y satisfied Miss
Lawton's artistic taste, and here frequently, with her sketch-book in
hand, she indulged that taste and a certain shy reserve which kept her
from contact with strangers. On one of the leaves of that sketch-book
appears a study of a donkey's head, being none other than the grave
features of Jinny, as once projected timidly over the artist's
shoulder. The preliminaries of this intimacy have never transpired, nor
is it a settled fact if Jinny made the first advances. The result was
only known to the men of Sawyer's Bar by a vision which remained fresh
in their memories long after the gentle lady and her four-footed friend
had passed beyond their voices. As two of the tunnel-men were
returning from work one evening, they chanced to look up the little
trail, kept sacred from secular intrusion, that led from the cemetery
to the settlement. In the dim twilight, against a sunset sky, they
beheld a pale-faced girl riding slowly toward them. With a delicate
instinct, new to those rough men, they drew closer in the shadow of the
bushes until she passed. There was no mistaking the familiar
grotesqueness of Jinny; there was no mistaking the languid grace of
Miss Lawton. But a wreath of wild roses was around Jinny's neck, from
her long ears floated Miss Jessie's hat ribbons, and a mischievous,
girlish smile was upon Miss Jessie's face, as fresh as the azaleas in
her hair. By the next day the story of this gentle apparition was
known to a dozen miners in camp, and all were sworn to secrecy. But
the next evening, and the next, from the safe shadows of the woods they
watched and drank in the beauty of that fanciful and all unconscious
procession. They kept their secret, and never a whisper or footfall
from these rough men broke its charm or betrayed their presence. The
man who could have shocked the sensitive reserve of the young girl
would have paid for it with his life.

And then one day the character of the procession changed, and this
little incident having been told, it was permitted that Jinny should
follow her friend, caparisoned even as before, but this time by the
rougher but no less loving hands of men. When the cortege reached the
ferry where the gentle girl was to begin her silent journey to the sea,
Jinny broke from those who held her, and after a frantic effort to
mount the barge fell into the swiftly rushing Stanislaus. A dozen
stout arms were stretched to save her, and a rope skilfully thrown