y, indeed, rose before noon; he loved all games, from
poker to clerical croquet; and in the Toll House croquet ground I have
seen him toiling at the latter with the devotion of a curate. He took an
interest in education, was an active member of the local school-board,
and when I was there, he had recently lost the schoolhouse key. His
waggon was broken, but it never seemed to occur to him to mend it. Like
all truly idle people, he had an artistic eye. He chose the print stuff
for his wife's dresses, and counselled her in the making of a patch-work
quilt, always, as she thought, wrongly, but to the more educated eye,
always with bizarre and admirable taste--the taste of an Indian. With
all this, he was a perfect, unoffending gentleman in word and act. Take
his clay pipe from him, and he was fit for any society but that of
fools. Quiet as he was, there burned a deep, permanent excitement in his
dark blue eyes; and when this grave man smiled, it was like sunshine in
a shady place.

Mrs. Hanson (_nee_, if you please, Lovelands) was more commonplace than
her lord. She was a comely woman, too, plump, fair-coloured, with
wonderful white teeth; and in her print dresses (chosen by Rufe) and
with a large sunbonnet shading her valued complexion, made, I assure
you, a very agreeable figure. But she was on the surface, what there was
of her, out-spoken and loud-spoken. Her noisy laughter had none of the
charm of one of Hanson's rare, slow-spreading smiles; there was no
reticence, no mystery, no manner about the woman: she was a first-class
dairymaid, but her husband was an unknown quantity between the savage
and the nobleman. She was often in and out with us, merry, and healthy,
and fair; he came far seldomer--only, indeed, when there was business,
or now and again, to pay a visit of ceremony, brushed up for the
occasion, with his wife on his arm, and a clean clay pipe in his teeth.
These visits, in our forest state, had quite the air of an event, and
turned our red canyon into a salon.

Such was the pair who ruled in the old Silverado Hotel, among the windy
trees, on the mountain shoulder overlooking the whole length of Napa
Valley, as the man aloft looks down on the ship's deck. There they kept
house, with sundry horses and fowls, and a family of sons, Daniel
Webster, and I think George Washington, among the number. Nor did they
want visitors. An old gentleman, of singular stolidity, and called
Breedlove--I think he had crossed t