half a crown A 'man who
prides himself upon persuasion should learn the per-
suasive faculty of silence, above all as to his own
misdeeds. It is only in the farce and for dramatic
purposes that Scapin enlarges on his peculiar talents
to the world at large.
Scapin is perhaps a good name for this clever,
unfortunate Alick ; for at the bottom of all his mis-
conduct there was a guiding sense of humour that
moved you to forgive him. It was more than half
a jest that he conducted his existence. " Oh, man,"
he said to me once with unusual emotion, like a
man thinking of his mistress, " I would give up
anything for a lark."
It was in relation to his fellow-stowaway that
Alick showed the best, or perhaps I should say the
only good, points of his nature. " Mind you," he
said suddenly, changing his tone, " mind you that 's
a good boy. He would n't tell you a lie. A lot of
them think he is a scamp because his clothes are
ragged, but he is n't ; he 's as good as gold." To
hear him, you become aware that Alick himself
had a taste for virtue. He thought his own idleness
and the other's industry equally becoming. He
was no more anxious to insure his own reputation
84 THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT
as a liar than to uphold the truthfulness of his
companion; and he seemed unaware of what was
incongruous in his attitude, and was plainly sincere
in both characters.
It was not surprising that he should take an
interest in the Devonian, for the lad worshipped and
served him in love and wonder. Busy as he was, he
would find time to warn Alick of an approaching
officer, or even to tell him that the coast was clear,
and he might slip off and smoke a pipe in safety.
" Tom," he once said to him, for that was the name
which Alick ordered him to use, " if you don't like
going to the galley, I '11 go for you. You ain't used
to this kind of thing, you ain't. But I 'm a sailor ;
and I can understand the feelings of any fellow,
I can." Again, he was hard up, and casting about
for some tobacco, for he was not so liberally used
in this respect as others perhaps less worthy, when
Alick offered him the half of one of his fifteen sticks.
I think, for my part, he might have increased the
offer to a whole one, or perhaps a pair of them, and
not lived to regret his liberality. But the Devonian
refused. " No," he said, " you 're a stowaway
like me ; I won't take it from you, I '11 take it from
some one who 's not down on his luck."
It was notable in this generous lad that he was
strongly under the influence of sex. If a woman
passed near where he was working, his eyes lit up,
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 85
his hand paused, and his mind wandered instantly
to other thoughts. It was natural that he should
exercise a fascination proportionally strong upon
women. He begged, you will remember, from
women only, and was never refused. Without
wishing to explain away the charity of those who
helped him, I cannot but fancy he may have owed
a little to his handsome face, and to that quick,
responsive nature, formed for love, which speaks
eloquently through all disguises, and can stamp an
impression in ten minutes' talk or an exchange of
glances. He was the more dangerous in that he
was far from bold, but seemed to woo in spite of
himself, and with a soft and pleading eye. Ragged
as he was, and many a scarecrow is in that respect
more comfortably furnished, even on board he was
not without some curious admirers.
There was a girl among the passengers, a tall,
blond, handsome, strapping Irishwoman, with a
wild, accommodating eye, whom Alick had dubbed
Tommy, with that transcendental appropriateness
that defies analysis. One day the Devonian was
lying for warmth in the upper stoke-hole, which
stands open on the deck, when Irish Tommy came
past, very neatly attired, as was her custom.
" Poor fellow," she said, stopping, " you have n't
a vest."
"No," he said;" I wish I 'ad."
86 THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT
Then she stood and gazed on him in silence,
until, in his embarrassment, for he knew not how
to look under this scrutiny, he pulled out his pipe
and began to fill it with tobacco.
"Do you want a match?" she asked. And
before he had time to reply, she ran off and pres-
ently returned with more than one.
That was the beginning and the end, as far as
our passage is concerned, of what I will make bold
to call this love-affair. There are many relations
which go on to marriage and last during a life-
time, in which less human feeling is engaged than
in this scene of five minutes at the stoke-hole.
Rigidly speaking, this would end the chapter of
the stowaways; but in a larger sense of the word
I have yet more to add. Jones had discovered and
pointed out to me a young woman who was remark-
able among her fellows for a pleasing and interest-
ing air. She was poorly clad, to the verge, if not
over the line, of disrespectability, with a ragged old
jacket and a bit of a sealskin cap no bigger than
your fist; but her eyes, her whole expression, and
her manner, even in ordinary moments, told of a
true womanly nature, capable of love, anger, and
devotion. She had a look, too, of refinement, like
one who might have been a better lady than most,
had she been allowed the opportunity. When alone
she seemed preoccupied and sad; but she was not
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 87
often alone ; there was usually by her side a heavy,
dull, gross man in rough clothes, chary of speech
and gesture not from caution, but poverty of dis-
position; a man like a ditcher, unlovely and unin-
teresting; whom she petted and tended and waited
on with her eyes as if he had been Amadis of Gaul.
It was strange to see this hulking fellow dog-sick,
and this delicate, sad woman caring for him. He
seemed, from first to last, insensible of her caresses
and attentions, and she seemed unconscious of his
insensibility. The Irish husband, who sang his
wife to sleep, and this Scottish girl serving her
Orson, were the two bits of human nature that
most appealed to me throughout the voyage.
On the Thursday before we arrived, the tickets
were collected; and soon a rumour began to go
round the vessel ; and this girl, with her bit of seal-
skin cap, became the centre of whispering and
pointed fingers. She, also, it was said, was a stow-
away of a sort ; for she was on board with neither
ticket nor money; and the man with whom she
travelled was the father of a family, who had left
wife and children to be hers. The ship's officers
discouraged the story, which may therefore have
been a story and no more; but it was believed in
the steerage, and the poor girl had to encounter
many curious eyes from that day forth.
PERSONAL EXPERIENCE AND
REVIEW
TRAVEL is of two kinds ; and this voyage
of mine across the ocean combined both.
" Out of my country and myself I go,"
sings the old poet: and I was not only travelling
out of my country in latitude and longitude, but
out of myself in diet, associates, and considera-
tion. Part of the interest and a great deal of the
amusement flowed, at least to me, from this novel
situation in the world.
I found that I had what they call fallen in life
with absolute success and verisimilitude. I was
taken for a steerage passenger ; no one seemed sur-
prised that I should be so; and there was nothing
but the brass plate between decks to remind me that
I had once been a gentleman. In a former book,
describing a former journey, I expressed some
wonder that I could be readily and naturally taken
for a pedlar, and explained the accident by the dif-
ference of language and manners between England
and France. I must now take a humbler view ; for
here I was among my own countrymen, somewhat
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 89
roughly clad, to be sure, but with every advantage
of speech and manner; and I am bound to confess
that I passed for nearly anything you please except
an educated gentleman. The sailors called me
" mate," the officers addressed me as " my man,"
my comrades accepted me without hesitation for
a person of their own character and experience, but
with some curious information. One, a mason him-
self, believed I was a mason; several, and among
these at least one of the seamen, judged me to be a
petty officer in the American navy; and I was so
often set down for a practical engineer that at last
I had not the heart to deny it. From all these
guesses I drew one conclusion, which told against
the insight of my companions. They might be
close observers in their own way, and read the
manners in the face; but it was plain that they
did not extend their observation to the hands.
To the saloon passengers also I sustained my part
without a hitch. It is true I came little in their
way; but when we did encounter, there was no
recognition in their eye, although I confess I some-
times courted it in silence. All these, my inferiors
and equals, took me, like the transformed monarch
in the story, for a mere common, human man.
They gave me a hard, dead look, with the flesh
about the eye kept unrelaxed.
With the women this surprised me less, as I had
9 o THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT
already experimented on the sex by going abroad
through a suburban part of London simply attired
in a sleeve-waistcoat. The result was curious. I
then learned for the first time, and by the exhaus-
tive process, how much attention ladies are accus-
tomed to bestow on all male creatures of their own
station; for, in my humble rig, each one who went
by me caused me a certain shock of surprise and a
sense of something wanting. In my normal circum-
stances, it appeared every young lady must have
paid me some tribute of a glance; and though I
had often not detected it when it was given, I was
well aware of its absence when it was withheld. My
height seemed to decrease with every woman who
passed me, for she passed me like a dog. This is one
of my grounds for supposing that what are called
the upper classes may sometimes produce a disa-
greeable impression in what are called the lower;
and I wish some one would continue my experi-
ment, and find out exactly at what stage of toilette a
man becomes invisible to the well-regulated female
eye. .
Here on shipboard the matter was put to a more
complete test ; for, even with the addition of speech
and manner, I passed among the ladies for precisely
the average man of the steerage. It was one after-
noon that I saw this demonstrated. A very plainly
dressed woman was taken ill on deck. I think I
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 91
had the luck to be present at every sudden seizure
during all the passage ; and on this occasion found
myself in the place of importance, supporting the
sufferer. There was not only a large crowd imme-
diately around us, but a considerable knot of saloon
passengers leaning over our heads from the hurri-
cane-deck. One of these, an elderly managing
woman, hailed me with counsels. Of course I had
to reply; and as the talk went on, I began to dis-
cover that the whole group took me for the hus-
band. I looked upon my new wife, poor creature,
with mingled feelings ; and I must own she had
not even the appearance of the poorest class of city
servant-maids, but looked more like a country
wench who should have been employed at a road-
side inn. Now was the time for me to go and
study the brass plate.
To such of the officers as knew about me the
doctor, the purser, and the stewards I appeared
in the light of a broad joke. The fact that I spent
the better part of my day in writing had gone
abroad over the ship and tickled them all prodi-
giously. Whenever they met me they referred to
my absurd occupation with familiarity and breadth
of humourous intention. Their manner was well
calculated to remind me of my fallen fortunes. You
may be sincerely amused by the amateur literary
efforts of a gentleman, but you scarce publish the
92 THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT
feeling to his face. "Well!" they would say:
" still writing? " And the smile would widen into
a laugh. The purser came one day into the cabin,
and, touched to the heart by my misguided indus-
try, offered me some other kind of writing, " for
which," he added pointedly, " you will be paid."
This was nothing else than to copy out the list
of passengers.
Another trick of mine which told against my
reputation was my choice of roosting-place in an
active draught upon the cabin floor. I was openly
jeered and flouted for this eccentricity; and a con-
siderable knot would sometimes gather at the door
to see my last dispositions for the night. This was
embarrassing, but I learned to support the trial
with equanimity.
Indeed I may say that, upon the whole, my new
position sat lightly and naturally upon my spirits.
I accepted the consequences with readiness, and
found them far from difficult to bear. The steerage
conquered me ; I conformed more and more to the
type of the place, not only in manner but at heart,
growing hostile to the officers and cabin passengers
who looked down upon me, and day by day greedier
for small delicacies. Such was the result, as I
fancy, of a diet of bread and butter, soup and por-
ridge. We think we have no sweet tooth as long
as we are full to the brim of molasses ; but a man
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 93
must have sojourned in the workhouse before he
boasts himself indifferent to dainties. Every even-
ing, for instance, I was more and more preoccu-
pied about our doubtful fare at tea. If it was
delicate my heart was much lightened ; if it was but
broken fish I was proportionally downcast. The
offer of a little jelly from a fellow-passenger more
provident than myself caused a marked elevation in
my spirits. And I would have gone to the ship's
end and back again for an oyster or a chipped fruit.
In other ways I was content with my position.
It seemed no disgrace to be confounded with my
company ; for I may as well declare at once I found
their manners as gentle and becoming as those of
any other class. I do not mean that my friends
could have sat down without embarrassment and
laughable disaster at the table of a duke. That
does not imply an inferiority of breeding, but a
difference of usage. Thus I flatter myself that I
conducted myself well among my fellow T -passen-
gers; yet my most ambitious hope is not to have
avoided faults, but to have committed as few as
possible. I know too well that my tact is not the
same as their tact, and that my habit of a different
society constituted, not only no qualification, but a
positive disability to move easily and becomingly in
this. When Jones complimented me because I
" managed to behave very pleasantly " to my fellow-
94 THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT
passengers, was how he put it I could follow
the thought in his mind, and knew his compliment
to be such as we pay foreigners on their proficiency
in English. I dare say this praise was given me
immediately on the back of some unpardonable sole-
cism, which had led him to review my conduct as
a whole. We are all ready to laugh at the plough-
man among lords ; we should consider also the case
of a lord among the ploughmen. I have seen
a lawyer in the house of a Hebridean fisherman;
and I know, but nothing will induce me to disclose,
which of these two was the better gentleman.
Some of our finest behaviour, though it looks well
enough from the boxes, may seem even brutal to
the gallery. We boast too often manners that are
parochial rather than universal ; that, like a country
wine, will not bear transportation for a hundred
miles, nor from the parlour to the kitchen. To be
a gentleman is to be one all the world over, and
in every relation and grade of society. It is a
high calling, to which a man must first be born,
and then devote himself for life. And, unhappily,
the manners of a certain so-called upper grade have
a kind of currency, and meet with a certain external
acceptation throughout all the others, and this tends
to keep us well satisfied with slight acquirements
and the amateurish accomplishments of a clique.
But manners, like art, should be human and central.
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 95
Some of my fellow-passengers, as I now moved
among them in a relation of equality, seemed to me
excellent gentlemen. They were not rough, nor
hasty, nor disputatious ; debated pleasantly, differed
kindly; were helpful, gentle, patient, and placid.
The type of manners was plain, and even heavy;
there was little to please the eye, but nothing to
shock ; and I thought gentleness lay more nearly at
the spring of behaviour than in many more ornate
and delicate societies. I say delicate, where I can-
not say refined ; a thing may be fine, like ironwork,
without being delicate, like lace. There was here
less delicacy ; the skin supported more callously the
natural surface of events, the mind received more
bravely the crude facts of human existence; but I
do not think that there was less effective refinement,
less consideration for others, less polite suppression
of self. I speak of the best among my fellow-pas-
sengers ; for in the steerage, as well as in the saloon,
there is a mixture. Those, then, with whom I found
myself in sympathy, and of whom I may therefore
hope to write with a greater measure of truth, were
not only as good in their manners, but endowed
with very much the same natural capacities, and
about as wise in deduction, as the bankers and
barristers of what is called society. One and all
were too much interested in disconnected facts, and
loved information for its own sake with too rash
96 THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT
a devotion; but people in all classes display the
same appetite as they gorge themselves daily with
the miscellaneous gossip of the newspaper. News-
paper reading, as far as I can make out, is often
rather a sort of brown study than an act of culture.
I have myself palmed off yesterday's issue on a
friend, and seen him re-peruse it for a continuance
of minutes with an air at once refreshed and solemn.
Workmen, perhaps, pay more attention ; but though
they may be eager listeners, they have rarely
seemed to me either willing or careful thinkers.
Culture is not measured by the greatness of the
field which is covered by our knowledge, but by the
nicety with which we can perceive relations in that
field, whether great or small. Workmen, certainly
those who were on board with me, I found wanting
in this quality or habit of the mind. They did not
perceive relations, but leaped to a so-called cause,
and thought the problem settled. Thus the cause
of everything in England was the form of govern-
ment, and the cure for all evils was, by consequence,
a revolution. It is surprising how many of them
said this, and that none should have had a definite
thought in his head as he said it. Some hated the
Church because they disagreed with it ; some hated
Lord Beaconsfield because of war and taxes; all
hated the masters, possibly with reason. But these
feelings were not at the root of the matter ; the true
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 97
reasoning of their souls ran thus I have not
got on; I ought to have got on; if there was a
revolution I should get on. How? They had no
idea. Why? Because because well, look at
America !
"To be politically blind is no distinction ; we are all
so, if you come to that. At bottom, as it seems to
me, there is but one question in modern home poli-
tics, though it appears in many shapes, and that is
the question of money; and but one political rem-
edy, that the people should grow wiser and better.
My workmen fellow-passengers were as impatient
and dull of hearing on the second of these points
as any member of Parliament; but they had some
glimmerings of the first. They would not hear of
improvement on their part, but wished the world
made over again in a crack, so that they might
remain improvident and idle and debauched, and
yet enjoy the comfort and respect that should
accompany the opposite virtues ; and it was in this
expectation, as far as I could see, that many of
them were now on their way to America. But on
the point of money they saw clearly enough that
inland politics, so far as they were concerned, were
reducible to the question of annual income ; a ques-
tion which should long ago have been settled by
a revolution, they did not know how, and which
they were now about to settle for themselves, once
98 THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT
more they knew not how, by crossing the Atlantic
in a steamship of considerable tonnage.
And yet it has been amply shown them that the
second or income question is in itself nothing, and
may as well be left undecided, if there be no wis-
dom and virtue to profit by the change. It is not by
a man's purse, but by his character, that he is rich
or poor. Barney will be poor, Alick will be poor,
Mackay will be poor; let them go where they will,
and wreck all the governments under heaven, they
will be poor until they die.
Nothing is perhaps more notable in the average
workman than his surprising idleness, and the can-
dour with which he confesses to the failing. It has
to me been always something of a relief to find the
poor, as a general rule, so little oppressed with
work. I can in consequence enjoy my own more
fortunate beginning with a better grace. The other
day I was living with a farmer in America, an old
frontiersman, who had worked and fought, hunted
and farmed, from his childhood up. He excused
himself for his defective education on the ground
that he had been overworked from first to last.
Even now, he said, anxious as he was, he had never
the time to take up a book. In consequence of this,
I observed him closely ; he was occupied for four or,
at the extreme outside, for five hours out of the
twenty- four, and then principally in walking; and
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 99
the remainder of the day he passed in born idleness,
either eating fruit or standing with his back against
a door. I have known men do hard literary work
all morning, and then undergo quite as much phys-
ical fatigue by way of relief as satisfied this power-
ful frontiersman for the day. He, at least, like
all the educated class, did so much homage to
industry as to persuade himself he was industrious.
But the average mechanic recognises his idleness
with effrontery; he has even, as I am told, organ-
ized it.
I give the story as it was told me, and it was told
me for a fact. A man fell from a housetop in the
city of Aberdeen, and was brought into hospital
with broken bones. He was asked what was his
trade, and replied that he was a tapper. No one
had ever heard of such a thing before ; the officials
were filled with curiosity; they besought an expla-
nation. It appeared that when a party of slaters
were engaged upon a roof, they would now and
then be taken with a fancy for the public-house.
Now a seamstress, for example, might slip away
from her work and no one be the wiser ; but if these
fellows adjourned, the tapping of the mallets would
cease, and thus the neighbourhood be advertised
of their defection. Hence the career of the tapper.
He has to do the tapping and keep up an industrious
bustle on the housetop during the absence of the
ioo THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT
slaters. When he taps for only one or two, the
thing is child's-play, but when he has to represent
a whole troop, it is then that he earns his money
in the sweat of his brow. Then must he bound
from spot to spot, reduplicate, triplicate, sexdupli-
cate his single personality, and swell and hasten
his blows, until he produce a perfect illusion for
the ear, and you would swear that a crowd of emu-
lous masons were continuing merrily to roof the
house. It must be a strange sight from an upper
window.
I heard nothing on board of the tapper ; but I was
astonished at the stories told by my companions.
Skulking, shirking, malingering, were all estab-
lished tactics, it appeared. They could see no dis-
honesty where a man who is paid for an hour's
work gives half an hour's consistent idling in its
place. Thus the tapper would refuse to watch for
the police during a burglary, and call himself an
honest man. It is not sufficiently recognised that
our race detests to work. If I thought that I should
have to work every day of my life as hard as I am
working now, I should be tempted to give up
the struggle. And the workman early begins on
his career of toil. He has never had his fill of
holidays in the past, and his prospect of holi-
days in the future is both distant and uncertain.
In the circumstances, it would require a high
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 101
degree of virtue not to snatch alleviations for the
moment.
There were many good talkers on the ship ; and
I believe good talking of a certain sort is a com-
mon accomplishment among working men. Where
books are comparatively scarce, a greater amount
of information will be given and received by word
of mouth ; and this tends to produce good talkers,
and, what is no less needful for conversation, good
listeners. They could all tell a story with effect.
I am sometimes tempted to think that the less liter-
ary class show always better in narration ; they have
so much more patience with detail, are so much less
hurried to reach the points, and preserve so much
juster a proportion among the facts. At the same
time their talk is dry; they pursue a topic plod-
dingly, have not an agile fancy, do not throw sudden
lights from unexpected quarters, and when the talk
is over they often leave the matter where it was.
They mark time instead of marching. They think
only to argue, not to reach new conclusions, and use
their reason rather as a weapon of offence than as a
tool for self-improvement. Hence the talk of some
of the cleverest was unprofitable in result, because
there was no give and take ; they would grant you
as little as possible for premise, and begin to dispute
under an oath to conquer or to die.
But the talk of a workman is apt to be more in-
102 THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT
teresting than that of a wealthy merchant, because
the thoughts, hopes, and fears of which the work-
man's life is built lie nearer to necessity and nature.
They are more immediate to human life. An in-
come calculated by the week is a far more human
thing than one calculated by the year, and a small
income, simply from its smallness, than a large one.
I never wearied listening to the details of a work-
man's economy, because every item stood for some
real pleasure. If he could afford pudding twice a
week, you knew that twice a week the man ate with
genuine gusto and was physically happy; while if
you learn that a rich man has seven courses a day,
ten to one the half of them remain untasted, and
the whole is but misspent money and a weariness
to the flesh.
The difference between England and America
to a working man was thus most humanly put to
me by a fellow-passenger : " In America," said he,
" you get pies and puddings." I do not hear
enough, in economy books, of pies and pudding.
A man lives in and for the delicacies, adornments,
and accidental attributes of life, such as pudding
to eat and pleasant books and theatres to occupy
his leisure. The bare terms of existence would be
rejected with contempt by all. If a man feeds on
bread and butter, soup and porridge, his appetite
grows wolfish after dainties. And the workman
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 103
dwells in a borderland, and is always within sight
of those cheerless regions where life is more diffi-
cult to sustain than worth sustaining. Every de-
tail of our existence, where it is worth while to
cross the ocean after pie and pudding, is made alive
and enthralling by the presence of genuine desire ;
but it is all one to me whether Croesus has a hundred
or a thousand thousands in the bank. There is more
adventure in the life of the working man who
descends as a common soldier into the battle of
life, than in that of the millionaire who sits apart
in an office, like Von Moltke, and only directs the
manoeuvres by telegraph. Give me to hear about
the career of him who is in the thick of the
business ; to whom one change of market means an
empty belly, and another a copious and savoury
meal. This is not the philosophical, but the human
side of economics; it interests like a story; and
the life of all who are thus situated partakes in a
small way of the charm of Robinson Crusoe; for
every step is critical, and human life is presented
to you naked and verging to its lowest terms.
NEW YORK
Awe drew near to New York I was at first
amused, and then somewhat staggered, by
the cautious and the grisly tales that went
the round. You would have thought we were to
land upon a cannibal island. You must speak to
no one in the streets, as they would not leave you
till you were rooked and beaten. You must enter
a hotel with military precautions; for the least
you had to apprehend was to awake next morning
without money or baggage, or necessary raiment,
a lone forked radish in a bed; and if the worst
befell, you would instantly and mysteriously dis-
appear from the ranks of mankind.
I have usually found such stories correspond to
the least modicum of fact. Thus I was warned,
I remember, against the roadside inns of the
Cevennes, and that by a learned professor; and
when I reached Pradelles the warning was ex-
plained it was but the far-away rumour and
reduplication of a single terrifying story already
half a century old, and half forgotten in the the-
atre of the events. So I was tempted to make
light of these reports against America. But we
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 105
had on board with us a man whose evidence it
would not do to put aside. He had come near
these perils in the body; he had visited a robber
inn. The public has an old and well-grounded
favour for this class of incident, and shall be
gratified to the best of my power.
My fellow-passenger, whom we shall call
M'Naughten, had come from New York to Boston
with a comrade, seeking work. They were a pair
of rattling blades; and, leaving their baggage at
the station, passed the day in beer-saloons, and
with congenial spirits, until midnight struck. Then
they applied themselves to find a lodging, and
walked the streets till two, knocking at houses of
entertainment and being refused admittance, or
themselves declining the terms. By two the in-
spiration of their liquor had begun to wear off;
they were weary and humble, and after a great
circuit found themselves in the same street where
they had begun their search, and in front of a
French hotel where they had already sought ac-
commodation. Seeing the house still open, they
returned to the charge. A man in a white cap sat
in an office by the door. He seemed to welcome
them more warmly than when they had first pre-
sented themselves, and the charge for the night had
somewhat unaccountably fallen from a dollar to a
quarter. They thought him ill-looking, but paid
io6 THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT
their quarter apiece, and were shown up-stairs to
the top of the house. There, in a small room, the
man in the white cap wished them pleasant
slumbers.
It was furnished with a bed, a chair, and some
conveniences. The door did not lock on the inside ;
and the only sign of adornment was a couple of
framed pictures, one close above the head of the
bed, and the* other opposite the foot, and both
curtained, as we may sometimes see valuable water-
colours, or the portraits of the dead, or works of
art more than usually skittish in the subject. It
was perhaps in the hope of finding something of
this last description that M'Naughten's comrade
pulled aside the curtain of the first. He was
startlingly disappointed. There was no picture.
The frame surrounded, and the curtain was de-
signed to hide, an oblong aperture in the partition,
through which they looked forth into the dark
corridor. A person standing without could easily
take a purse from under the pillow, or even strangle
a sleeper as he lay abed. M'Naughten and his
comrade stared at each other like Vasco's seamen,
" with a wild surmise " ; and then the latter, catch-
ing up the lamp, ran to the other frame and roughly
raised the curtain. There he stood, petrified ; and
M'Naughten, who had followed, grasped him by
the wrist in terror. They could see into another
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 107
room, larger in size than that which they occupied,
where three men sat crouching and silent in the
dark. For a second or so these five persons looked
each other in the eyes, then the curtain was dropped,
and M'Naughten and his friend made but one bolt
of it out of the room and down-stairs. The man
in the white cap said nothing as they passed him;
and they were so pleased to be once more in the
open night that they gave up all notion of a bed,
and walked the streets of Boston till the morning.
No one seemed much cast down by these stories,
but all inquired after the address of a respectable
hotel; and I, for my part, put myself under the
conduct of Mr. Jones. Before noon of the second
Sunday we sighted the low shores outside of New
York harbour; the steerage passengers must re-
main on board to pass through Castle Garden on
the following morning ; but we of the second cabin
made our escape along with the lords of the saloon ;
and by six o'clock Jones and I issued into West
Street, sitting on some straw in the bottom of an
open baggage- wagon. It rained miraculously ; and
from that moment till on the following night I
left New York, there was scarce a lull, and no
cessation of the downpour. The roadways were
flooded; a loud strident noise of falling water
filled the air ; the restaurants smelt heavily of wet
people and wet clothing.
io8 THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT
It took us but a few minutes, though it cost us
a good deal of money, to be rattled along West
Street to our destination : " Reunion House, No.
10 West Street, one minute's walk from Castle
Garden; convenient to Castle Garden, the Steam-
boat Landings, California Steamers and Liverpool
Ships ; Board and Lodging per day i dollar, single
meals 25 cents, lodging per night 25 cents; private
rooms for families; no charge for storage or
baggage; satisfaction guaranteed to all persons;
Michael Mitchell, Proprietor." Reunion House
was, I may go the length of saying, a humble
hostelry. You entered through a long bar-room,
thence passed into a little dining-room, and thence
into a still smaller kitchen. The furniture was of
the plainest ; but the bar was hung in the American
taste, with encouraging and hospitable mottoes.
Jones was well known; we were received
warmly ; and two minutes afterwards I had refused
a drink from the proprietor, and was going on, in
my plain European fashion, to refuse a cigar, when
Mr. Mitchell sternly interposed, and explained the
situation. He was offering to treat me, it appeared ;
whenever an American bar-keeper proposes any-
thing, it must be borne in mind that he is offering
to treat ; and if I did not want a drink, I must at
least take the cigar. I took it bashfully, feeling I
had begun my American career on the wrong foot.
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 109
I did not enjoy that cigar; but this may have been
from a variety of reasons, even the best cigar often
failing to please if you smoke three-quarters of it
in a drenching rain.
For many years America was to me a sort of
promised land; "westward the march of empire
holds its way " ; the race is for the moment to the
young; what has been and what is we imperfectly
and obscurely know ; what is to be yet lies beyond
the flight of our imaginations. Greece, Rome, and
Judaea are gone by for ever, leaving to generations
the legacy of their accomplished work; China still
endures, an old-inhabited house in the brand-new
city of nations ; England has already declined, since
she has lost the States ; and to these States, there-
fore, yet undeveloped, full of dark possibilities, and
grown, like another Eve, from one rib out of the
side of their own old land, the minds of young
men in England turn naturally at a certain hopeful
period of their age. It will be hard for an American
to understand the spirit. But let him imagine a
young man, who shall have grown up in an old and
rigid circle, following by-gone fashions and taught
to distrust his own fresh instincts, and who now
suddenly hears of a family of cousins, all about his
own age, who keep house together by themselves
and live far from restraint and tradition; let him
imagine this, and he will have some imperfect notion
no THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT
of the sentiment with which spirited English youths
turn to the thought of the American Republic. It
seems to them as if, out west, the war of life was
still conducted in the open air, and on free barbaric
terms; as if it had not yet been narrowed into
parlours, nor begun to be conducted, like some
unjust and dreary arbitration, by compromise,
costume, forms of procedure, and sad, senseless self-
denial. Which of these two he prefers, a man with
any youth still left in him will decide rightly for
himself. He would rather be houseless than denied
a pass-key ; rather go without food than partake of
a stalled ox in stiff, respectable society; rather be
shot out of hand than direct his life according to
the dictates of the world.
He knows or thinks nothing of the Maine Laws,
the Puritan sourness, the fierce, sordid appetite for
dollars, or the dreary existence of country towns.
A few wild story-books which delighted his child-
hood form the imaginative basis of his picture of
America. In course of time, there is added to this
a great crowd of stimulating details vast cities
that grow up as by enchantment; the birds, that
have gone south in autumn, returning with the
spring to find thousands camped upon their marshes,
and the lamps burning far and near along populous
streets ; forests that disappear like snow ; countries
larger than Britain that are cleared and settled, one
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT in
man running forth with his household gods before
another, while the bear and the Indian are yet
scarce aware of their approach; oil that gushes
from the earth ; gold that is washed or quarried in
the brooks or glens of the Sierras; and all that
bustle, courage, action, and constant kaleidoscopic
change that Walt Whitman has seized and set forth
in his vigorous, cheerful, and loquacious verses.
Here I was at last in America, and was soon out
upon New York streets, spying for things foreign.
The place had to me an air of Liverpool ; but such
was the rain that not Paradise itself would have
looked inviting. We were a party of four, under
two umbrellas; Jones and I and two Scots lads,
recent immigrants, and not indisposed to welcome
a compatriot. They had been six weeks in New
York, and neither of them had yet found a single
job or earned a single halfpenny. Up to the pres-
ent they were exactly out of pocket by the amount
of the fare.
The lads soon left us. Now I had sworn by all
my gods to have such a dinner as would rouse the
dead; there was scarce any expense at which I
should have hesitated ; the devil was in it but Jones
and I should dine like heathen emperors. I set
to work, asking after a restaurant; and I chose
the wealthiest and most gastronomical-looking
passers-by to ask from. Yet, although I had told
ii2 THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT
them I was willing to pay anything in reason, one
and all sent me off to cheap, fixed-price houses,
where I would not have eaten that night for the
cost of twenty dinners. I do not know if this were
characteristic of New York, or whether it was only
Jones and I who looked un-dinerly and discouraged
enterprising suggestions. But at length, by our
own sagacity, we found a French restaurant, where
there was a French waiter, some fair French cook-
ing, some so-called French wine, and French coffee
to conclude the whole. I never entered into the
feelings of Jack on land so completely as when I
tasted that coffee.
I suppose we had one of the " private rooms for
families" at Reunion House. It was very small,
furnished with a bed, a chair, and some clothes-
pegs ; and it derived all that was necessary for the
life of the human animal through two borrowed
lights; one looking into the passage, and the sec-
ond opening without sash, into another apartment,
where three men fitfully snored, or in intervals of
wakefulness, drearily mumbled to each other all
night long. It will be observed that this was almost
exactly the disposition of the room in M'Naughten's
story. Jones had the bed ; I pitched my camp upon
the floor; he did not sleep until near morning, and
I, for my part, never closed an eye.
At sunrise I heard a cannon fired; and shortly
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 113
afterwards the men in the next room gave over
snoring for good, and began to rustle over their
toilettes. The sound of their voices as they talked
was low and moaning, like that of people watching
by the sick. Jones, who had at last begun to doze,
tumbled and murmured, and every now and then
opened unconscious eyes upon me where I lay. I
found myself growing eerier and eerier, for I dare
say I was a little fevered by my restless night, and
hurried to dress and get down-stairs.
You had to pass through the rain, which still fell
thick and resonant, to reach a lavatory on the other
side of the court. There were three basin-stands,
and a few crumpled towels and pieces of wet soap,
white and slippery like fish; nor should I forget
a looking-glass and a pair of questionable combs.
Another Scots lad was here, scrubbing his face with
a good will. He had been three months in New
York and had not yet found a single job nor earned
a single halfpenny. Up to the present, he also was
exactly out of pocket by the amount of the fare.
I began to grow sick at heart for my fellow-
emigrants.
Of my nightmare wanderings in New York I
spare to tell. I had a thousand and one things to
do; only the day to do them in, and a journey
across the continent before me in the evening. It
rained with patient fury; every now and then I
8
n 4 THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT
had to get under cover for awhile in order, so to
speak, to give my mackintosh a rest; for under
this continued drenching it began to grow damp on
the inside. I went to banks, post-offices, railway-
offices, restaurants, publishers, book-sellers, money-
changers, and wherever I went a pool would gather
about my feet, and those who were careful of their
floors would look on with an unfriendly eye. Wher-
ever I went, too, the same traits struck me: the
people were all surprisingly rude and surprisingly
kind. The money-changer cross-questioned me like
a French commissary, asking my age, my business,
my average income, and my destination, beating
down my attempts at evasion, and receiving my
answers in silence; and yet when all was over, he
shook hands with me up to the elbows, and sent his
lad nearly a quarter of a mile in the rain to get me
books at a reduction. Again, in a very large pub-
lishing and bookselling establishment, a man, who
seemed to be the manager, received me as I had
certainly never before been received in any human
shop, indicated squarely that he put no faith in
my honesty, and refused to look up the names of
books or give me the slightest help or information,
on the ground, like the steward, that it was none
of his business. I lost my temper at last, said I was
a stranger in America and not learned in their eti-
quette; but I would assure him, if he went to any
THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT 115
bookseller in England, of more handsome usage.
The boast was perhaps exaggerated ; but like many
a long shot, it struck the gold. The manager
passed at once from one extreme to the other; I
may say that from that moment he loaded me with
kindness; he gave me all sorts of good advice,
wrote me down addresses, and came bareheaded
into the rain to point me out a restaurant, where
I might lunch, nor even then did he seem to think
that he had done enough. These are (it is as well
to be bold in statement) the manners of America.
It is this same opposition that has most struck me
in people of almost all classes and from east to west.
By the time a man had about strung me up to be
the death of him by his insulting behaviour, he him-
self would be just upon the point of melting into
confidence and serviceable attentions. Yet I sus-
pect, although I have met with the like in so many
parts, that this must be the character of some par-
ticular State or group of States ; for in America, and
this again in all classes, you will find some of the
softest-mannered gentlemen in the world.
I was so wet when I got back to Mitchell's
toward the evening, that I had simply to divest
myself of my shoes, socks, and trousers, and leave
them behind for the benefit of New York city. No
fire could have dried them ere I had to start; and
to pack them in their present condition was to
n6 THE AMATEUR EMIGRANT
spread ruin among my other possessions. With a
heavy heart I said farewell to them as they lay a
pulp in the middle of a pool upon the floor of
Mitchell's kitchen. I wonder if they are dry by
now. Mitchell hired a man to carry my baggage
to the station, which was hard by, accompanied me
thither himself, and recommended me to the par-
ticular attention of the officials. No one could have
been kinder. Those who are out of pocket may
go safely to Reunion House, where they will get
decent meals and find an honest and obliging land-
lord. I owed him this word of thanks, before I
enter fairly on the second and far less agreeable
chapter of my emigrant experience.
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
" Vixerunt nonmdli in agris, delectati re sua familiari. His idem
fropositum fuit quod regibus, ut ne qua re agerent, ne cut parerent,
libertate uterentur : cujus proprium est sic vivere ut velis"
Cic., De Of., I. xx.
TO
VIRGIL WILLIAMS
AND
DORA NORTON WILLIAMS
THESE SKETCHES ARE AFFECTIONATELY
DEDICATED BY THEIR FRIEND
THE AUTHOR
CONTENTS
IN THE VALLEY
CHAPTER PAGE
I CALISTOGA 129
II THE PETRIFIED FOREST 136
III NAPA WINE 142
IV THE SCOT ABROAD 150
WITH THE CHILDREN OF ISRAEL
I To INTRODUCE MR. KELMAR 156
II FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF SILVERADO . * . . 162
III THE RETURN 176
THE ACT OF SQUATTING 183.
THE HUNTER'S FAMILY 196
THE SEA-FOGS 210
THE TOLL HOUSE 219
A STARRY DRIVE 226
EPISODES IN THE STORY OF A MINE . . 232
TOILS AND PLEASURES 246
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
THE scene of this little book is on a high
mountain. There are, indeed, many
higher; there are many of a nobler out-
line. It is no place of pilgrimage for the summary
globe-trotter; but to one who lives upon its sides,
Mount Saint Helena soon becomes a centre of in-
terest. It is the Mont Blanc of one section of the
Californian Coast Range, none of its near neigh-
bours rising to one-half its altitude. It looks down
on much green, intricate country. It feeds in the
spring-time many splashing brooks. From its sum-
mit 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
i2 4 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
shoulders. Its naked peak stands nearly four
thousand five hundred feet above the sea; its sides
are fringed with forest; 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 operations, 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 mountain to the heart, many-
windowed hotels lighting up the night like factories,
and a prosperous city occupying 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 Fran-
cisco, the traveller has 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
inland sea, the Bay of San Francisco, there can be
few drearier scenes than the Vallejo Ferry. Bald
shores and a low, bald islet enclose the sea ; through
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS 125
the narrows 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 killing chill ; and, although
the upper sky was still unfleckedl with vapour, the
sea-fogs were pouring in from seaward, over the
hilltops of Marin County, in one great, shapeless,
silver cloud.
South Vallejo is typical of many Californian
towns. It was a blunder; the site has proved un-
tenable ; and although it is still such a young place
by the scale of Europe, it has already begun to be
deserted for its neighbour 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 human face or voice
these are the marks of South Vallejo. Yet there
was a tall building beside the pier, labelled the Star
Flour Mills; and sea-going, full-rigged ships lay
close alongshore, 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 wharves 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-
126 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
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 labourers, 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 vileness of the food
and the rough coatless men devouring it in silence.
In our bedroom, the stove would not burn, though
it would smoke; and while one window would not
open, the other would not shut. There, was 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 moon-
light. All about that dreary inn frogs sang their
ungainly chorus.
Early the next morning we mounted the hill
along a wooden footway, bridging one marish spot
after another. Here and there, as we ascended,
we passed a house embowered in white roses. More
of the bay became 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
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS 127
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 wider out-
looks 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 scan-
ning it with shaded eyes; and, as if to answer to
the thought, one of the great ships below began
silently to clothe herself with 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 enclosures ; the sun shone wide over
open uplands, the displumed hills stood clear against
the sky. But by-and-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 neighbourhood,
mounting an inland, irrigated valley. 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 propor-
tions, of bright new wooden houses and great and
128 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
growing forest trees; and the chapel bell on the
engine sounded most festally that sunny Sunday, as
we drew up at one green town after another, with
the townsfolk trooping in their Sunday's best to
see the strangers, with the sun sparkling on the
clean houses, and great domes of foliage humming
overhead in the breeze.
This pleasant Napa Valley is, at its north end,
blockaded by our mountain. There, at Calistoga,
the railroad ceases, and the traveller who intends
faring farther, 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.
IN THE VALLEY
CHAPTER I
CALISTOGA
IT is difficult for a European to imagine Calis-
toga, the whole place is so new, and of such
an occidental pattern; the very name, I hear,
was invented at a supper-paity by the man who
found the springs.
The railroad and the highway come up the valley
about parallel to one another. The street of Calis-
toga 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
witfy a firm resolve to grow larger, Washington
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
concentrated upon that street between the railway
Q
ijo THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
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 black-
smith's, the chemist's, the general merchant's, and
Kong Sam Kee, the Chinese laundryman's ; here,
probably, is the office of the local 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 remembered 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 robber road-agent, he is quaintly called
is still busy in these parts. The fame of Vas-
quez 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
off the garments of his trade, like Grindoff, in
The Miller and his Men, and flamed forth in his
second dress as a captain of banditti. A great rob-
bery 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 several and the dentist, I be-
lieve, amongst the number bit the dust. The
grass was springing for the first time, nourished
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS 131
upon their blood, when I arrived in Calistoga. I am
reminded of another highwayman of that same year.
" He had been unwell," so ran his humourous de-
fence, " and the doctor told him to take something,
so he took the express box."
The cultus of the stage-coachman always flour-
ishes highest where there are thieves on the road,
and where the guard travels armed, and the stage
is not only a link 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 not forgotten.
Along the unfenced, abominable mountain roads,
he launches his team with small regard to human
life or the doctrine of probabilities. Flinching
travellers, 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 re-
quired point. Wonderful tales are current of his
readiness and skill. One in particular, of how one
of his horses fell at a ticklish 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.
ij2 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
I only saw Foss once, though, strange as it may
sound, I have twice talked with him. He lives out
of Calistoga, at a ranche called Fossville. One
evening, after he was long gone home, I dropped
into Cheeseborough's, and was asked if I should
like to speak with Mr. Foss. Supposing that the
interview was impossible, 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
returned 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 ac-
customed to consider the very skirts of civilisation,
I should have used the telephone for the first time
in my civilised career. So it goes in these young
countries; telephones, and telegraphs, and news-
papers, and advertisements running far ahead
among the Indians and the grizzly bears.
Alone, on the other side of the railway, stands
the Springs 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
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS 133
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 burthens, and by the day or week.
The whole neighbourhood of Mount Saint
Helena is full of sulphur and of boiling springs.
The Geysers are famous; they were the great
health resort of the Indians 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 enclosure 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 tenant of
a cottage sank a well, and there also the water came
up boiling. It keeps this end of the valley as warm
as a toast. I have gone across to the hotel a little
ij4 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
after five in the morning, when a sea-fog from the
Pacific was hanging thick and grey, 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
sometimes too hot to move about.
But in spite of this heat from above and below,
doing one on both sides, Calistoga was a pleasant
place to dwell in ; beautifully green, for it was then
that favoured moment in the Calif ornian 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 some-
thing satisfactory in the sight of that great moun-
tain that enclosed us to the north : whether it stood,
robed in sunshine, quaking to its topmost pinnacle
with the heat and brightness of the day ; or whether
it set itself to weaving vapours, wisp after wisp
growing, trembling, fleeting, and fading in the
blue.
The tangled, woody, and almost trackless foot-
hills that enclose the valley, shutting if 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 nod-
ding pine-trees were dwarfed into satellites by
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS 135
the bulk and bearing of Mount Saint Helena. She
over-towered them by two-thirds of her own stat-
ure. She excelled them by the boldness of her
profile. Her great bald summit, clear of trees and
pasture, a cairn of quartz and cinnabar, rejected
kinship with the dark and shaggy wilderness of
lesser hilltops.
CHAPTER II
THE PETRIFIED FOREST
WE drove 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 valley, 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 line and colour a finished composition.
We passed a cow stretched by the roadside, her bell
slowly beating time to the movement of her ru-
minating jaws, her big red face crawled over by
half-a-dozen flies, a monument of content.
A little farther, 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, giving 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 carriage-step. To the right or the
left, there was scarce any trace of man but the road
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS 137
we followed ; I think we passed but one ranchero's
house in the whole distance, 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 strik-
ing 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 impene-
trable thickets, 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
Calif ornian 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 English. He taught me the madrona,
the manzanita, the buckeye, the maple; he showed
me the crested mountain quail; he showed me
where some young redwoods were already spiring
heavenwards from the ruins of the old ; for in this
district all had already perished : redwoods 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
ij8 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
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. 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 axe 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 adventures, 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 ranche had done
him good. It was " the handsomest spot in
the Californy mountains." Is n't it handsome,
now? " he said. Every penny he makes goes into
that ranche to make it handsomer. Then the cli-
mate, with the sea-breeze every afternoon in the
hottest summer weather, had gradually cured the
sciatica ; and his sister and niece were now domesti-
cated with him for company or, rather, the niece
came only once in the two days, teaching music the
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS 139
r.:eanwhile in the valley. And then, for a last piece
of luck, " the handsomest spot in the Californy
mountains " had produced a petrified 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 axe and a sciatica.
This tardy favourite 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 ruralised from head to foot, proceeded
to escort us up the hill behind his house.
" 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,
clinging lumps of bark, all changed into grey 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 putre-
faction, 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
i 4 o THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
" 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 " silica " with careless
freedom.
When I mentioned I was from Scotland, " My
old country," he said ; "my old country " with
a smiling look and a tone of real affection in his
voice. I was mightily surprised, for he was obvi-
ously 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
Scot, and an American, acknowledging some kind
allegiance 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 combination 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.
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS 141
And the forest itself ? Well, on a tangled, briery
hillside for the pasture would bear a little fur-
ther cleaning up, to my eyes there lie scattered
thickly various lengths of petrified trunk, such as
the one already mentioned. It is very curious, of
course, and ancient enough, if that were all. Doubt-
less, the heart of the geologist beats quicker at the
sight; but, for my part, I was mightily unmoved.
Sight-seeing is the art of disappointment.
" There 's nothing under heaven so blue
That 's fairly worth the travelling to."
But, fortunately, Heaven rewards us with many
agreeable prospects and adventures by the way;
and sometimes, when we go out to see a petrified
forest, prepares a far more delightful curiosity in
the form of Mr. Evans, whom may all prosperity
attend throughout a long and green old age.
tefell
CHAPTER 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 school-
fellow kept secreted in his play-box up to my last
discovery, those notable Valtellines that once shone
upon the board of Caesar.
Some of us, kind old Pagans, watch with dread
the shadows falling on the age: how the uncon-
querable worm invades the sunny terraces of
France, and Bordeaux is no more, and the Rhone
a mere Arabia Petraea. Chateau Neuf is dead, and
I have never tasted it ; Hermitage a hermitage
indeed from all life's sorrows lies expiring by the
river. And in the place of these imperial 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 Lyceus, and the vats staved in, and the dis-
honest wines poured forth among the sea. It is
not Pan only; Bacchus, too, is dead.
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS 143
If wine is to withdraw its most poetic counte-
nance, the sun of the white dinner-cloth, a deity to
be invoked by two or three, all fervent, hushing
their talk, degusting tenderly, and storing reminis-
cences 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 politics the while, and
even the schoolboy " took his whack," like liquorice
water. And at the same time, we look timidly for-
ward, 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 Australian
wines.
Wine in California is still in the experimental
stage; and when you taste a vintage, grave eco-
nomical questions 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 another. 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 fra-
i 44 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
grance and soft fire ; those virtuous Bonanzas, where
the soil has sublimated 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 farther, and the grizzly muses undisturbed.
But 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.
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 prop-
erly matured, and bearing its own name, is to be
fortune's favourite.
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 mer-
chant said to me, after he had shown me through
his premises. " 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 cha-
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS 145
teaux, 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 dare say 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-
growing 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 inclina-
tion, 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 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 Richebourg, which the wind carries away, what
an apotheosis of the dust! Not man himself can
seem a stranger child of that brown, friable powder,
than the blood and sun in that old flask behind the
faggots.
A Californian vineyard, one of man's outposts in
10
146 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
the wilderness, has features of its own. There is
nothing here to remind you of the Rhine or Rhone,
of the low cote d'or, or the infamous and scabby
deserts of Champagne; but all is green, solitary,
covert. We visited two of them, Mr. Schram's and
Mr. M'Eckron's, sharing the same glen.
Some way down the valley 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 perhaps after the rains, but already yield-
ing 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 English haw-
thorn, and the buckeyes were putting forth their
twisted horns of blossom : through all this, we
struggled toughly upwards, canted to and fro by
the roughness of the trail, and continually switched
across the face by sprays 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 or weed, called poison oak,
whose very neighbourhood is venomous to some,
and whose actual touch is avoided by the most
impervious.
The two houses, with their vineyards, stood each
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS 147
in a green niche of its own in this steep and narrow
forest dell. Though they were so near, there was
already a good difference in level ; and Mr. M'Eck-
ron's head must be a long way under the feet of Mr.
Schram. No more had been cleared than was neces-
sary for cultivation ; 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 re-
cently 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 putting 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. Schranrs, on the other hand, is the oldest
vineyard 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 mal-
voisies, 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
148 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
like a bandit's cave : all trimness, varnish, flowers,
and sunshine, among the tangled wildwood. 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
neophite and girlish trepidation, and he followed
every sip and read my face with proud anxiety.
I tasted all. I tasted every variety and shade
of Schramberger, red and white Schramberger,
Burgundy Schramberger, Schramberger Hock,
Schramberger Golden Chasselas, the latter with
a notable 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
Marathon, and no Johannisberg ; yet the stirring
sunlight, 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
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS 149
communicate a flavour, 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 farther 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 change and these perpetual
echoes of the moving footfall, haunt the land. Men
move eternally, still chasing Fortune; and, fortune
found, still wander. As we drove back to Calistoga,
the road lay empty of mere passengers, but its green
side was dotted with the camps of travelling fam-
ilies: one cumbered with a great waggonful of
household stuff, settlers going to occupy a ranche
they had taken up in Mendocino, or perhaps Te-
hama 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.
CHAPTER 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 infidelities. Scot-
land is indefinable ; it has no unity except upon the
map. Two languages, many dialects, innumerable
forms of piety, and countless local patriotisms and
prejudices, part us among ourselves more widely
than the extreme east and west of that great conti-
nent of America. When I am at home, I feel a man
from Glasgow to be something like a rival, a man
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 another Saxon. It is not community
of tongue. We have it not among ourselves ; and
we have it almost to perfection, with English, or
Irish, or American. It is no tie of faith, for we
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS 151
detest each other's errors. And yet somewhere,
deep down in the heart of each one of us, some-
thing yearns for the old land, and the old kindly
people.
Of all mysteries of the human heart, this is per-
haps the most inscrutable. There is no special love-
liness in that grey country, with its rainy, sea-beat
archipelago; its fields of dark mountains; its un-
sightly places, black with coal; its treeless, sour,
unfriendly-looking corn-lands; its quaint, grey,
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 repay 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-
man. You must pay for it in many ways, as for all
other advantages on earth. You have to learn the
paraphrases and the shorter catechism ; you gener-
152 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
ally take to drink ; your youth, as far as I can find
out, is a time of louder war against society, of more
outcry and tears and turmoil, than if you had been
born, for instance, 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 Chim-
borazo, and neither of them care; but when the
Scotch wine-grower told me of Mons Meg, it was
like 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
message 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
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS 153
again to his ranche among the hills, and that
was all.
Another Scotchman there was, a resident, who
for 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 country-
man is perfect like a whiff of peats.
And there was yet another. Upon him I came
suddenly, 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 are a Scotchman, sir ? " he said gravely.
" So am I ; I come from Aberdeen. This is my
card," presenting 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, indicating the misbegotten plant be-
fore our door, " which is the largest specimen I
have yet observed in Califoarnia."
i 54 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
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 pocket-book, all with the
gravity of Solomon. He then thanked me pro-
fusely, 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.
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 vigour and success. All the Scotch
in Sacramento became infatuated with him, and
spent their spare time and money, driving 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
Sacramento, 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.
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS 155
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 per-
haps these two are cause and effect : " For ye were
strangers in the land of Egypt."
WITH THE CHILDREN OF
ISRAEL
CHAPTER I
TO INTRODUCE MR. KELMAR
ONE thing in this new country very particu-
larly strikes a stranger, and that is the
number of antiquities. 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
pyramid or feudal tower. The towns, like the
vineyards, are experimentally founded : they grow
great and prosper by passing occasions; and when
the lode comes to an end, and the miners move else-
where, the town remains behind them, like Palmyra
in the desert. I suppose there are, in no country
in the world, so many deserted towns as here in
California.
The whole neighbourhood of Mount Saint
Helena, now so quiet and sylvan, was once alive
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS 157
with mining camps and villages. Here there would
be two thousand souls under canvas; there one
thousand or fifteen hundred ensconced, as if for
ever, 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 quar-
ter of the world to the rattlesnakes and deer 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 Calistoga. There is something
singularly enticing in the idea of going, rent-free,
into a ready-made house. And to the British mer-
chant, 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 mulli-
gatawney 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, driv-
ing by along the Geysers road, wooden-faced, but
glorified with legend, might have been induced to
158 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
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
neighbour rolling in cattle.
Now, my principal adviser in this matter was one
whom I will call Kelmar. That was not what he
called himself, but as soon as I set eyes on him, I
knew it was or ought to be his name; I am sure
it will be his name among the angels. Kelmar was
the store-keeper, a Russian Jew, good-natured, in
a very thriving way of business, and, on equal
terms, one of the most serviceable of men. He
also had something of the expression of a Scotch
country elder, who, by some peculiarity, should
chance to be a Hebrew. He had a project-
ing under lip, with which he continually smiled,
or rather smirked. Mrs. Kelmar was a singularly
kind woman; and the oldest son had quite a dark
and romantic bearing, and might be heard on
summer evenings playing sentimental airs on the
violin.
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS 159
I had no idea, at the time I made his acquaint-
ance, what an important person Kelmar was. But
the Jew store-keepers of California, profiting at
once by the needs and habits of the people, have
made themselves in too many cases the tyrants
of the rural population. Credit is offered, is
pressed on the new customer, and when once he is
beyond his depth, the tune changes, and he is from
thenceforth a white slave. I believe, even from the
little I saw, that Kelmar, if he choose to put on
the screw, could send half the settlers packing in
a radius of seven or eight miles round Calistoga.
These are continually paying him, but are never
suffered to get out of debt. He palms dull goods
upon them, for they dare not refuse to buy; he
goes and dines with them when he is on an outing,
and no man is loudlier welcomed ; he is their family
friend, the director of their business, and, to a
degree elsewhere unknown in modern days, their
king.
For some reason, Kelmar always shook his head
at the mention of Pine Flat, and for some days I
thought he disapproved of the whole scheme and
was proportionately sad. One fine morning, how-
ever, he met me, wreathed in smiles. He had
found the very place for me Silverado, another
old mining town, right up the mountain. Rufe
Hanson, the hunter, could take care of us fine
160 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
people the Hansons; we should be close to the
Toll House, where the Lakeport stage called daily;
it was the best place for^ my health, besides. Rufe
had been consumptive, and was now quite a strong
man, ain't it ? In short, the place and all its accom-
paniments seemed made for us on purpose.
He took me to his back door, whence, as from
every point of Calistoga, Mount Saint Helena
could be seen towering in the air. There, in the
nick, just where the eastern foot-hills joined the
mountain, and she herself began to rise above
the zone of forest there was Silverado. The
name had already pleased me; the high station
pleased me still more. I began to inquire with some
eagerness. It was but a little while ago that Sil-
verado was a great place. The mine a silver
mine, of course had promised great things.
There was quite a lively population, with several
hotels and boarding-houses; and Kelmar himself
had opened a branch store, and done extremely
well " Ain't it? " he said, appealing to his wife.
And she said, " Yes; extremely well." Now there
was no one living in the town but Rufe the hunter ;
and once more I heard Rufe's praises by the yard,
and this time sung in chorus.
I could not help perceiving at the time that there
was something underneath ; that no unmixed desire
to have us comfortably settled had inspired the
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS 161
Kelmars with this flow of words. But I was im-
patient to be gone, to be about my kingly project;
and when we were offered seats in Kelmar's wag-
gon, I accepted on the spot. The plan of their
next Sunday's outing took them, by good fortune,
over the border into Lake County. They would
carry us so far, drop us at the Toll House, present
us to the Hansons, and call for us again on Monday
morning early.
CHAPTER II
FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF SILVERADO
WE were to leave by six precisely ; that was
solemnly pledged on both sides; and a
messenger came to us the last thing at
night, to remind us of the hour. But it was eight
before we got clear of Calistoga: Kelmar, Mrs.
Kelmar, a friend of theirs whom we named Abra-
mina, her little daughter, my wife, myself, and,
stowed away behind us, a cluster of ship's coffee-
kettles. These last were highly ornamental in the
sheen of their bright tin, but I could invent nc
reason for their presence. Our carriageful reck-
oned up, as near as we could get at it, some three
hundred years to the six of us. Four of the six,
besides, were Hebrews. But I never, in all mj
life, was conscious of so strong an atmosphere oi
holiday. No word was spoken but of pleasure ; anc
even when we drove in silence, nods and smiles
went round the party like refreshments.
The sun shone out of a cloudless sky. Close ai
the zenith rode the belated moon, still clearly
visible, and, along one margin, even bright. Th(
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS 163
wind blew a gale from the north ; the trees roared ;
the corn and the deep grass in the valley fled in
whitening surges; the dust towered into the air
along the road and dispersed like the smoke of
battle. It was clear in our teeth from the first, and
for all the windings of the road it managed to
keep clear in our teeth until the end.
For some two miles we rattled through the val-
ley, skirting the eastern foot-hills; then we struck
off to the right, through haugh-land, and presently,
crossing a dry watercourse, entered the Toll road,
or, to be more local, entered on " the grade." The
road mounts the near shoulder of Mount Saint
Helena, bound northward into Lake County. In
one place it skirts along the edge of a narrow and
deep canon, filled with trees, and I was glad, in-
deed, not to be driven at this point by the dashing
Foss. Kelmar, with his unvarying smile, jogging
to the motion of the trap, drove for all the world
like a good, plain, country clergyman at home ; and
I profess I blessed him unawares for his timidity.
Vineyards and deep meadows, islanded and
framed with thicket, gave place more and more as
we ascended to woods of oak and madrona, dotted
with enormous pines. It was these pines, as they
shot above the lower wood, that produced that
pencilling of single trees I had so often remarked
from the valley. Thence, looking up and from
164 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
however far, each fir stands separate against the
sky no bigger than an eyelash; and all together
lend a quaint, fringed aspect to the hills. The
oak is no baby; even the madrona, upon these
spurs of Mount Saint Helena, comes to a fine bulk
and ranks with forest trees ; but the pines look down
upon the rest for underwood. As Mount Saint
Helena among her foot-hills, so these dark giants
out-top their fellow-vegetables. Alas! if they had
left the redwoods, the pines, in turn, would have
been dwarfed. But the redwoods, fallen from their
high estate, are serving as family bedsteads, or yet
more humbly as field fences, along all Napa Valley.
A rough smack of resin was in the air, and a
crystal mountain purity. It came pouring over
these green slopes by the oceanful. The woods sang
aloud, and gave largely of their healthful breath.
Gladness seemed to inhabit these upper zones, and
we had left indifference behind us in the valley.
" I to the hills will lift mine eyes ! " There are
days in a life \vhen thus to climb out of the low-
lands seems like scaling heaven.
As we continued to ascend, the wind fell upon
us with increasing strength. It was a wonder how
the two stout horses managed to pull us up that
steep incline and still face the athletic opposition of
the wind, or how their great eyes were able to
endure the dust. Ten minutes after we went by,
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS 165
a tree fell, blocking the road ; and even before us
leaves were thickly strewn, and boughs had fallen,
large enough to make the passage difficult. But
now we were hard by the summit. The road
crosses the ridge, just in the nick that Kelmar
showed me from below, and then, without pause,
plunges down a deep, thickly wooded glen on the
farther side. At the highest point a trail strikes
up the main hill to the leftward ; and that leads to
Silverado. A hundred yards beyond, and in a kind
of elbow of the glen, stands the Toll House Hotel.
We came up the one side, were caught upon the
summit by the whole weight of the wind as it
poured over into Napa Valley, and a minute after
had drawn up in shelter, but all buffeted and
breathless, at the Toll House door.
A water-tank, and stables, and a grey house of
two stories, with gable ends and a veranda, are
jammed hard against the hillside, just where a
stream has cut for itself a narrow canon, filled with
pines. The pines go right up overhead; a little
more and the stream might have played, like a
fire-hose, on the Toll House roof. In front the
ground drops as sharply as it rises behind. There
is just room for the road and a sort of promontory
of croquet ground, and then you can lean over the
edge and look deep below you through the wood.
I said croquet ground, not green; for the surface
166 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
was of brown, beaten earth. The toll-bar itself
was the only other note of originality : a long beam,
turning on a post, and kept slightly horizontal by
a counterweight of stones. Regularly about sun-
down this rude barrier was swung, like a derrick,
across the road and made fast, I think, to a tree
upon the farther side.
On our arrival there followed a gay scene in the
bar. I was presented to Mr. Corwin, the landlord ;
to Mr. Jennings, the engineer, who lives there for
his health; to Mr. Hoddy, a most pleasant little
gentleman, once a member of the Ohio legislature,
again the editor of a local paper, and now, with
undiminished dignity, keeping the Toll House bar.
I had a number of drinks and cigars bestowed
on me, and enjoyed a famous opportunity of see-
ing Kelmar in his glory, friendly, radiant, smiling,
steadily edging one of the ship's kettles on the
reluctant Corwin. Corwin, plainly aghast, resisted
gallantly, and for that bout victory crowned his
arms.
At last we set forth for Silverado on foot. Kel-
mar and his jolly Jew girls were full of the senti-
ment of Sunday outings, breathed geniality and
vagueness, and suffered a little vile boy from the
hotel to lead them here and there about the woods.
For three people all so old, so bulky in body, and
belonging to a race so venerable, they could not but
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS 167
surprise us by their extreme and almost imbecile
youthfulness of spirit. They were only going to
stay ten minutes at the Toll House; had they not
twenty long miles of road before them on the other
side? Stay to dinner? Not they! Put up the
horses ? Never. Let us attach them to the veranda
by a wisp of straw rope, such as would not have
held a person's hat on that blustering day. And
with all these protestations of hurry, they proved
irresponsible like children. Kelmar himself, shrewd
old Russian Jew, with a smirk that seemed just to
have concluded a bargain to its satisfaction, in-
trusted himself and us devoutly to that boy. Yet
the boy was patently fallacious ; and for that matter
a most unsympathetic urchin, raised apparently on
gingerbread. He was bent on his own pleasure,
nothing else ; and Kelmar followed him to his ruin,
with the same shrewd smirk. If the boy said there
was " a hole there in the hill " a hole, pure and
simple, neither more nor less Kelmar and his
Jew girls would follow him a hundred yards to
look complacently down that hole. For two hours
we looked for houses; and for two hours they fol-
lowed us, smelling trees, picking flowers, foisting
false botany on the unwary. Had we taken five,
with that vile lad to head them off on idle divaga-
tions, for five they would have smiled and stumbled
through the woods.
i68 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
However, we came forth at length, and as by
accident, upon a lawn, sparse planted like an or-
chard, but with forest instead of fruit trees. That
was the site of Silverado mining town. A piece
of ground was levelled up, where Kelmar's store
had been; and facing that we saw Rufe Hanson's
house, still bearing on its front the legend Silver-
ado Hotel. Not another sign of habitation. Sil-
verado town had all been carted from the scene;
one of the houses was now the schoolhouse far
down the road; one was gone here, one there, but
all were gone away. It was now a sylvan solitude,
and the silence was unbroken but by the great,
vague voice of the wind. Some days before our
visit, a grizzly bear had been sporting round the
Hansons' chicken-house.
Mrs. Hanson was at home alone, we found.
Rufe had been out after a " bar," had risen late,
and was now gone, it did not clearly appear whither.
Perhaps he had had wind of Kelmar's coming, and
was now ensconced among the underwood, or
watching us from the shoulder of the mountain.
We, hearing there were no houses to be had, were
for immediately giving up all hopes of Silverado.
But this, somehow, was not to Kelmar's fancy.
He first proposed that we should " camp some-
veres around, ain't it?" waving his hand cheerily
as though to weave a spell; and when that was
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS 169
firmly rejected, he decided that we must take up
house with the Hansons. Mrs. Hanson had been,
from the first, flustered, subdued, and a little pale;
but from this proposition she recoiled with haggard
indignation. So did we, who would have pre-
ferred, in a manner of speaking, death. But Kel-
mar was not to be put by. He edged Mrs. Hanson
into a corner, where for a long time he threatened
her with his forefinger, like a character in Dickens ;
and the poor woman, driven to her entrenchments,
at last remembered with a shriek that there were
still some houses at the tunnel.
Thither we went ; the Jews, who should already
have been miles into Lake County, still cheerily
accompanying us. For about a furlong we fol-
lowed a good road along the hillside through the
forest, until suddenly that road widened out and
came abruptly to an end. A canon, woody below,
red, rocky, and naked overhead, was here walled
across by a dump of rolling stones, dangerously
steep, and from twenty to thirty feet in height. A
rusty iron chute on wooden legs came flying,
like a monstrous gargoyle, across the parapet. It
was down this that they poured the precious ore;
and below here the carts stood to wait their lading,
and carry it millward down the mountain.
The whole canon was so entirely blocked, as if
by some rude guerilla fortification, that we could
iyo THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
only mount by lengths of wooden ladder, fixed in
the hillside. These led us round the farther corner
of the dump ; and when they were at an end, we still
persevered over loose rubble and wading deep in
poison oak, till we struck a triangular platform,
filling up the whole glen, and shut in on either hand
by bold projections of the mountain. Only in front
the place was open like the proscenium of a theatre,
and we looked forth into a great realm of air, and
down upon treetops and hilltops, and far and near
on wild and varied country. The place still stood
as on the day it was deserted : a line of iron rails
with a bifurcation; a truck in working order; a
world of lumber, old wood, old iron ; a blacksmith's
forge on one side, half buried in the leaves of
dwarf madronas; and on the other, an old brown
wooden house.
Fanny and I dashed at the house. It consisted
of three rooms, and was so plastered against the
hill, that one room was right atop of another, that
the upper floor was more than twice as large as the
lower, and that all three apartments must be en-
tered from a different side and level. Not a win-
dow-sash remained. The door of the lower room
was smashed, and one panel hung in splinters.
We entered that, and found a fair amount of rub-
bish : sand and gravel that had been sifted in there
by the mountain winds; straw, sticks, and stones;
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS 171
a table, a barrel; a plate-rack on the wall; two
home-made boot- jacks, signs of miners and their
boots ; and a pair of papers pinned on the boarding,
headed respectively " Funnel No. i," and " Fun-
nel No. 2," but with the tails torn away. The
window, sashless of course, was choked with the
green and sweetly smelling foliage of a bay; and
through a chink in the floor, a spray of poison oak
had shot up and was handsomely prospering in the
interior. It was my first care to cut away that
poison oak, Fanny standing by at a respectful dis-
tance. That was our first improvement by which
we took possession.
The room immediately above could only be en-
tered by a plank propped against the threshold,
along which the intruder must foot it gingerly,
clutching for support to sprays of poison oak, the
proper product of the country. Herein was, on
either hand, a triple tier of beds, where miners had
once lain; and the other gable was pierced by a
sashless window and a doorless doorway opening
on the air of heaven, five feet above the ground.
As for the third room, which entered squarely from
the ground level, but higher up the hill and further
up the canon, it contained only rubbish and the
uprights for another triple tier of beds.
The whole building was overhung by a bold,
lion-like, red rock. Poison oak, sweet bay trees,
i 7 2 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
calycanthus, brush, and chaparral, grew freely but
sparsely all about it. In front, in the strong sun-
shine, the platform lay overstrewn with busy litter,
as though the labours of the mine might begin
again to-morrow in the morning.
Following back into the canon, among the mass
of rotting plant and through the flowering bushes,
we came to a great crazy staging, with a wry wind-
lass on the top; and clambering up, we could look
into an open shaft, leading edgeways down into
the bowels of the mountain, trickling with water,
and lit by some stray sun-gleams, whence I know
not. In that quiet place the still, far-away tinkle
of the water-drops was loudly audible. Close by,
another shaft led edgeways up into the superin-
cumbent shoulder of the hill. It lay partly open;
and sixty or a hundred feet above our head, we
could see the strata propped apart by solid wooden
wedges, and a pine, half undermined, precariously
nodding on the verge. Here also a rugged, hori-
zontal tunnel ran straight into the unsunned bowels
of the rock. This secure angle in the mountain's
flank was, even on this wild day, as still as my
lady's chamber. But in the tunnel a cold, wet
draught tempestuously blew. Nor have I ever
known that place otherwise than cold and windy.
Such was our first prospect of Juan Silverado.
I own I had looked for something different: a
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS 173
clique of neighbourly houses on a village green,
we shall say, all empty to be sure, but swept and
varnished ; a trout stream brawling by ; great elms
or chestnuts, humming with bees and nested in by
song-birds; and the mountains standing round
about, as at Jerusalem. Here, mountain and
house and the old tools of industry were all alike
rusty and downfalling. The hill was here wedged
up, and there poured forth its bowels in a spout of
broken mineral; man with his picks and powder,
and nature with her own great blasting tools of sun
and rain, labouring together at the ruin of that
proud mountain. The view up the canon was a
glimpse of devastation; dry red minerals sliding
together, here and there a crag, here and there
dwarf thicket clinging in the general glissade, and
over all a broken outline trenching on the blue
of heaven. Downwards indeed, from our rock
eyrie, we beheld the greener side of nature; and
the bearing of the pines and the sweet smell of
bays and nutmegs commended themselves grate-
fully to our senses. One way and another, now
the die was cast. Silverado be it!
After we had got back to the Toll House, the
Jews were not long of striking forward. But I
observed that one of the Hanson lads came down,
before their departure, and returned with a ship's
kettle. Happy Hansons! Nor was it until after
174 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
Kelmar was gone, if I remember rightly, that
Rufe put in an appearance to arrange the details
of our installation.
The latter part of the day, Fanny and I sat in
the veranda of the Toll House, utterly stunned by
the uproar of the wind among the trees on the other
side of the valley. Sometimes, we would have it
it was like a sea, but it was not various enough for
that; and again, we thought it like the roar of
a cataract, but it was too changeful for the cata-
ract ; and then we would decide, speaking in sleepy
voices, that it could be compared with nothing but
itself. My mind was entirely preoccupied by the
noise. I hearkened to it by the hour, gapingly
hearkened, and let my cigarette go out. Sometimes
the wind would make a sally nearer hand, and send
a shrill, whistling crash among the foliage on our
side of the glen; and sometimes a backdraught
would strike into the elbow where we sat, and cast
the gravel and torn leaves into our faces. But
for the most part, this great, streaming gale passed
unweariedly by us into Napa Valley, not two hun-
dred yards away visible by the tossing boughs,
stunningly audible, and yet not moving a hair upon
our heads. , So it blew all night long while I was
writing up my journal, and after we were in bed,
under a cloudless, starset heaven; and so it was
blowing still next morning when we rose.
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS 175
It was a laughable thought to us, what had be-
come of our cheerful, wandering Hebrews. We
could not suppose they had reached a destination.
The meanest boy could lead them miles out of their
way to see a gopher-hole. Boys we felt to be their
special danger; none others were of that exact
pitch of cheerful irrelevancy to exercise a kindred
sway upon their minds : but before the attractions
of a boy their most settled resolutions would be
wax. We thought we could follow in fancy these
three aged Hebrew truants wandering in and out
on hilltop and in thicket, a demon boy trotting far
ahead, their will-o'-the-wisp conductor; and at last
about midnight, the wind still roaring in the dark-
ness, we had a vision of all three on their knees
upon a mountain-top around a glow-worm.
CHAPTER III
THE RETURN
NEXT morning we were up by half-past
five, according to agreement, and it was
ten by the clock before our Jew boys re-
turned to pick us up: Kelmar, Mrs. Kelmar, and
Abramina, all smiling from ear to ear, and full
of tales of the hospitality they had found on the
other side. It had not gone unrewarded ; for I ob-
served with interest that the ship's kettles, all but
one, had been " placed." Three Lake County fami-
lies, at least, endowed for life with a ship's kettle.
Come, this was no misspent Sunday. The absence
of the kettles told its own story : our Jews said
nothing about them; but, on the other hand, they
said many kind and comely things about the people
they had met. The two women, in particular, had
been charmed out of themselves by the sight of a
young girl surrounded by her admirers; all even-
ing, it appeared, they had been triumphing together
in the girl's innocent successes, and to this natural
and unselfish joy they gave expression in language
that was beautiful by its simplicity and truth.
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS 177
Take them for all in all, few people have done
my heart more good; they seemed so thoroughly
entitled to happiness, and to enjoy it in so large a
measure and so free from after-thought; almost
they persuaded me to be a Jew. There was, indeed,
a chink of money in their talk. They particularly
commended people who were well to do. " He
don't care ain't it?" was their highest word of
commendation to an individual fate; and here I
seem to grasp the root of their philosophy it
was to be free from care, to be free to make these
Sunday wanderings, that they so eagerly pursued
after wealth; and all this carefulness was to be
careless. The fine good-humour of all three
seemed to declare they had attained their end. Yet
there was the other side to it; and the recipients
of kettles perhaps cared greatly.
No sooner had they returned, than the scene of
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, leav-
ing them under 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 re-
membered me, and brought me out a half a tumbler-
ful of the playful, innocuous American cocktail. I
drank it, and lo! veins of living fire ran down my
i 7 8 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
legs; and then a focus of conflagration remained
seated in my stomach, not unpleasantly, 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
Ou volent les rouges-gorges " :
and again, to a more trampling measure
" Et tout tremble, I run, 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 armour, in that
nook of the mountain, sacred only to the Indian and
the bear! This is still the strangest thing in all
man's travelling, that he should carry about with
him incongruous memories. There is no foreign
land ; it is the traveller only that is foreign, and now
and again, by a flash of recollection, lights up the
contrasts of the earth.
But while I was thus wandering in my fancy,
great feats had been transacted in the bar. Cor-
win the bold had fallen, Kelmar was again crowned
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS 179
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 business 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 clown the grade there stands
a ranche 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
delightful 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 com-
bination of sentiment and financial bathos. Abra-
mina, 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 resplen-
dently Hebraic that I cannot pass it over. When
her " old man " wrote home for her from America,
her old man's family would not entrust her with the
i8o THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
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 homesickness up here in
the long winters; of her honest, country-woman
troubles and alarms upon the journey; how in the
bank at Frankfort she had feared lest the banker,
after having taken her cheque, 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
down-stairs."
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 an-
other quarter 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
Calistoga past two in the afternoon, Fanny and I
having breakfasted at six in the morning, eight
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS 181
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 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 in-
terests of none but Kelmar; that the money we
laid out, dollar by dollar, cent by cent, and through
the hands of various intermediaries, should all
hop ultimately into Kelmar's till ; these were
facts that we only grew to recognise in the course
of time and by the accumulation of evidence. 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
perhaps I should be with the Hebrew tyrant. The
whole game of business is beggar my neighbour;
and though perhaps that game looks uglier when
played at such close quarters and on so small a
182 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
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 uncon-
scious of the beam in his own eye, was at least
silent in the matter of his brother's mote.
THE ACT OF SQUATTING
THERE were four of us squatters my-
self 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 regarded
the sofa-cushion as a bed-rock necessary of exist-
ence. 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
i8 4 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
in heaven. Only from the summit of the mountain
one little snowy wisp of cloud after another kept
detaching itself, like smoke from a volcano, and
blowing southward in some high stream of air:
Mount Saint Helena still 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 Sil-
verado mine, we held to be an outlying province
of our own. Thither, then, we went, crossing the
valley by a grassy trail; and there lunched out of
the basket, sitting in a kind of portico, and wonder-
ing, while we ate, at this great bulk of useless
building. Through a chink we could look far
down into the interior, and see sunbeams floating
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
religion, the busy millers toiling somewhere else.
All the time we were there, mill 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 com-
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS 185
pare this with the former days, when the engine
was in full blast, the mill 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 reflections and the basket of cold provender,
until Hanson 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
canon. Above, as I have said, this was a wild,
red, stony gully 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 Toll House our natural north-west passage
to civilisation. I found and followed it, clearing
my way as I went through fallen branches and
dead trees. It went straight down that steep canon,
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 Toll
House shingles. Signs were not wanting of the
ancient greatness of Silverado. The footpath was
1 86 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
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 some-
thing like an iron lantern fastened on the rocky
wall. It was a promising spot for the imagination.
No boy could have left it unexplored.
The stream thenceforward stole along the bot-
tom of the dingle, and made, for that dry land,
a pleasant warbling in the leaves. Once, I sup-
pose, it ran splashing down the whole length of the
canon, 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, daylight 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, dozing in sun and dust
and silence, like a place enchanted. My mission
was after hay for bedding, and that I was readily
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS 187
promised. But when I mentioned that we were
waiting for Rufe, the people shook their heads.
Rufe was not a regular man anyway, 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 con-
junction, 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 ourselves 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 human,
from the former 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 Calistoga Mine.
Here is one, verbatim; and if any one can calcu-
late the scale of charges, he has my envious
admiration.
Calistoga Mine, May 3rd, 1875.
John Stanley
To S. Chapman, Cr.
To board from April ist, to April 30 ... $25 75
" ' May ist, to 3rd 2 oo
2775
i88 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
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 Silver-
ado; like Palmyra in the desert, it had outlived
its people and its purpose ; we camped, like Layard,
amid ruins, and these names spoke to us of pre-
historic time. A boot- jack, a pair of boots, a
dog-hutch, and these bills of Mr. Chapman'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 Chapman, 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 whitened face, produced a paper bag.
"What's this?" said he. It contained a gran-
ulated powder, something the colour of Gregory's
Mixture, but rosier; and as there were several of
the bags, and each more or less broken, the powder
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS 189
was spread widely on the floor. Had any of us
ever seen giant powder? No, nobody had; and
instantly there grew up in my mind a shadowy
belief, verging with every moment nearer to cer-
titude, that I had somewhere heard somebody de-
scribe it as just such a powder as the one around us.
I have learnt 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, like
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 ex-
amination, the can proved to contain oil, with the
trifling addition of nitro-glycerine ; but no research
disclosed a trace of either man or lantern.
It was a pretty sight, after this anecdote, to see
us 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
1 90 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
of the rougher dirt off the floor, and left it. That
was our sitting-room and kitchen, though there was
nothing to sit upon but the table, and no provi-
sion for a fire except a hole in 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, perhaps, 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 below, 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 colours of nature; and
we had exchanged a dim, human garret for a cor-
ner, even although it were untidy, of the blue hall
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS 191
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 falling 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 margin of the dump
and saw, far below us, the green treetops stand-
ing still in the clear air. Beautiful perfumes,
breaths of bay, resin, and nutmeg, came to us
more often and grew sweeter and sharper as the
afternoon 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
farther side.
There was no stove, of course, and no hearth
in our lodging, so we betook ourselves to the black-
192 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
smith's forge across the platform. If the platform
be taken as a stage, and the out-curving 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 cottage, 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 ' companionable sounds, and colours up the
emptiest building with better than frescoes. For
awhile 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
arrived, with a waggonful of our effects and two
of his wife's relatives to lend him a hand. The
elder showed surprising strength. He would pick
up a huge packing-case, full of books of all things,
swing it on his shoulder, and away up the two
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS 193
crazy ladders and the breakneck spout of rolling
mineral, familiarly termed a path, that led from
the car-track to our house. Even for a man un-
burthened, the ascent was toilsome and precarious ;
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 speedily 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 chimney, and lost one
of the plates along the road. The Silverado prob-
lem was scarce solved.
Rufe himself was grave and good-natured over
his share of blame; he even, if I remember right,
expressed regret. But his crew, to my astonish-
ment and anger, grinned from ear to ear, and
laughed aloud at our distress. They thought it
" real funny " about the stovepipe they had for-
gotten ; " real funny " that they should have lost
a plate. As for hay, the whole party 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 sus-
pect, such a game of poker as that before they
13
i 9 4 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
started. But about nine, as a particular favour,
we should have some hay.
So they took their departure, leaving me still
staring, 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 all 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,
like breaches in a fortress, it began to grow rapidly
chill. Talk ceased; nobody moved but the un-
happy Chuchu, still in quest of sofa-cushions, who
tumbled complainingly among the trunks. It re-
quired a certain happiness 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
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS 195
canon, and through which we entered by our bridge
of flying plank was still entire, a handsome,
panelled door, the most finished piece of carpentry
in Silverado. And the two lowest bunks next to
this we roughly rilled 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 si-
lence of the night was utter. Then a high wind
began in the distance among the treetops, and for
hours continued 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 refreshing draughts, so
deep was the canon, so close our house was planted
under the overhanging rock.
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 unrecog-
nisable in towns; inhabit the fringe of settlements
and the deep, quiet places of the country; rebel-
lious to all labour, and pettily thievish, like the
English gipsies; rustically ignorant, but with a
touch of woodlore 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
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, however, and easily
recognised. Loutish, but not ill-looking, they will
sit all day, swinging their legs on a field fence,
the mind seemingly as devoid of all reflection as
a Suffolk peasant's, careless of politics, for the
most part incapable of reading, but with a rebel-
lious vanity and a strong sense of independence.
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS 197
Hunting is their most congenial business, or, if
the occasion offers, a little amateur detection. In
tracking a criminal, following 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 an-
swering 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 will not say that the Hanson family was Poor
White, because the name savours of offence; but
I may go as far as this they were, in many
points, not unsimilar to the people usually so called.
Rufe himself combined two of the qualifications,
for he was both a hunter and an amateur detective.
It was he who pursued Russel and Dollar, the rob-
bers of the Lake Port stage, and captured them the
very morning after the exploit, while they were still
sleeping in a hayfield. Russel, a drunken Scotch
carpenter, was even an acquaintance of his own,
and he expressed much grave commiseration for
his fate. In all that he said and did, Rufe was
198 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
grave. I never saw him hurried. When he spoke,
he took out his pipe with ceremonial deliberation,
looked east and west, and then, in quiet tones and
few words, stated his business or told his story.
His gait was to match; it would never have sur-
prised you if, at any step, he had turned round
and walked away again, so warily and slowly,
and with so much seeming hesitation did he go
about. He lay long in bed in the morning
rarely, indeed, rose before noon; he loved all
games, from poker to clerical croquet; and in
the Toll House croquet ground I have seen him
toiling at the latter with the devotion of a curate.
He took an interest in education, was an active
member of the local school-board, and when I was
there, he had recently lost the schoolhouse key.
His waggon was broken, but it never seemed to
occur to him to mend it. Like all truly idle people,
he had an artistic eye. He chose the print stuff
for his wife's dresses, and counselled her in the
making of a patchwork quilt, always, as she
thought, wrongly, but to the more educated eye,
always with bizarre and admirable taste the
taste of an Indian. With all this, he was a
perfect, unoffending gentleman in word and act.
Take his clay pipe from him, and he was fit for
any society but that of fools. Quiet as he was,
there burned a deep, permanent excitement in his
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS 199
dark blue eyes; and when this grave man smiled,
it was like sunshine in a shady place.
Mrs. Hanson (nee, if you please, Lovelands)
was more commonplace than her lord. She was
a comely woman, too, plump, fair-coloured, with
wonderful white teeth; and in her print dresses
(chosen by Rufe) and with a large 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, out-spoken and
loud-spoken. Her noisy laughter had none of the
charm of one of Hanson's rare, slow-spreading
smiles; there was no reticence, no mystery, no
manner about the woman: she was a first-class
dairymaid, but her husband was an unknown quan-
tity between the savage and the nobleman. She
was often in and out with us, merry, and healthy,
and fair; he came far seldomer only, indeed,
when there was business, or now and again, to
pay a visit of ceremony, brushed up for the occa-
sion, 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
canon into a salon.
Such was the pair who ruled in the old Silverado
Hotel, among the windy trees, on the mountain
shoulder overlooking the whole length of Napa
Valley, as the man aloft looks down on the ship's
200 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
deck. There they kept house, with sundry horses
and fowls, and a family of sons, Daniel Webster,
and I think George Washington, among the num-
ber. Nor did they want visitors. An old gentle-
man, of singular stolidity, and called Breedlove
I think he had crossed the plains in the same
caravan with Rufe housed with them for awhile
during our stay; and they had besides a permanent
lodger, in the form of Mrs. Hanson's brother,
Irvine Lovelands. I spell Irvine by guess; for I
could get no information on the subject, just as
I could never find out, in spite of many inquiries,
whether or not Rufe was a contraction for Rufus.
They were all cheerfully at sea about their names
in that generation. And this is surely the more
notable where the names are all so strange, and
even the family names appear to have been coined.
At one time, at least, the ancestors of all these
Alvins and Alvas, Loveinas, Lovelands, and Breed-
loves, must have taken serious council and found
a certain poetry in these denominations; that must
have been, then, their form of literature. But still
times change; and their next descendants, the
George Washingtons and Daniel Websters, will at
least be clear upon the point. And anyway, and
however his name should be spelt, this Irvine Love-
lands was the most unmitigated Caliban I ever
knew.
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS 201
Our very first morning at Silverado, when we
were full of business, patching up doors and win-
dows, making beds and seats, and getting our
rough lodging into shape, Irvine and his sister
made their appearance together, she for neigh-
bourliness and general curiosity; he, because he
was working for me, to my sorrow, cutting fire-
wood 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, accom-
panied that simple pleasure with profuse expecto-
ration. She rattled away, talking up hill and down
dale, laughing, tossing her head, showing her
brilliant teeth. He looked on in silence, now spit-
ting heavily on the floor, now putting his head
back and uttering a loud, discordant, joyless laugh.
He had a tangle of shock hair, the colour of wool ;
his mouth was a grin; although as strong as a
horse, he looked neither heavy nor yet adroit, only
leggy, coltish, and in the road. But it was plain
he was in high spirits, thoroughly enjoying his
visit; and he laughed frankly whenever we failed
to accomplish what we were about. This was
scarcely helpful: it was even, to amateur carpen-
ters, embarrassing; but it lasted until we knocked
202 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
off work and began to get dinner. Then Mrs.
Hanson remembered she should have been gone
an hour ago; and the pair retired, and the lady's
laughter died away among the nutmegs down the
path. That was Irvine's first day's work in my
employment the devil take him !
The next morning he returned and, as he was
this time alone, he bestowed his conversation upon
us with great liberality. He prided himself on his
intelligence ; asked us if we knew the school-ma'am.
He did n't think much of her, anyway. He had
tried her, he had. He had put a question to her.
If a tree a hundred feet high were to fall a foot a
day, how long would it take to fall right down?
She had not been able to solve the problem. " She
don't know nothing," he opined. He told us how
a friend of his kept a school with a revolver, and
chuckled mightily over that; his friend could teach
school, he could. All the time he kept chewing
gum and spitting. He would stand awhile looking
down; and then he would toss back his shock of
hair, and laugh hoarsely, and spit, and bring for-
ward a new subject. A man, he told us, who bore
a grudge against him, had poisoned his dog.
" That was a low thing for a man to do now,
was n't it ? It was n't like a man, that, nohow.
But I got even with him : I pisoned his dog." His
clumsy utterance, his rude embarrassed manner,
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS 203
set a fresh value on the stupidity of his remarks.
I do not think I ever appreciated the meaning of
two words until I knew Irvine the verb, loaf,
and the noun, oaf; between them, they complete
his portrait. He could lounge, and wriggle, and
rub himself against the wall, and grin, and be more
in everybody's way than any other two people that
I ever set my eyes on. Nothing that he did became
him; and yet you were conscious that he was one
of your own race, that his mind was cumbrously
at work, revolving the problem of existence like
a quid of gum, and in his own cloudy manner
enjoying life, and passing judgment on his fellows.
Above all things, he was delighted with himself.
You would not have thought it, from his uneasy
manners and troubled, struggling utterance; but
he loved himself to the marrow, and was happy
and proud like a peacock on a rail.
His self-esteem was, indeed, the one joint in his
harness. He could be got to work, and even kept
at work, by flattery. As long as my wife stood
over him, crying out how strong he was, so long
exactly he would stick to the matter in hand; and
the moment she turned her back, or ceased to praise
him, he would stop. His physical strength was
wonderful ; and to have a woman stand by and
admire his achievements, warmed his heart like
sunshine. Yet he was as cowardly as he was
204 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
powerful, and felt no shame in owning to the weak-
ness. Something was once wanted from the crazy
platform over the shaft, and he at once refused to
venture there " did not like," as he said, " foolin'
round them kind o' places," and let my wife go
instead of him, looking on with a grin. Vanity,
where it rules, is usually more heroic: but Irvine
steadily approved himself, and expected others to
approve him; rather looked down upon my wife,
and decidedly expected her to look up to him, on
the strength of his superior prudence.
Yet the strangest part of the whole matter was
perhaps this, that Irvine was as beautiful as a
statue. His features were, in themselves, perfect;
it was only his cloudy, uncouth, and coarse ex-
pression that disfigured them. So much strength
residing in so spare a frame was proof sufficient
of the accuracy of his shape. He must have been
built somewhat after the pattern of Jack Sheppard ;
but the famous housebreaker, we may be certain,
was no lout. It was by the extraordinary powers
of his mind no less than by the vigour of his body,
that he broke his strong prison with such imper-
fect implements, turning the very obstacles to ser-
vice. 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
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS 205
cruel thought to persons less favoured in their
birth, that this creature, endowed to use the lan-
guage of theatres with extraordinary " means,"
should so manage to misemploy them that he
looked ugly and almost deformed. It was only
by an effort of abstraction, and after many days,
that you discovered what he was.
By playing on the oaf's conceit, and standing
closely over him, we got a path made round the
corner of the dump to our door, so that we could
come and go with decent ease; and he even en-
joyed the work, for in that there were boulders to
be plucked up bodily, bushes to be uprooted, and
other occasions for athletic display : but cutting
wood was a different matter. Anybody could cut
wood; and, besides, my wife was tired of super-
vising 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 grow-
ing trees upon the mountain-side. Irvine, as a
woodcutter, we could tolerate; but Irvine as a
friend of the family, at so much a day, was too
bald an imposition, and at length, on the after-
noon of the fourth or fifth day of our connection,
I explained to him, as clearly as I could, the light
in which I had grown to regard his presence. I
pointed out to him that I could not continue to give
2o6 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
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 con-
sulted him on the subject. It was a very droll
interview, in the large, bare north room of the
Silverado Hotel, Mrs. Hanson's patchwork on a
frame, and Rufe, and his wife, and I, and the oaf
himself, all more or less embarrassed. Rufe an-
nounced there was nobody in the neighbourhood
but Irvine who could do a day's work for anybody.
Irvine, thereupon, refused to have any more to do
with my service ; he " would n't work no more for
a man as had spoke to him 's I had done." I found
myself on the point of the last humiliation
driven to beseech the creature whom I had just
dismissed with insult : but I took the high hand in
despair, said there must be no talk of Irvine coming
back unless matters were to be differently managed ;
that I would rather chop firewood for myself than
be fooled ; and, in short, the Hansons being eager for
the lad's hire, I so imposed upon them with merely
affected resolution, that they ended by begging me
to re-employ him again, on a solemn promise that
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS 207
he should be more industrious. The promise, I
am bound to say, was kept. We soon had a fine
pile of firewood at our door; and if Caliban gave
me the cold shoulder and spared me his conver-
sation, 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 in-
clined to fancy, Mrs. Hanson. Her social bril-
liancy somewhat dazzled the others, and she had
more of the small change of sense. It was she
who faced Kelmar, for instance; and perhaps if
she had been alone, Kelmar would have had no
rule within her doors. Rufe, to be sure, had a
fine, sober, open-air attitude of mind, seeing the
world without exaggeration perhaps, we may
even say, without enough; for he lacked, along
with the others, that commercial idealism which
puts so high a value on time and money. Sanity
itself is a kind of convention. Perhaps Rufe was
wrong ; but, looking on life plainly, he was unable
to perceive that croquet or poker were in any way
less important than, for instance, mending his
waggon. Even his own profession, hunting, was
dear to him mainly as a sort of play; even that
he would have neglected, had it not appealed to
his imagination. His hunting-suit, for instance,
had cost I should be afraid to say how many
208 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
bucks the currency in which he paid his way :
it was all befringed, after the Indian fashion, and
it was dear to his heart. The pictorial side of his
daily business was never forgotten. He was even
anxious to stand for his picture in those buckskin
hunting clothes; and I remember how he once
warmed almost into enthusiasm, his dark blue eyes
growing perceptibly larger, as he planned the com-
position in which he should appear, " with the
horns of some real big bucks, and dogs, and a
camp on a crick" (creek, stream).
There was no trace in Irvine of this woodland
poetry. He did not care for hunting, nor yet for
buckskin suits. He had never observed scenery.
The world, as it appeared to him, was almost oblit-
erated by his own great grinning figure in the
foreground: Caliban Malvolio. And it seems to
me as if, in the persons of these brothers-in-law,
we had the two sides of rusticity fairly well
represented: the hunter living really in nature;
the clodhopper living merely out of society: the
one bent up in every corporal agent to capacity in
one pursuit, doing at least one thing keenly and
thoughtfully, and thoroughly alive to all that
touches it; the other in the inert and bestial state,
walking in a faint dream, and taking so dim an
impression of the myriad sides of life that he is
truly conscious of nothing but himself. It is only
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS 209
in the fastnesses of nature, forests, mountains, and
the back of man's beyond, that a creature endowed
with five senses can grow up into the perfection
of this crass and earthy vanity. In towns or the
busier country sides, he is roughly reminded of
other men's existence; and if he learns no more,
he learns at least to fear contempt. But Irvine
had come scathless through life, conscious only of
himself, of his great strength and intelligence; and
in the silence of the universe, to which he did not
listen, dwelling with delight on the sound of his
own thoughts.
THE SEA-FOGS
ARRANGE in the colour of the light usually
called me in the morning. By a certain
hour, the long, vertical chinks in our west-
ern. gable, where the boards had shrunk and sep-
arated, flashed suddenly into my eyes as stripes
of dazzling blue, at once so dark and splendid that
I used to marvel how the qualities could be com-
bined. At an earlier hour, the heavens in that
quarter were still quietly coloured, but the shoulder
of the mountain which shuts in the canon already
glowed with sunlight in a wonderful compound of
gold and rose and green; and this too would
kindle, although more mildly and with rainbow
tints, the fissures of our crazy gable. If I were
sleeping heavily, it was the bold blue that struck
me awake; if more lightly, then I would come to
myself in that earlier and fairier light.
One Sunday morning, about five, the first bright-
ness called me. I rose and turned to the east, not
for my devotions, but for air. The night had been
very still. The little private gale that blew every
evening in our canon, for ten minutes or perhaps
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS 211
a quarter of an hour, had swiftly blown itself out ;
in the hours that followed not a sigh of wind had
shaken the treetops; and our barrack, for all its
breaches, was less fresh that morning than of wont.
But I had no sooner reached the window than I
forgot all else in the sight that met my eyes, and
I made but two bounds into my clothes, and down
the crazy plank to the platform.
The sun was still concealed below the opposite
hilltops, though it was shining already, not twenty
feet above my head, on our own mountain slope.
But the scene, beyond a few near features, was
entirely changed. Napa Valley was gone; gone
were all the lower slopes and woody foot-hills of
the range; and in their place, not a thousand feet
below me, rolled a great level ocean. It was as
though I had gone to bed the night before, safe
in a nook of inland mountains, and had awakened
in a bay upon the coast. I had seen these inunda-
tions from below; at Calistoga I had risen and
gone abroad in the early morning, coughing and
sneezing, under fathoms on fathoms of grey sea-
vapour, like a cloudy sky a dull sight for the
artist, and a painful experience for the invalid.
But to sit aloft one's self in the pure air and
under the unclouded dome of "heaven, and thus
look down on the submergence of the valley, was
strangely different and even delightful to the eyes.
212 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
Far away were hilltops like little islands. Nearer,
a smoky surf beat about the foot of precipices and
poured into all the coves of these rough mountains.
The colour of that fog ocean was a thing never to
be forgotten. For an instant, among the Hebrides
and just about sundown, I have seen something
like it on the sea itself. But the white was not
so opaline; nor was there, what surprisingly in-
creased the effect, that breathless, crystal stillness
over all. Even in its gentlest moods the salt sea
travails, moaning among the weeds or lisping on
the sand; but that vast fog ocean lay in a trance
of silence, nor did the sweet air of the morning
tremble with a sound.
As I continued to sit upon the dump, I began
to observe that this sea was not so level as at
first sight it appeared to be. Away in the extreme
south, a little hill of fog arose against the sky
above the general surface, and as it had already
caught the sun, it shone on the horizon like the
topsails of some giant ship. There were huge
waves, stationary, as it seemed, like waves in a
frozen sea ; and yet, as I looked again, I was not
sure but they were moving after all, with a slow
and august advance. And while I was yet doubt-
ing, a promontory of the hills some four or five
miles away, conspicuous by a bouquet of tall pines,
was in a single instant overtaken and swallowed
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS 213
up. It reappeared 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 look-
ing nearer, and I saw that in every cove along the
line of mountains the fog was being piled in higher
and higher, as though by some wind that was
inaudible to me. I could trace its progress, one
pine-tree first growing hazy and then disappearing
after another ; although sometimes there was none
of this fore-running haze, but the whole opaque
white ocean gave a start and swallowed a piece of
mountain at a gulp. It was to flee these poison-
ous fogs that I had left the seaboard, and climbed
so high among the mountains. And now, behold,
here came the fog to besiege me in my chosen
altitudes, and yet came so beautifully that my first
thought was of welcome.
The sun had now gotten much higher, and
through all the gaps of the hills it cast long bars
of gold across that white ocean. An eagle, or
some other very great bird of the mountain, came
wheeling over the nearer pine-tops, and hung,
poised and something sideways, as if to look abroad
on that unwonted desolation, spying, perhaps with
terror, for the eyries of her comrades. Then, with
a long cry, she disappeared again towards Lake
County and the clearer air. At length it seemed
to me as if the flood were beginning to subside.
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
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 re-
lieved, and a good deal exhilarated by the sight,
I went into the house to light the fire.
I suppose it was nearly seven when I once more
mounted the platform to look abroad. The fog
ocean had swelled up enormously since last I saw
it; and a few hundred feet below me, in the deep
gap where the Toll House stands and the road
runs through into Lake County, it had already
topped the slope, and was pouring over and down
the other side like driving smoke. The wind
had climbed along with it; and though I was still
in calm air, I could see the trees tossing below
me, and their long, strident sighing mounted to
me where I stood.
Half an hour later, the fog had surmounted all
the ridge on the opposite side of the gap, though
a shoulder of the mountain still warded it out of
our canon. Napa Valley and its bounding hills
were now utterly blotted out. The fog, sunny
white in the sunshine, was pouring over into Lake
County in a huge, ragged cataract, tossing tree-
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS 215
tops appearing and disappearing in the spray. The
air struck with a little chill, and set me coughing.
It smelt strong of the fog, like the smell of a
washing-house, but with a shrewd tang of the sea
salt.
Had it not been for two things the sheltering
spur which answered as a dyke, and the great val-
ley on the other side which rapidly engulfed what-
ever mounted our own little platform in the canon
must have been already buried a hundred feet in
salt and poisonous air. As it was, the interest of
the scene entirely occupied our minds. We were
set just out of the wind, and but just above the
fog; we could listen to the voice of the one as to
music on the stage ; we could plunge our eyes down
into the other, as into some flowing stream from
over the parapet of a bridge; thus we looked on
upon a strange, impetuous, silent, shifting exhibi-
tion of the powers of nature, and saw the familiar
landscape changing from moment to moment like
figures in a dream.
The imagination loves to trifle with what is not.
Had this been indeed the deluge, I should have felt
more strongly, but the emotion would have been
similar in kind. I played with the idea, as the child
flees in delighted terror from the creations of his
fancy. The look of the thing helped me. And
when at last I began to flee up the mountain, it was
216 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
indeed partly to escape from the raw air that kept
me coughing, but it was also part in play.
As I ascended the mountain-side, I came once
more to overlook the upper surface of the fog ; but
it wore a different appearance from what I had
beheld at daybreak. For, first, the sun now fell on
it from high overhead, and its surface shone and
undulated like a great nor'land moor country,
sheeted with untrodden morning snow. And next
the new level must have been a thousand or fifteen
hundred feet higher than the old, so that only five
or six points of all the broken country below me,
still stood out. Napa Valley was now one with
Sonoma on the west. On the hither side, only a
thin scattered fringe of bluffs was unsubmerged;
and through all the gaps the fog was pouring over,
like an ocean, into the blue clear sunny country on
the east. There it was soon lost; for it fell 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 vapour was thrown high above it,
rising and falling, and blown into fantastic shapes.
The 5 peed 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
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS 217
of a dead pine beckoned out of the spray like the
arm of a drowning man. But still the imagination
was dissatisfied, still the ear waited for something
more. Had this indeed been water (as it seemed
so, to the eye), with what a plunge of reverberating
thunder would it have rolled upon its course, dis-
embowelling mountains and deracinating pines!
And yet water it was, and sea-water at that
true Pacific billows, only somewhat rarefied, rolling
in mid-air among the hilltops.
I climbed still higher, among the red rattling
gravel and dwarf underwood of Mount Saint
Helena, until I could look right down upon Sil-
verado, and admire the favoured nook in which it
lay. The sunny plain of fog was several hundred
feet higher; behind the protecting spur a gigantic
accumulation of cottony vapour threatened, with
every second, to blow over and submerge our home-
stead; but the vortex setting past the Toll House
was too strong; and there lay our little platform,
in the arms of the deluge, but still enjoying its
unbroken sunshine. About eleven, however, thin
spray came flying over the friendly buttress, and I
began to think the fog had hunted out its Jonah
after all. But it was the last effort. The wind
veered while we were at dinner, and began to blow
squally from the mountain summit; and by half-
past one, all that world of sea-fogs was utterly
2i8 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
routed and flying here and there into the south in
little rags of cloud. And instead of a lone sea-
beach, we found ourselves once more inhabiting a
high mountain-side, with the clear green country
far below us, and the light smoke of Calistoga
blowing in the air.
This was the great Russian campaign for that
season. Now and then, in the early morning, a
little white lakelet of fog would be seen far down
in Napa Valley; but the heights were not again
assailed, nor was the surrounding world again shut
off from Silverado.
THE TOLL HOUSE
THE Toll House, standing alone by the
wayside under nodding pines, with its
streamlet and water-tank; its backwoods,
toll-bar, and well-trodden croquet ground ; the ostler
standing by the stable door, chewing a straw ; a
glimpse of the Chinese cook in the back parts ; and
Mr. Hoddy in the bar, gravely alert and service-
able, and equally anxious to lend or borrow books ;
dozed all day in the dusty sunshine, more than
half asleep. There were no neighbours, except the
Hansons up the hill. The traffic on. the road was
infinitesimal ; only, at rare intervals, a couple in a
waggon, or a dusty farmer on a spring-board,
toiling over " the grade " to that metropolitan
hamlet, Calistoga ; and, at the fixed hours, the pas-
sage of the stages.
The nearest building was the schoolhouse, down
the road; and the school-ma'am boarded at the
Toll House, walking thence in the morning to the
little brown shanty, where she taught the young
ones of the district, and returning thither pretty
weary in the afternoon. She had chosen this out-
220 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
lying situation, I understood, for her health. Mr.
Corwin was consumptive; so was Rufe; so was
Mr. Jennings, the engineer. In short, the place
was a kind of small Davos : consumptive folk con-
sorting on a hilltop in the most unbroken idleness.
Jennings never did anything that I could see, ex-
cept now and then to fish, and generally to sit about
in the bar and the veranda, waiting for something
to happen. Corwin and Rufe did as little as pos-
sible; and if the school-ma'am, poor lady, had to
work pretty hard all morning, she subsided when it
was over into much the same dazed beatitude as
all the rest.
Her special corner was the parlour a very
genteel room, with Bible prints, a crayon portrait
of Mrs. Corwin in the height of fashion, a few
years ago, another of her son ( Mr. Corwin was not
represented), a mirror, and a selection of dried
grasses. A large book was laid religiously on the
table " From Palace to Hovel," I believe, its
name full of the raciest experiences in England.
The author had mingled freely with all classes, the
nobility particularly meeting him with open arms ;
and I must say that traveller had ill requited his
reception. His book, in short, was a capital in-
stance of the Penny Messalina school of literature ;
and there arose from it, in that cool parlour, in that
silent, wayside, mountain inn, a rank atmosphere
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS 221
of gold and blood and " Jenkins," and the " Mys-
teries of London," and sickening, inverted snobbery,
fit to knock you down. The mention of this book
reminds me of another and far racier picture of
our island life. The latter parts of Rocambole are
surely too sparingly consulted in the country which
they celebrate. No man's education can be said
to be complete, nor can he pronounce the world yet
emptied of enjoyment, till he has made the acquaint-
ance of " the Reverend Patterson, director of the
Evangelical Society." To follow the evolutions of
that reverend gentleman, who goes through scenes
in which even Mr. Duffield would hesitate to place
a bishop, is to rise to new ideas. But, alas! there
was no Patterson about the Toll House. Only,
alongside of " From Palace to Hovel," a sixpenny
" Ouida " figured. So literature, you see, was not
unrepresented.
The school-ma'am had friends to stay with her,
other school-ma'ams enjoying their holidays, quite
a bevy of damsels. They seemed never to go out,
or not beyond the veranda, but sat close in the little
parlour, quietly talking or listening to the wind
among the trees. Sleep dwelt in the Toll House,
like a fixture: summer sleep, shallow, soft, and
dreamless. A cuckoo clock, a great rarity in such
a place, hooted at intervals about the echoing
house; and Mr. Jennings would open his eyes for
222 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
a moment in the bar, and turn the leaf of a news-
paper, and the resting school-ma'ams in the par-
lour would be recalled to the consciousness of their
inaction. Busy Mrs. Corwin and her busy China-
man might be heard indeed, in the penetralia,
pounding dough or rattling dishes ; or perhaps Rufe
had called up some of the sleepers for 'a game of
croquet, and the hollow strokes of the mallet
sounded far away among the woods : but with these
exceptions, it was sleep and sunshine and dust,
and the wind in the pine-trees, all day long.
A little before stage time, that castle of indolence
awoke. The ostler threw his straw away and set
to his preparations. Mr. Jennings rubbed his eyes ;
happy Mr. Jennings, the something he had been
waiting for all day about to happen at last! The
boarders gathered in the veranda, silently giving
ear, and gazing down the road with shaded eyes.
And as yet there was no sign for the senses, not a
sound, not a tremor of the mountain road. The
birds, to whom the secret of the hooting cuckoo is
unknown, must have set down to instinct this pre-
monitory bustle.
And then the first of the two stages swooped
upon the Toll House with a roar and in a cloud of
dust; and the shock had not yet time to subside,
before the second was abreast of it. Huge concerns
they were, well horsed and loaded, the men in their
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS 223
shirt-sleeves, the women swathed in veils, the long
whip cracking like a pistol; and as they charged
upon that slumbering hostelry, each shepherding a
dust storm, the dead place blossomed into life and
talk and clatter. This the Toll House ? with its
city throng, its jostling shoulders, its infinity of
instant business in the bar? The mind would not
receive it! The heartfelt bustle of that hour is
hardly credible; the thrill of the great shower of
letters from the post-bag, the childish hope and in-
terest 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 top-
sails on the line. Yet, out of our great solitude of
four and twenty mountain hours, we thrilled to
their momentary presence; gauged and divined
them, loved and hated; and stood light-headed
in that storm of human electricity. Yes, like Pic-
cadilly Circus, this is also one of life's crossing-
places. Here I beheld one man, already famous or
infamous, a centre of pistol-shots: and another
who, if not yet known to rumour, will fill a column
of the Sunday paper when he comes to hang a
burly, thick-set, powerful Chinese desperado, six
224 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
long bristles upon either lip; redolent of whisky,
playing-cards, and pistols; swaggering in the bar
with the lowest assumption of the lowest European
manners ; rapping out blackguard English oaths in
his canorous oriental voice; and combining in one
person the depravities of two races and two civili-
sations. For all his lust and vigour, he seemed to
look cold upon me from the valley of the shadow
of the gallows. He imagined a vain thing; and
while he drained his cocktail, Holbein's death was
at his elbow. Once, too, I fell in talk with another
of these flitting strangers like the rest, in his
shirt-sleeves and all begrimed with dust and the
next minute we were discussing Paris and London,
theatres and wines. To him, journeying from one
human place to another, this was a trifle; but to
me ! No, Mr. Lillie, I have not forgotten it.
And presently the city-tide was at its flood and
began to ebb. Life runs in Piccadilly Circus, say,
from nine to one, and then, there also, ebbs into
the small hours of the echoing policeman and the
lamps and stars. . But the Toll House is far up
stream, and near its rural springs; the bubble of
the tide but touches it. Before you had yet grasped
your pleasure, the horses were put to, the loud
whips volleyed, and the tide was gone. North and
south had the two stages vanished, the towering
dust subsided in the woods; but there was still an
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS 225
interval before the flush had fallen on your cheeks,
before the ear became once more contented with
the silence, or the seven sleepers of the Toll House
dozed back to their accustomed corners. Yet a
little, and the ostler would swing round the great
barrier across the road ; and in the golden evening,
that dreamy inn begin to trim its lamps and spread
the board for supper.
As I recall the place the green dell below ; the
spires of pine; the sun-warm, scented air; that
grey, gabled inn, with its faint stirrings of life
amid the slumber of the mountains I slowly
awake to a sense of admiration, gratitude, and
almost love. A fine place, after all, for a wasted
life to doze away in the cuckoo clock hooting of
its far home country ; the croquet mallets, eloquent
of English lawns ; the stages daily bringing news of
the turbulent world away below there; and per-
haps once in the summer, a salt fog pouring over-
head with its tale of the Pacific.
A STARRY DRIVE
IN our rule at Silverado, there was a melan-
choly interregnum. The queen and the
crown prince with one accord fell sick; and,
as I was sick to begin with, our lone position on
Mount Saint Helena was no longer tenable, and we
had to hurry back to Calistoga and a cottage on the
green. By that time we had begun to realise the
difficulties of our position. We had found what an
amount of labour it cost to support life in our red
canon; and it was the dearest desire of our hearts
to get a China-boy to go along with us when we
returned. We could have given him a whole house
to himself, self-contained, as they say in the adver-
tisements; and on the money question we were pre-
pared to go far. Kong Sam Kee, the Calistoga
washerman, was entrusted with the affair; and
from day to day it languished on, with protestations
on our part and mellifluous excuses on the part of
Kong Sam Kee.
At length, about half-past eight of our last even-
ing, with the waggon ready harnessed to convey
us up the grade, the washerman, with a somewhat
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS 227
sneering air, produced the boy. He was a hand-
some, gentlemanly lad, attired in rich dark blue,
and shod with snowy white ; but, alas ! he had
heard rumours of Silverado. He knew it for a lone
place on the mountain-side, with no friendly wash-
house near by, where he might smoke a pipe of
opium o' nights with other China-boys, and lose his
little earnings at the game of tan; and he first
backed out for more money; and then, when that
demand was satisfied, refused to come point-blank.
He was wedded to his wash-houses ; he had no taste
for the rural life; and we must go to our mountain
servantless. It must have been near half an hour
before we reached that conclusion, standing in the
midst of Calistoga high street under the stars, and
the China-boy and Kong Sam Kee singing their
pigeon English in the sweetest voices and with the
most musical inflections.
We were not, however, to return alone; for we
brought with us Joe Strong, the painter, a most
good-natured comrade and a capital hand at an
omelette. I do not know in which capacity he was
most valued as a cook or a companion ; and he
did excellently well in both.
The Kong Sam Kee negotiation had delayed us
unduly ; it must have been half-past nine before we
left Calistoga, and night came fully ere we struck
the bottom of the grade. I have never seen such a
228 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
night. It seemed to throw calumny in the teeth
of all the painters that ever dabbled in starlight.
The sky itself was of a ruddy, powerful, nameless,
changing colour, dark and glossy like a serpent's
back. The stars, by innumerable millions, stuck
boldly forth like lamps. The milky way was bright,
like a moonlit cloud ; half heaven seemed milky way.
The greater luminaries shone each more clearly
than a winter's moon. Their light was dyed in
every sort of colour red, like fire ; blue, like steel ;
green, like the tracks of sunset; and so sharply
did each stand forth in its own lustre that there was
no appearance of that flat, star-spangled arch we
know so well in pictures, but all the hollow of
heaven was one chaos of contesting luminaries
a hurly-burly of stars. Against this the hills and
rugged treetops stood out redly dark.
As we continued to advance, the lesser lights
and milky ways first grew pale, and then vanished ;
the countless hosts of heaven dwindled in number
by successive millions; those that still shone had
tempered their exceeding brightness and fallen back
into their customary wistful distance; and the sky
declined from its first bewildering splendour into
the appearance of a common night. Slowly this
change proceeded, and still there was no sign of
any cause. Then a whiteness like mist was thrown
over the spurs of the mountain. Yet awhile, and,
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS 229
as we turned a corner, a great leap of silver light
and net of forest shadows fell across the road and
upon our wondering waggonful ; and, swimming
low among the trees, we beheld a strange, 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."
So sings Mr. Trowbridge, with a noble inspiration.
And so had the sunlight flooded that pale islet of
the moon, and her lit face put out, one after another,
that galaxy of stars. The wonder of the drive was
over; but, by some nice conjunction of clearness in
the air and fit shadow in the valley where we trav-
elled, we had seen for a little while that brave dis-
play of the midnight heavens. It was gone, but it
had been; nor shall I ever again behold the stars
with the same mind. He who has seen the sea
commoved with a great hurricane, thinks of it very
differently from him who has seen it only in a calm.
And the difference between a calm and a hurricane
is not greatly more striking than that between the
2jo THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
ordinary face of night and the splendour that shone
upon us in that drive. Two in our waggon knew
night as she shines upon the tropics, but even that
bore no comparison. The nameless colour of the
sky, the hues of the star-fire, and the incredible
projection of the stars themselves, starting from
their orbits, so that the eye seemed to distinguish
their positions in the hollow of space these were
things that we had never seen before and shall never
see again.
Meanwhile, in this altered night, we proceeded
on our way among the scents and silence of the
forest, reached the top of the grade, wound up by
Hanson's, and came at last to a stand under the
flying gargoyle of the chute. 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 waggon turned and drove
away, the noise gently dying in the woods, and
we clambered up the rough path, Caliban's great
feat of engineering, and came home to Silverado.
The moon shone in at the eastern doors and
windows, and over the lumber on the platform.
The one tall pine beside the ledge was steeped in
silver. Away up the canon, a wild cat welcomed
us with three discordant squalls. But once we had
lit a candle, and began to review our improvements,
homely in either sense, and count our stores, it
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS 231
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 house-
hold duties, and showed off our wealth and con-
veniences before the stranger, and had a glass of
wine, I think, in honour of our return, and trooped
at length one after another up the flying bridge of
plank, and lay down to sleep in our shattered,
moon-pierced barrack, we were among the hap-
piest sovereigns in the world, and certainly ruled
over the most contented people. Yet, in our ab-
sence, the palace had been sacked. Wild cats, so
the Hansons said, had broken in and carried off
a side of bacon, a hatchet, and two knives.
EPISODES IN THE STORY OF A
MINE
NO one could live at Silverado and not be
curious about the story of the mine. We
were surrounded by so many evidences of
expense and toil, we lived so entirely in the wreck
of that great enterprise, like mites in the ruins of
a cheese, that the idea of the old din and bustle
haunted our repose. Our own house, the forge,
the dump, the chutes, the rails, the windlass, the
mass of broken plant; the two tunnels, one far
below in the green dell, the other on the platform
where we kept our wine; the deep shaft, with the
sun-glints and the water-drops; above all, the
ledge, that great gaping slice out of the mountain
shoulder, propped apart by wooden wedges, on
whose immediate margin, high above our heads,
the one tall pine precariously nodded these stood
for its greatness; while the dog-hutch, boot-jacks,
old boots, old tavern bills, and the very beds that
we inherited from by-gone miners, put in human
touches and realised for us the story of the past.
I have sat on an old sleeper, under the thick
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS 233
madronas near the forge, with just a look over the
dump on the green world below, and seen the sun
lying broad among the wreck, and heard the silence
broken only by the tinkling water in the shaft, or
a stir of the royal family about the battered palace,
and my mind has gone back to the epoch of the
Stanleys and the Chapmans, with a grand tutti of
pick and drill, hammer and anvil, echoing about
the canon; the assayer hard at it in our dining-
room ; the carts below on the road, and their cargo
of red mineral bounding and thundering down the
iron chute. And now all gone all fallen away
into this sunny silence and desertion : a family
of squatters dining in the assayer's office, making
their beds in the big sleeping room erstwhile so
crowded, keeping their wine in the tunnel that once
rang with picks.
But Silverado itself, although now fallen in its
turn into decay, was once but a mushroom, and had
succeeded to other mines and other flitting cities.
Twenty years ago, away down the glen on the Lake
County side there was a place, Jonestown by name,
with two thousand inhabitants dwelling under can-
vas, and one roofed house for the sale of whisky.
Round on the western side of Mount Saint Helena,
there was at the same date, a second large encamp-
ment, its name, if it ever had one, lost for me.
Both of these have perished, leaving not a stick
234 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
and scarce a memory behind them. Tide after tide
of hopeful miners have thus flowed and ebbed about
the mountain, coming and going, now by lone
prospectors, now with a rush. Last, in order of
time came Silverado, reared the big mill, in the
valley, founded the town which is now represented,
monumentally, by Hanson's, pierced all these slaps
and shafts and tunnels, and in turn declined and
died away.
" Our noisy years seem moments in the 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 followed, in quest of the remainder,
a great drifting and tunnelling in all directions,
and a great consequent effusion of dollars, until,
all parties being sick of the expense, the mine was
deserted, and the town decamped. According to
the second version, told me with much secrecy
of manner, the whole affair, mine, mill, and town,
were parts of one majestic swindle. There had
never come any silver out of any portion of the
mine; there was no silver to come. At midnight
trains of packhorses might have been observed
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS 235
winding by devious tracks about the shoulder of
the mountain. They came from far away, from
Amador or Placer, laden with silver in " old cigar
boxes." They discharged their load at Silverado,
in the hour of sleep ; and before the morning they
were gone again with their mysterious drivers to
their unknown source. In this way, twenty thou-
sand pounds' worth of silver was smuggled in un-
der cover of night, in these old cigar boxes ; mixed
with Silverado mineral; carted down to the mill;
crushed, amalgamated, and refined, and despatched
to the city as the proper product of the mine.
Stock-jobbing, if it can cover such expenses, must
be a profitable business in San Francisco.
I give these two versions as I got them. But
I place little reliance on either, my belief in history
having been greatly shaken. For it chanced that
I had come to dwell in Silverado at a critical hour ;
great events in its history were about to happen
did happen, as I am led to believe ; nay, and it will
be seen that I played a part in that revolution
myself. And yet from first to last I never had a
glimmer of an idea what was going on ; and even
now, after full reflection, profess myself at sea.
That there was some obscure intrigue of the cigar-
box order, and that I, in the character of a wooden
puppet, set pen to paper in the interest of some-
body, so much, and no more, is certain.
236 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
Silverado, then under my immediate sway, be-
longed to one whom I will call a Mr. Ronalds.
I only knew him through the extraordinarily dis-
torting medium of local gossip, now as a momen-
tous jobber; now as a dupe to point an adage;
and again, and much more probably, as an ordi-
nary Christian gentleman like you or me, who
had opened a mine and worked it for awhile with
better and worse fortune. So, through a defective
window-pane, you may see the passer-by shoot up
into a hunch-backed giant, or dwindle into a pot-
bellied dwarf.
To Ronalds, at least, the mine belonged; but the
notice by which he held it would run out upon the
3Oth of June or rather, as I suppose, it had run
out already, and the month of grace would expire
upon that day, after which any American citizen
might post a notice of his own, and make Silverado
his. This, with a sort of quiet slyness, Rufe told
me at an early period of our acquaintance. There
was no silver, of course ; the mine " was n'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
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS 237
iron, what, in the name of fortune, was to prevent
him taking them? " " His right there was none to
dispute." He might lay hands on all to-morrow,
as the wild cats had laid hands upon our knives and
hatchet. Besides, was this mass of heavy mining
plant worth transportation ? If it was, why had not
the rightful owners carted it away? If it was,
would they not preserve their title to these mov-
ables, 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 prop-
erty, there was nothing to be gained. Lastly, was
it at all credible that Ronalds would forget what
Rufe remembered? The days of grace were not
yet over : any fine morning he might appear, paper
in hand, and enter for another year on his in-
heritance. However, it was none of my business;
all seemed legal; Rufe or Ronalds, all was one
to me.
On the morning of the 27th, Mrs. Hanson ap-
peared with the milk as usual, in her sun-bonnet.
The time would be out on Tuesday, she reminded
us, and bade me be in readiness to play my part,
though I had no idea what it was to be. And sup-
pose Ronalds came? we asked. She received the
idea with derision, laughing aloud with all her fine
teeth. He could not find the mine to save his life,
238 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
it appeared, without Rufe to guide him. Last year,
when he came, they heard him " up and down the
road a hollerin' and a raisin' Cain." And at last
he had to come to the Hansons in despair, and bid
Rufe, " Jump into your pants and shoes, and show
me where this old mine is, anyway ! " Seeing that
Ronalds had laid out so much money in the spot,
and that a beaten road led right up to the bottom of
the dump, I thought this a remarkable example.
The sense of locality must be singularly in abey-
ance in the case of Ronalds.
That same evening, supper comfortably over,
Joe Strong busy at work on a drawing of the dump
and the opposite hills, we were all out on the plat-
form together, sitting there, under the tented
heavens, with the same sense of privacy as if we
had been cabined in a parlour, when the sound of
brisk footsteps came mounting up the path. We
pricked bur ears at this, for the tread seemed lighter
and firmer than was usual with our country neigh-
bours. And presently, sure enough, two town
gentlemen, with cigars and kid gloves, came de-
bouching past the house. They looked in that
place like a blasphemy.
" Good-evening," they said. For none of us
had stirred; we all sat stiff with wonder.
" Good-evening," I returned ; and then, to put
them at their ease, " A stiff climb," I added.
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS 239
" Yes," replied the leader; "but we have to
thank you for this path."
I did not like the man's tone. None of us liked
it. He did not seem embarrassed by the meeting,
but threw up his remarks like favours, and strode
magisterially by us towards the shaft and tunnel.
Presently we heard his voice raised to his
companion. " We drifted every sort of way, but
couldn't strike the ledge." Then again: "It
pinched out here." And once more : " Every
miner that ever worked upon it says there 's
bound to be a ledge somewhere."
These were the snatches of his talk that reached
us, and they had a damning significance. We, the
lords of Silverado, had come face to face with our
superior. It is the worst of all quaint and of all
cheap ways of life that they bring us at last to the
pinch of some humiliation. I liked well enough to
be a squatter when there was none but Hanson by ;
before Ronalds, I will own, I somewhat quailed.
I hastened to do him fealty, said I gathered he was
the Squattee, and apologised. He threatened me
with ejection, in a manner grimly pleasant more
pleasant to him, I fancy, than to me; and then he
passed off into praises of the former state of Sil-
verado. " 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,
2 4 o THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
the mill newly erected; nothing going but cham-
pagne, and hope the order of the day. Ninety
thousand dollars came out; a hundred and forty
thousand were put in, making a net loss of fifty
thousand. The last days, I gathered, the days of
John Stanley, were not so bright; the champagne
had ceased to flow, the population was already
moving elsewhere, and Silverado had begun to
wither in the branch before it was cut 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 towards afternoon. A noisy last shot,
to inaugurate the days of silence.
Throughout this interview, my conscience was a
good deal exercised; and I was moved to throw
myself on my knees and own the intended treachery.
But then I had Hanson to consider. I was in much
the same position as Old Rowley, that royal
humourist, whom " the rogue had taken into his
confidence." And again, here was Ronalds on the
spot. He must know the day of the month as well
as Hanson and I. If a broad hint were necessary,
he had the broadest in the world. For a large
board had been nailed by the crown prince on the
very front of our house, between the door and
window, painted in cinnabar the pigment of
the country with doggrel rhymes and contu-
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS 241
melious pictures, and announcing, in terms un-
necessarily figurative, that the trick was already
played, the claim already jumped, and Master Sam
the legitimate successor of Mr. Ronalds. But no,
nothing could save that man; quern deus vult per-
dere, 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 dark-
ness, and this plump, handsome woman, seated
on an upturned valise beside the bunks, talking
and showing her fine teeth, and laughing till the
rafters rang. Any ship, to be sure, with a hun-
dredth part as many holes in it as our barrack,
must long ago have gone to her last port. Up
to that time I had always imagined Mrs. Han-
son's loquacity to be mere incontinence, that she
said what was uppermost for the pleasure of speak-
ing, 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 Ron-
alds 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,
16
242 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
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 sub-
ject in my turn, and let her rattle where she would.
She had come to tell us that, instead of waiting
for Tuesday, the claim was' to be jumped on the
morrow. How? If the time were not out, it
was impossible. Why? If Ronalds had come and
gone, and done nothing, there was the less cause
for hurry. But again I could reach no satisfac-
tion. The claim was to be jumped next morning,
that was all that she would condescend upon.
And yet it was not jumped the next morning,
nor yet the next, and a whole week had come and
gone before we heard more of this exploit. That
day week, however, a day of great heat, Hanson,
with a little roll of paper in his hand, and the
eternal pipe alight; Breedlove, his large, dull
friend, to act, I suppose, as witness; Mrs. Han-
son, 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.
Caliban was absent, but he had been chary of his
friendly visits since the row ; and with that excep-
tion, the whole family was gathered together as
for a marriage or a christening. Strong was sit-
ting at work, in the shade of the dwarf madronas
near the forge; and they planted themselves about
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS 243
him in a circle, one on a stone, another on the
waggon rails, a third on a piece of plank. Grad-
ually the children stole away up the canon 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 volubility, saying nothing, but
keeping the party at their ease like a courtly
hostess.
Not a word occurred about the business of the
day. Once, twice, and thrice I tried to slide the
subject in, but was discouraged by the stoic apathy
of Rufe, and beaten down before the pouring ver-
biage of his wife. There is nothing of the Indian
brave about me, and I began to grill with impa-
tience. At last, like a highway robber, I cornered
Hanson, and bade him stand and deliver his busi-
ness. Thereupon he gravely rose, as though to
hint that this was not a proper place, nor the sub-
ject one suitable for squaws, and I, following his
example, led him up the plank into our barrack.
There he bestowed himself on a box, and unrolled
his papers with fastidious deliberation. There were
two sheets of note-paper, and an old mining notice,
244 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
dated May 3Oth, 1879, part print, part manuscript,
and the latter much obliterated by the rains. It
was by this identical piece of paper that the mine
had been held last year. For thirteen months it
had endured the weather and the change of seasons
on a cairn behind the shoulder of the canon ; and it
was now my business, spreading it before me on
the table, and sitting on a valise, to copy its terms
with some necessary changes, twice over on the
two sheets of note-paper. One was then to be
placed on the same cairn a " mound of rocks "
the notice put it; and the other to be lodged for
registration.
Rufe watched me, silently smoking, till I came
to the place for the locator's name at the end of
the first copy; and when I proposed that he should
sign, I thought I saw a scare in his eye. " I don't
think that '11 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 Calis-
toga 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 ex-
plained ; and it was easy for him to " depytise,"
with a strong accent on the last. So friendly and
so free are popular institutions.
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS 245
When I had done my scrivening, Hanson strolled
out, and addressed Breedlove, " Will you step up
here a bit? " and after they had disappeared a little
while into the chaparral and madrona thicket, they
came back again, minus a notice, and the deed was
done. The claim was jumped ; a tract of mountain-
side, fifteen hundred feet long by six hundred wide,
with all the earth's precious bowels, had passed
from Ronalds to Hanson, and, in the passage,
changed its name from the " Mammoth " to the Cal-
istoga." I had tried to get Rufe to call it after his
wife, after himself, and after Garfield, the Repub-
lican Presidential candidate of the hour since
then elected, and, alas ! dead but all was in vain.
The claim had once been called the Calistoga before,
and he seemed to feel safety in returning to that.
And so the history of that mine became once
more plunged in darkness, lit only by some monster
pyrotechnical displays of gossip. And perhaps the
most curious feature of the whole matter is this:
that we should have dwelt in this quiet corner of
the mountains, with not a dozen neighbours, and
yet struggled all the while, like desperate swim-
mers, in this sea of falsities and contradictions.
Wherever a man is, there will be a lie.
TOILS AND PLEASURES
I MUST try to convey some notion of our life,
of how the days passed and what pleasure
we took in them, of what there was to do
and how we set about doing it, in our mountain
hermitage. The house, after we had repaired the
worst of the damages, and filled in some of the
doors and windows with white cotton cloth, be-
came a healthy and a pleasant dwelling-place, al-
ways airy and dry, and haunted by the outdoor
perfumes of the glen. Within, it had the look of
habitation, the human look. You had only to go
into the third room, which we did not use, and
see its stones, its 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 little clean
spots that he creates to dwell in, were at once
contrasted with the rich passivity of nature. And
yet our house was everywhere so wrecked and shat-
tered, the air came and went so freely, the sun
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS 247
found so many portholes, the golden outdoor glow
shone in so many open chinks, that we enjoyed, at
the same time, some of the comforts of a roof and
much of the gaiety and brightness of al fresco life.
A single shower of rain, to be sure, and we should
have been drowned out like mice. But ours was a
Calif ornian summer, and an earthquake was a far
likelier accident than a shower of rain.
Trustful in this fine weather, we kept the house
for kitchen and bedroom, and used the platform
as our summer parlour. The sense of privacy,
as I have said already, was complete. We could
look over the dump on miles of forest and rough
hilltop; our eyes commanded some of Napa Val-
ley, where the train ran, and the little country
townships sat so close together along the line of
the rail. But here there was no man to intrude.
None but the Hansons were our visitors. Even
they came but at long intervals, or twice daily, at
a stated hour, with milk. So our days, as they
were never interrupted, drew out to the greater
length; hour melted insensibly into hour; the
household duties, though they were many, and
some of them laborious, dwindled into mere islets
of business in a sea of sunny daytime; and it
appears to me, looking back, as though the far
greater part of our life at Silverado had been
passed, propped upon an elbow, or seated on a
248 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
plank, listening to the silence that there is among
the hills.
My work, it is true, was over early in the
morning. I rose before any one else, lit the
stove, put on the water to boil, and strolled forth
upon the platform to wait till it was ready. Sil-
verado would then be still in shadow, the sun
shining on the mountain higher up. A clean smell
of trees, a smell of the earth at morning, hung
in the air. Regularly, every day, there was a
single bird, not singing, but awkwardly chirrup-
ing among the green madronas, and the sound
was cheerful, natural, and stirring. It did not
hold the attention, nor interrupt the thread of
meditation, like a blackbird or a nightingale; it
was mere woodland prattle, of which the mind
was conscious like a perfume. The freshness of
these morning seasons remained with me far on
into the day.
As soon as the kettle boiled, I made porridge
and coffee; and that, beyond the literal drawing
of water, and the preparation of kindling, which
it would be hyperbolical to call the hewing of
wood, ended my domestic duties for the day.
Thenceforth my wife laboured single-handed in
the palace, and I lay or wandered on the plat-
form at my own sweet will. The little corner
near the forge, where we found a refuge under
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS 249
the madronas from the unsparing early sun, is
indeed connected in my mind with some night-
mare encounters over Euclid, and the Latin Gram-
mar. These were known as Sam's lessons. He
was supposed to be the victim and the sufferer;
but here there must have been some misconcep-
tion, for whereas I generally retired to bed after
one of these engagements, he was no sooner set
free than he dashed up to the Chinaman's house,
where he had installed a printing-press, that great
element of civilisation, and the sound of his la-
bours would be faintly audible about the canon
half the day.
To walk at all was a laborious business; the
foot sank and slid, the boots were cut to pieces,
among sharp, uneven, rolling stones. When we
crossed the platform in any direction, it was usual
to lay a course, following as much as possible the
line of waggon rails. Thus, if water were to be
drawn, the water-carrier left the house along some
tilting planks that we had laid down, and not laid
down very well. These carried him to that great
highroad, the railway; and the railway served
him as far as to the head of the shaft. But from
thence to the spring and back again he made the
best of his unaided way, staggering among the
stones, and wading in low growth of the calycan-
thus, where the rattlesnakes lay hissing at his pas-
250 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
sage. Yet I liked to draw water. It was pleasant
to dip the grey metal pail into the clean, colour-
less, cool water; pleasant to carry it back, with
the water lipping at the edge, and a broken sun-
beam quivering in the midst.
But the extreme roughness of the walking con-
fined 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 de-
light to trundle to and fro by the hour with vari-
ous ladings. About midway down the platform,
the railroad trended to the right, leaving our house
and coasting along the far side within a few yards
of the madronas and the forge, and not far off
the latter, ended in a sort of platform on the edge
of the dump. There, in old days, the trucks were
tipped, and their load sent thundering down the
chute. There, besides, was the only spot where
we could approach the margin of the dump. Any-
where else, you took your life in your right hand
when you came within a yard and a half to peer
over. For at any moment the dump might begin
to slide and carry you down and bury you below
its ruins. Indeed, the neighbourhood of an old
mine is a place beset with dangers. For as still
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS 251
as Silverado was, at any moment the report of
rotten wood might tell us that the platform had
fallen into the shaft; the dump might begin to
pour into the road below; or a wedge slip in
the great upright seam, and hundreds of tons of
mountain bury the scene of our encampment.
I have already compared the dump to a ram-
part, built certainly by some rude people, and for
prehistoric wars. It was likewise a frontier. All
below was green and woodland, the tall pines soar-
ing 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 min-
eral, that had dammed the canon up, was a crea-
ture 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 dis-
trict, seemed to have had an eye to nothing besides
mining; and even the natural hillside was all slid-
ing gravel and precarious boulder. Close at the
margin of the well leaves would decay to skeletons
and mummies, which at length some stronger gust
would carry clear of the canon and scatter in the
subjacent woods. Even moisture and decaying
vegetable matter could not, with all nature's al-
chemy, concoct enough soil to nourish a few poor
grasses. It is the same, they say, in the neigh-
bourhood of all silver mines; the nature of that
252 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
precious rock being stubborn with quartz and poi-
sonous with cinnabar. Both were plenty in our
Silverado. The stones sparkled white in the sun-
shine with quartz; they were all stained red with
cinnabar. Here, doubtless, came the Indians of
yore to paint their faces for the war-path; and
cinnabar, if I remember rightly, was one of the
few articles of Indian commerce. Now, 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 flavour of poetry, com-
pounded out of Indian story and Hawthornden's
allusion :
" Desire, alas ! desire a Zeuxis new,
From Indies borrowing gold, from Eastern skies
Most bright cinoper ..."
Yet this is but half the picture; our Silverado
platform has another side to it. Though there
was no soil, and scarce a blade of grass, yet out
of these tumbled gravel-heaps and broken boulders,
a flower garden bloomed as at home in a conser-
vatory. Calycanthus crept, like a hardy weed, all
over our rough parlour, choking the railway, and
pushing forth its rusty, aromatic cones from be-
tween two blocks of shattered mineral. Azaleas
made a big snow-bed just above the well. The
shoulder of the hill waved white with Mediter-
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS 253
ranean heath. In the crannies of the ledge and
about the spurs of the tall pine, a red flowering
stone-plant hung in clusters. Even the low, thorny
chaparral was thick with pea-like blossom. Close
at the foot of our path nutmegs prospered, de-
lightful to the sight and smell. At sunrise, and
again late at night, the scent of the sweet bay-
trees filled the canon, and the down-blowing night
wind must have borne it hundreds of feet into the
outer air. .
All this vegetation, to be sure, was stunted. The
madrona was here no bigger than the manzanita;
the bay was but a stripling shrub ; the very pines,
with four or five exceptions in all our upper canon,
were not so tall as myself, or but a little taller,
and the most of them came lower than my waist.
For a prosperous forest tree, we must look below,
where the glen was crowded with green spires.
But for flowers and ravishing perfume, we had
none to envy: our heap of road-metal was thick
with bloom, like a hawthorn in the front of June;
our red, baking angle in the mountain, a labora-
tory of poignant scents. It was an endless won-
der to my mind, as I dreamed about the platform,
following the progress of the shadows, where the
madrona with its leaves, the azalea and calycan-
thus with their blossoms, could find moisture to
support such thick, wet, waxy growths, or the
254 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
bay-tree collect the ingredients of its perfume.
But there they all grew together, healthy, happy,
and happy-making, as though rooted in a fathom
of black soil.
Nor was it only vegetable life that prospered.
We had, indeed, few birds, and none that had
much of a voice or anything worthy to be called
a song. My morning comrade had a thin chirp,
unmusical and monotonous, but friendly and pleas-
ant to hear. He had but one rival : a fellow with
an ostentatious cry of near an octave descending,
not one note of which properly followed another.
This is the only bird I ever knew with a wrong
ear; but there was something enthralling about
his performance. You listened and listened, think-
ing each time he must surely get it right; but
no, it was always wrong, and always wrong the
same way. Yet he seemed proud of his song,
delivered it with execution and a manner of his
own, and was charming to his mate. A very in-
correct, 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 canon, among the crags that were
printed on the sky. Now and again, but very
rarely, they wheeled high over our heads in si-
lence, or with a distant, dying scream ; and then,
with a fresh impulse, winged fleetly forward,
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS 255
dipped over a hilltop, and were gone. They
seemed solemn and ancient things, sailing the
blue air: perhaps coeval with the mountain where
they haunted, perhaps emigrants from Rome,
where the glad legions may have shouted to be-
hold them on the morn of battle.
But if birds were rare, the place abounded with
rattlesnakes the rattlesnakes' nest, it might have
been named. Wherever we brushed among the
bushes, our passage woke their angry buzz. One
dwelt habitually in the wood-pile, and sometimes,
when we came for firewood, thrust up his small
head between two logs, and hissed at the intrusion.
The rattle has a legendary credit; it is said to
be awe-inspiring, and, once heard, to stamp itself
for ever in the memory. But the sound is not at
all alarming; the hum of many insects, and the
buzz of the wasp convince the ear of danger quite
as readily. As a matter of fact, we lived for
weeks in Silverado, coming and going, with rattles
sprung on every side, and it never occurred to us
to be afraid. I used to take sun-baths and do cal-
isthenics in a certain pleasant nook among azalea
and calycanthus, the rattles whizzing on every side
like spinning-wheels, and the combined hiss or buzz
rising louder and angrier at any sudden movement ;
but I was never in the least impressed, nor ever
attacked. It was only towards the end of our
256 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
stay, that a man down at Calistoga, who was ex-
patiating on the terrifying nature of the sound,
gave me at last a very good imitation; and it
burst on me at once that we dwelt in the very
metropolis of deadly snakes, and that the rattle
was simply the commonest noise in Silverado.
Immediately on our return, we attacked the Han-
sons on the subject. They had formerly assured
us that our canon was favoured, like Ireland, with
an entire immunity from poisonous reptiles; but,
with the perfect inconsequence of the natural man,
they were no sooner found out than they went off
at score in the contrary direction, and we were
told that in no part of the world did rattlesnakes
attain to such a monstrous bigness as among the
warm, flower-dotted rocks of Silverado. This is
a contribution rather to the natural history of the
Hansons than to that of snakes.
One person, however, better served by his in-
stinct, 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.
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS 257
Dwarf pines, not big enough to be Christmas
trees, grew thinly among loose stone and gravel
scaurs. Here and there a big boulder sat quies-
cent on a knoll, having paused there till the next
rain in his long slide down the mountain. There
was here no ambuscade for the snakes, you could
see clearly where you trod; and yet the higher
I went, the more abject and appealing became
Chuchu's terror. He was an excellent master of
that composite language in which dogs commu-
nicate with men, and he would assure me, on his
honour, that there was some peril on the moun-
tain; appeal to me, by all that I held holy, to turn
back; and at length, finding all was in vain, and
that I still persisted, ignorantly foolhardy, he
would suddenly whip round and make a bee-line
down the slope for Silverado, the gravel shower-
ing 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
alarm of Caliban, who dashed out to chastise the
intruder, and found himself, by moonlight, face
to face with such a tartar. Something at least
there must have been : some hairy, dangerous brute
lodged permanently among the rocks a little to
the north-west of Silverado, spending his summer
thereabout, with wife and family.
258 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
And there was, or there had been, another ani-
mal. Once, under the broad daylight, on that
open stony hillside, where the baby pines were
growing, scarcely tall enough to be a badge for
a MacGregor's bonnet, I came suddenly upon his
innocent body, lying mummified by the dry air
and sun : a pigmy kangaroo. I am ingloriously
ignorant of these subjects; had never heard of
such a beast; thought myself face to face with
some incomparable sport of nature; and began to
cherish hopes of immortality in science. Rarely
have I been conscious of a stranger thrill than
when I raised that singular creature from the
stones, dry as a board, his innocent heart long
quiet, and all warm with sunshine. His long
hind legs were stiff, his tiny forepaws clutched
upon his breast, as if to leap; his poor life cut
short upon that mountain by some unknown ac-
cident. 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 cor-
ner 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.
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS 259
children in full health and spirits shout together,
to the dismay of neighbours; and their idle,
happy, deafening vociferations rise and fall, like
the song of the crickets. I used to sit at night
on the platform, and wonder why these creatures
were so happy; and what was wrong with man
that he also did not wind up his days with an
hour or two of shouting; but I suspect that all
long-lived animals are solemn. The dogs alone
are hardly used by nature; and it seems a mani-
fest injustice for poor Chuchu to die in his teens,
after a life so shadowed and troubled, continually
shaken with alarm, and the tear of elegant senti-
ment permanently in his eye.
There was another neighbour of ours at Silver-
ado, 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 board-
ing of our house. He entered by a round hole,
more neatly pierced than a man could do it with
a gimlet, and he seems to have spent his life in
cutting out the interior of the plank, but whether
as a dwelling or a store-house, I could never find.
When I used to lie in bed in the morning for
a rest we had no easy-chairs in Silverado I
would hear, hour after hour, the sharp cutting
sound of his labours, and from time to time a
dainty shower of sawdust would fall upon the
260 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
blankets. There lives no more industrious crea-
ture than a bore.
And now that I have named to the reader all
our animals and insects without exception only
I find I have forgotten the flies he will be able
to appreciate the singular privacy and silence of our
days. It was not only man who was excluded : ani-
mals, the song of birds, the lowing of cattle, the
bleating of sheep, clouds even, and the variations of
the weather, were here also wanting; and as, day
after day, the sky was one dome of blue, and the
pines below us stood motionless in the still air, so the
hours themselves were marked out from each other
only by the series of our own affairs, and the sun's
great period as he ranged westward through the
heavens. The two birds cackled awhile in the early
morning ; all day the water tinkled in the shaft, the
bores ground sawdust in the planking of our crazy
palace infinitesimal sounds ; and it was only
with the return of night that any change would
fall on our surroundings, or the four crickets begin
to flute together in the dark.
Indeed, it would be hard to exaggerate the
pleasure that we took in the approach of evening.
Our day was not very long, but it was very tiring.
To trip along unsteady planks or wade among
shifting stones, to go to and fro for water, to
clamber down the glen to the Toll House after
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS 261
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 comfort-
able posture; I would be fevered and weary of the
staring sun; and just then he would begin cour-
teously to withdraw his countenance, the shadows
lengthened, the aromatic airs awoke, and an inde-
scribable but happy change announced the coming
of the night.
The hours of evening when we were once cur-
tained in the friendly dark, sped lightly. Even as
with the crickets, night brought to us a certain
spirit of rejoicing. It was good to taste the air;
good to mark the dawning of the stars, as they
increased their glittering company; good, too, to
gather stones, and send them crashing down the
chute, a wave of light. It seemed, in some way,
the reward and the fulfilment of the day. So it is
when men dwell in the open air; it is one of the
simple pleasures that we lose by living cribbed and
262 THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS
covered in a house, that, though the coming of the
day is still the most inspiriting, yet day's de-
parture, also, and the return of night refresh,
renew, and quiet us; and in the pastures of the
dusk we stand, like cattle, exulting in the absence
of the load.
Our nights were never cold, and they were
always still, but for one remarkable exception.
Regularly, about nine o'clock, a warm wind sprang
up, and blew for ten minutes, or maybe a quarter
of an hour, right down the canon, 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 configura-
tion of the glen. At least, it was very welcome to
the hot and weary squatters; and if we were not
abed already, the springing up of this lilliputian
valley-wind would often be our signal to retire.
I was the last to go to bed, as I was still the first
to rise. Many a night I have strolled about the
platform, taking a bath of darkness before I slept.
The rest would be in bed, and even from the forge
I could hear them talking together from bunk to
bunk. A single candle in the neck of a pint bottle
was their only illumination ; and yet the old cracked
house seemed literally bursting with the light. It
shone keen as a knife through all the vertical
THE SILVERADO SQUATTERS 263
chinks; it struck upward through the broken
shingles; and through the eastern door and win-
dow, 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 bed-
wards 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 dis-
proportionate a figure in the eye and mind. But
the more he is alone with nature, the greater man
and his doings bulk in the consideration of his fel-
low-men. Miles and miles away upon the opposite
hilltops, if there were any hunter belated or any
traveller who had lost his way, he must have stood,
and watched and wondered, from the time the
candle issued from the door of the assayers office
till it had mounted the plank and disappeared again
into the miners' dormitory.
DATE DUE
QCT22-4S
CAT NO 1187
PLEASE DO NOT REMOVE
CARDS OR SLIPS FROM THIS POCKET
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO LIBRARY
PR Stevenson, Robert Louis
5^88 The amateur emigrant
A6
1911
