d and above him.

There was an intensity in all that he did. Passing his mining-claim on
horseback one day, I paused to look at him in his work. Clad in a blue
flannel mining-suit, he was digging as for life. The embankment of red
dirt and gravel melted away rapidly before his vigorous strokes, and he
seemed to feel a sort of fierce delight in his work. Pausing a moment,
he looked up and saw me.

"You dig as if you were in a hurry," I said.

"Yes, I have been digging here three years. I have a notion that I have
just so much of the earth to turn over before I am turned under," he
replied with a sort of grim humor.

He was still there when we visited Sonora in 1857. He invited us out to
dinner, and we went. By skillful circling around the hill, we reached
the little cabin on the summit with horse and buggy. The old man had
made preparations for his expected guests. The floor of the cabin had
been swept, and its scanty store of furniture put to rights, and a
dinner was cooking in and on the little stove. His lady-guest insisted
on helping in the preparation of the dinner, but was allowed to do
nothing further than to arrange the dishes on the primitive table, which
was set out under one of the little oaks in the yard. It was a miner's
feast--can-fruits, can-vegetables, can-oysters, can-pickles, can-every
thing nearly, with tea distilled from the Asiatic leaf by a receipt of
his own. It was a hot day, and from the cloudless heavens the sun
flooded the earth with his glory, and the shimmer of the sunshine was in
the still air. We tried to be cheerful, but there was a pathos about the
affair that touched us. He felt it too. More than once there was a tear
in his eye. At parting, he kissed little Paul, and gave us his hand in
silence. As we drove down the hill, he stood gazing after us with a look
fixed and sad. The picture is till before me the lonely old man standing
sad and silent, the little cabin, the rude dinner-service under the oak,
and the overarching sky. That was our last meeting. The next will be on
the Other Side.

Suicide in California.

A half protest rises within me as I begin this Sketch. The page almost
turns crimson under my gaze, and shadowy forms come forth out of the
darkness into which they wildly plunged out of life's misery into
death's mystery. Ghostly lips cry out, "Leave us alone! Why call us back
to a world where we lost all, and in quitting which we risked all?
Disturb us not to gratif