it, light our candle-lanterns and
go looking for gold. We were always sure that we should yet find a
forgotten cache of gold--perhaps guarded by a lonely skeleton--but we
never did!

About all we ever got out of it was snake-frights (naturally, sans
alcoholic origin), until we were sure, the snakes were not rattlers;
baby bats, which invariably tried to bite us; swallows' eggs, wet feet,
and a good spanking if the family happened to find out what we had been
up to.

I suppose that it really was a very dangerous pastime, for although
sometimes the drift tunnel led us to a sunlit opening on the hillside,
more often we reached a blind end and were forced to return to the main
shaft and to "shin" up the rope, with from ten to forty feet of inky
water waiting to catch us if we fell.

Or we went up the river to "swing the rocker" for old Ali Quong. He
always pretended to drive us away, bellowing fiercely as soon as he
caught sight of us, "Whassa malla you? Alle time you come see Ali Quong!
Ketchem too-oo much tlouble for po-or old Chinaman"--the whole time with
his wrinkled, brown face wreathed in smiles.

There we stayed the long summer afternoon, swinging the rocker while
Quong shoveled in the pebbly dirt, watching him take the black sand,
which held the gold, off the canvas with his little spade-like scoop,
and panning it for him in the heavy iron pan, fascinated to see what
we should find. Usually only a few small nuggets in a group of colors
(flake gold), but once we found a good sized nugget which Quong
gallantly gave me for a "Chinese New Year" gift. At dusk he sent us
home, each with a bar of brown barley sugar--smelling to the blue of
opium--which he fished out of one of his numerous jumpers with his
long-fingered, sensitive hands.

They are dead, long ago--Ah Quong, old Sing, Shotgun-Chinaman--and gone
to the blessed region of the Five Immortals, I know, but every true
Californian will understand the regard the pioneer families had for
these faithful Chinese servitors who took as much loving pride in the
aristocratic and unblemished names of their "familees" as the white
persons who bore them. Four generations of my family, old Sing lived to
serve--but I must get on with my forty-niner's tale of the hanging of
Charlie Price!

"Eh, mon, but the spring is here again," said Jim "Hutch" (Hutchinson)
to Old Man Greeley.

"Is it so, now?" returned the little man, gazing off through the sunny,
velvet air to a wo