u here? It was lucky for my wife,
wasn't it, since I got left, to have you to look after her? Thanks, old
fellow; you are just in time for the train. Alice and I will stop over a
day to rest. A thousand times obliged: good-bye! Alice, say good-bye to
Doctor Earle! you will not see him again."

Their hands and eyes met. He was pale as marble: she flushed one
instant, paled the next, with a curious expression in her eyes which the
Doctor never forgot and never quite understood. It was enough to know
that the game was up. He had another mine on his hands, and an ugly pain
in his heart which he told himself bitterly would be obstinate of cure.
If he only could be sure what that look in her eyes had meant!

WHAT THEY TOLD ME AT WILSON'S BAR.

The mining season was ended in the narrow valley of one of the
Sacramento's northern tributaries, as, in fact, it was throughout the
whole region of "placer diggings;" for it was October of a dry year, and
water had failed early in all the camps. The afternoon of a long, idle
day at Wilson's Bar was drawing to a close. The medium through which the
sun's hot rays reached the parched earth was one of red dust, the effect
of which was that of a mellow Indian summer haze, pleasing to the eye,
if abhorred by the skin and lungs, compelled to take it in, whether
brute or human. In the landscape was an incongruous mingling of beauty
and deformity; the first, the work of nature; the last, the marring of
man.

To the east and to the west rose hills, whose ruggedness was softened by
distance to outlines of harmonious grandeur. Scattered over the valley
between them, the stately "digger," or nut-pines, grew at near
intervals, singly or in groups of three or five, harmonizing by their
pale gray-green with the other half-tints of earth, air, and sky.
Following the course of the dried up river was a line, more or less
continuous, of the evergreen oaks, whose round, spreading tops are such
a grateful relief to the eye in the immense levels of the lower
Sacramento and upper San Joaquin valleys. Depending from these, hung
long, venerable-looking beards of gray moss, as devoid of color as
everything else in the landscape; everything else, except the California
wild grape, which, so far from being devoid of color, was gorgeous
enough in itself to lighten up the whole foreground of the picture.
Growing in clumps upon the ground, it was gay as a bed of tulips.
Clambering up occasional tall trees,