he work. Stupid and unprophetic
lads! We were doing this in play and never suspecting. Why, that cave
hollow and all the adjacent hills were made of gold! But we did not know
it. We took it for dirt. We left its rich secret in its own peaceful
possession and grew up in poverty and went wandering about the world
struggling for bread--and this because we had not the gift of prophecy.
That region was all dirt and rocks to us, yet all it needed was to be
ground up and scientifically handled and it was gold. That is to say,
the whole region was a cement-mine--and they make the finest kind of
Portland cement there now, five thousand barrels a day, with a plant
that cost $2,000,000.

For a little while Reuel Gridley attended that school of ours. He was an
elderly pupil; he was perhaps twenty-two or twenty-three years old. Then
came the Mexican War and he volunteered. A company of infantry was
raised in our town and Mr. Hickman, a tall, straight, handsome athlete
of twenty-five, was made captain of it and had a sword by his side and a
broad yellow stripe down the leg of his gray pants. And when that
company marched back and forth through the streets in its smart
uniform--which it did several times a day for drill--its evolutions were
attended by all the boys whenever the school hours permitted. I can see
that marching company yet, and I can almost feel again the consuming
desire that I had to join it. But they had no use for boys of twelve and
thirteen, and before I had a chance in another war the desire to kill
people to whom I had not been introduced had passed away.

I saw the splendid Hickman in his old age. He seemed about the oldest
man I had ever seen--an amazing and melancholy contrast with the showy
young captain I had seen preparing his warriors for carnage so many,
many years before. Hickman is dead--it is the old story. As Susy said,
"What is it all for?"

Reuel Gridley went away to the wars and we heard of him no more for
fifteen or sixteen years. Then one day in Carson City while I was having
a difficulty with an editor on the sidewalk--an editor better built for
war than I was--I heard a voice say, "Give him the best you've got, Sam,
I'm at your back." It was Reuel Gridley. He said he had not recognized
me by my face but by my drawling style of speech.

He went down to the Reese River mines about that time and presently he
lost an election bet in his mining camp, and by the terms of it he was
obliged to buy a