n old brown
wooden house.

Fanny and I dashed at the house. It consisted of three rooms, and was so
plastered against the hill, that one room was right atop of another,
that the upper floor was more than twice as large as the lower, and that
all three apartments must be entered from a different side or level. Not
a window-sash remained. The door of the lower room was smashed, and one
panel hung in splinters. We entered that, and found a fair amount of
rubbish: sand and gravel that had been sifted in there by the mountain
winds; straws, sticks, and stones; a table, a barrel; a plate-rack on
the wall; two home-made boot-jacks, signs of miners and their boots; and
a pair of papers pinned on the boarding, headed respectively "Funnel No.
1," and "Funnel No. 2," but with the tails torn away. The window,
sashless of course, was choked with the green and sweetly smelling
foliage of a bay; and through a chink in the floor, a spray of poison
oak had shot up and was handsomely prospering in the interior. It was my
first care to cut away that poison oak, Fanny standing by at a
respectful distance. That was our first improvement by which we took
possession.

The room immediately above could only be entered by a plank propped
against the threshold, along which the intruder must foot it gingerly,
clutching for support to sprays of poison oak, the proper product of the
country. Herein was, on either hand, a triple tier of beds, where miners
had once lain; and the other gable was pierced by a sashless window and
a doorless doorway opening on the air of heaven, five feet above the
ground. As for the third room, which entered squarely from the ground
level, but higher up the hill and farther up the canyon, it contained
only rubbish and the uprights for another triple tier of beds.

The whole building was overhung by a bold, lion-like, red rock. Poison
oak, sweet bay trees, calycanthus, brush, and chaparral, grew freely but
sparsely all about it. In front, in the strong sunshine, the platform
lay overstrewn with busy litter, as though the labours of the mine might
begin again to-morrow in the morning.

Following back into the canyon, among the mass of rotting plant and
through the flowering bushes, we came to a great crazy staging, with a
wry windlass on the top; and clambering up, we could look into an open
shaft, leading edgeways down into the bowels of the mountain, trickling
with water, and lit by some stray sun-gleams, whence I kn