. He found that beans and
bacon eaten with a knife were sweeter and more wholesome than "blanc
mange," "consomme," or "cafe noir" cooked in French style, and served by
a French chef.

Of the Too Sure Man

Once upon a time, in the town of Lillooet, county of Lillooet, Province
of British Columbia, there lived a man who was so sure of his footing
that he closed his eyes and floundered along in the dark. When people
told him there were chasms in front of him, or that there was ice on the
trail ahead, he would not believe them, but put his fingers in his ears
so that he could not hear, and thus became deaf and blind to his own
interests. The people pestered him so much about his folly, and he
learned to hate them so much for their interference in his personal
matters, that he crossed the names of all his friends from his list of
social possibilities, would recognize none of them, and refused to speak
even when addressed; he thus became a blind, deaf and dumb mute. The
result was that he ultimately slipped upon the ice on the trail, and
fell into a chasm and has not been seen since. It was in the first days
of the Lillooet quartz discoveries. Gold had been mined from Cayuse
Creek, Bridge River, and the Fraser River, in uncountable ounces, in the
free state, by the placer or hydraulic process of mining, for a great
number of years, but the source of supply from which the free gold had
originated had not yet been located. It was even doubted if there was
any source of supply, although it was generally conceded that all gold
was originally pilfered by the streams and rivers from the hard
quartz-rocks of which the great mountains of Cayuse Creek and Bridge
River were formed. While some of the miners contented themselves with
making wing-dams, turning streams from their natural courses, and
scraping about the mud and gravel of the exposed beds for the pure, free
gold, picking up nuggets at sight and capturing the "dust" with
quicksilver, others, looking for bigger game, climbed the high
mountains, tore the moss from their sides to expose the rock, and
pounced upon every piece of "float" which would indicate the possible
existence of a "mother lode" somewhere near at hand or higher up.

The Too Sure Man of this story was one of the latter. He had found a
piece of "float rock" with a shining speck in it near where the nigger's
cabin now stands on Cayuse Creek in the vicinity of Lillooet, and he
traced it to the very spot