huge free milling works, where hydraulic machinery crushes the
gold-bearing quartz and screens it to fineness before catching the gold
on delicate sieves, the process is only a complex refinement of the
bar-washer cradling his gold.

Fires had not yet cleared the giant hemlock forests, as they have
to-day along the Cariboo Trail, and prospectors found their way through
a chartless sea of windfall--hemlocks criss-crossed the height of a
house with branches interlaced like wire. Cataracts fell over lofty
ledges in wind-blown spray. Spanish moss, grey-green and feathery,
hung from branch to branch of the huge Douglas firs. Sometimes the
trail would lead for miles round the edge of some precipices beyond
which could be glimpsed the eternal snows. Sometimes an avalanche slid
over a slope with the distant appearance of a great white waterfall and
the echo of muffled thunder. Where the mountain was swept as by a
mighty besom, the pack-train kept an anxious eye on the snow {31} amid
the valleys of the upper peaks; for, in an instant, the snowslide might
come over the edge of the upper valley to sweep down the slope,
carrying away forests, rocks, trail, pack-train and all. The story is
told of one slide seen by the guide at the head of a long pack-train.
He had judged it to be ten miles away; but out from the upper valley it
came coiling like a long white snake, and before he could turn, it had
caught him. In a slide death was almost certain, from suffocation if
not from the crush of falling trees and rocks. Miners have been taken
from their cabins dead in the trail of a snowslide that swept the shack
to the bottom of the valley without so much as a hair of their heads
being injured. Though the logs were twisted and warped, the dead
bodies were not even bruised.

When a hushed whisper came through the trees, travellers looked for
some waterfall. At midday, when the thaw was at its full, all the
mountain torrents became vocal with the glee of disimprisoned life
running a race of gladness to the sea. The sun sets early in the
mountains with a gradual hushing of the voice of glad waters and a red
glow as of wine on the encircling peaks. Camp for the night was always
near water for the horses; and every {32} star was etched in replica in
river or lake. Sunrise steals in silence among the mountain peaks.
There is none of that stir of song and vague rustling of animal life
such as are heard at lower levels. Nor does the