of nature herself we found an
embrace as clinging, as hopeless and restraining, as the civilization
from which we had fled. We were quite content after a few hours' work
in the shaft to lie on our backs on the hillside staring at the
unwinking sky, or to wander with a gun through the virgin forest in
search of game scarcely less vagabond than ourselves. We indulged in
the most extravagant and dreamy speculations of the fortune we should
eventually discover in the shaft, and believed that we were practical.
We broke our "saleratus bread" with appetites unimpaired by
restlessness or anxiety; we went to sleep under the grave and sedate
stars with a serene consciousness of having fairly earned our rest; we
awoke the next morning with unabated trustfulness, and a sweet
obliviousness of even the hypothetical fortunes we had perhaps won or
lost at cards overnight. We paid no heed to the fact that our little
capital was slowly sinking with the shaft, and that the rainy
season--wherein not only "no man could work," but even such play as
ours was impossible--was momentarily impending.

In the midst of this, one day Lacy Bassett suddenly emerged from the
shaft before his "shift" of labor was over with every sign of disgust
and rage in his face and inarticulate with apparent passion. In vain
we gathered round him in concern; in vain Captain Jim regarded him with
almost feminine sympathy, as he flung away his pick and dashed his hat
to the ground.

"What's up, Lacy, old pard? What's gone o' you?" said Captain Jim
tenderly.

"Look!" gasped Lacy at last, when every eye was on him, holding up a
small fragment of rock before us and the next moment grinding it under
his heel in rage. "Look! To think that I've been fooled agin by this
blanked fossiliferous trap--blank it! To think that after me and
Professor Parker was once caught jist in this way up on the Stanislaus
at the bottom of a hundred-foot shaft by this rotten trap--that yer I
am--bluffed agin!"

There was a dead silence; we looked at each other blankly.

"But, Bassett," said Walker, picking up a part of the fragment, "we've
been finding this kind of stuff for the last two weeks."

"But how?" returned Lacy, turning upon him almost fiercely. "Did ye
find it superposed on quartz, or did you find it NOT superposed on
quartz? Did you find it in volcanic drift, or did ye find it in old
red-sandstone or coarse illuvion? Tell me that, and then ye kin talk.
But this