in tents until the flood
had subsided, left no distracting wreckage behind them. A dozen
half-submerged log cabins dotted the tranquil surface of the waters,
without ripple or disturbance, looking in the moonlight more like the
ruins of centuries than of a few days. There was no current to sap their
slight foundations or sweep them away; nothing stirred that silent lake
but the occasional shot-like indentations of a passing raindrop, or,
still more rarely, a raft, made of a single log, propelled by some
citizen on a tour of inspection of his cabin roof-tree, where some of
his goods were still stored. There was no sense of terror in this bland
obliteration of the little settlement; the ruins of a single burnt-up
cabin would have been more impressive than this stupid and even
grotesquely placid effect of the rival destroying element. People took
it naturally; the water went as it had come,--slowly, impassively,
noiselessly; a few days of fervid Californian sunshine dried the cabins,
and in a week or two the red dust lay again as thickly before their
doors as the winter mud had lain. The waters of Rattlesnake Creek
dropped below its banks, the stage-coach from Marysville no longer made
a detour of the settlement. There was even a singular compensation to
this amicable invasion; the inhabitants sometimes found gold in those
breaches in the banks made by the overflow. To wait for the "old
Rattlesnake sluicing" was a vernal hope of the trusting miner.

The history of "Jules'," however, was once destined to offer a singular
interruption of this peaceful and methodical process. The winter of
1859-60 was an exceptional one. But little rain had fallen in the
valleys, although the snow lay deep in the high Sierras. Passes were
choked, ravines filled, and glaciers found on their slopes. And when the
tardy rains came with the withheld southwesterly "trades," the regular
phenomenon recurred; Jules' Flat silently, noiselessly, and peacefully
went under water; the inhabitants moved to the higher ground, perhaps
a little more expeditiously from an impatience born of the delay. The
stagecoach from Marysville made its usual detour and stopped before the
temporary hotel, express offices, and general store of "Jules'," under
canvas, bark, and the limp leaves of a spreading alder. It deposited a
single passenger,--Miles Hemmingway, of San Francisco, but originally of
Boston,--the young secretary of a mining company, dispatched to report
upo