pe of the settlement. From the
knoll you looked straight along the main street; with a field-gun you
could have swept it clean from end to end, and, what's more, you
wouldn't have hurt a soul. The place was dead empty--not so much as
a cur to sit on the sidewalk--and the only hint of life was the
laughing and banjo-playing indoors. You could hear that plain
enough. Every second house in the place was a saloon, and every
saloon seemed to have a billiard-table and a banjo player. I never
heard anything like it. I should say, if you divided the population
into four parts, that two of these were playing billiards, one
tum-tumming 'Hey, Juliana' on the banjo, and the remaining fourth
looking on and drinking whisky, and occasionally taking part in the
chorus. All the way down the sidewalk I had these two sounds--the
_click, click_ of the balls and the _thrum, thrum, tinkle, tinkle_ of
'Juliana'--ahead of me; and left silence in my wake, as the
inhabitants dropped their occupations and sauntered out to stare at
'the Last Invalid,' which was the name promptly coined for me by the
disheartened but still humorous promoters of America's Peerless
Sanatorium.

"You don't know 'Juliana'--neither tune nor words? Nor did I when I
set foot in Eucalyptus; but I lived on pretty close terms with it for
the next two months, and it ended by clearing me out of the
neighbourhood. It was a sort of nigger camp-meeting song, and a
hybrid at that. It went something like this:"

'O, de lost ell-an'-yard is a-huntin' fer de morn'--

The lost ell-and-yard is Orion's sword and belt, I may tell you--

'Hey, Juliana, Juli-he-hi-holy!
An' my soul's done sicken fer de Hallelujah horn,
Hey, Juliana, Juli-he-hi-ho!
Was it weary there,
In de wilderness?
Was it weary-y-y, 'way down in Goshen?

'O, de children shibber by de Jordan's flow--
Hey, Juliana, Juli-he-hi-holy!
An' it's time fer Gaberl to shake hisself an' blow,
Hey, Juliana, Juli-he-hi-ho!
For it's weary here
In de wilderness;
Oh, it's weary-y-y, 'way down in Goshen!'

That was the sort of stuff, and it had any number of verses.
I never heard the end of them. Also there were variants--most of
them unfit for publication. The tune had swept up the valley like an
epidemic disease: and, after a while, it astonished no dweller in
Eucalyptus to find his waking thoughts and his wh