not amount even to a
semblance, and upon Dora, therefore, devolved the task of maintaining
the cuisine as well as the character of the establishment. She had
been accustomed to this duty indeed ever since, upon becoming a
schoolteacher at the age of sixteen, she had proved her capacity
to perform it. She early found her place in the public schools of
Clarksville, and so the pot was soon boiling merrily, and the demands
of the doctor's magnificent appetite were duly honored at sight.

Thus, Doctor Hanchett was enabled to live a life of elegant leisure,
devoid of care and fruitful of enjoyment to a man of his temperament,
for some fourteen months. Then he was suddenly smitten with the
"gold fever," and went raging through the town, seeking whom he might
infect. It was one of the curiosities of this singular epidemic that
it claimed not only those youthful and adventurous spirits who were by
common consent held to be its legitimate victims, but carried off
also old and infirm men, chronic invalids, and, stranger still, such
shiftless, incompetent and altogether worthless cumberers of the
ground as this Doctor Hanchett; thus proving itself to be, like most
other contagions, a not entirely unmixed evil.

Not wholly through the efforts of Doctor Hanchett, it is safe to
say, but in due process of time and events, a company was mustered in
Clarksville to go overland to California, as so many other companies
were mustered in hundreds of other towns all over the country in that
memorable spring of '49. This company, composed principally of
men from the surrounding country, and containing only two or three
residents of the village proper, regarded itself as peculiarly
fortunate in being able to count among its members a gentleman
like Doctor Hanchett, who, besides being a physician, was an old
campaigner, and thus likely to prove doubly desirable as a comrade in
an expedition like that upon which they were embarked.

It being definitely settled that the doctor was to march with his
company upon a certain day not far distant, it devolved upon his
chancellor of the exchequer to provide the sinews of war. Whether Dora
found this duty an agreeable one or not, she performed it promptly and
cheerfully. The little hoard that by the sharpest economy the frugal
girl had contrived to save from her earnings was placed in the
doctor's hands without reserve, to be appropriated, first to the
purchase of an outfit, and next to the defrayment