knob. Johnny had killed
a man in Virginia City, not an unusual occurrence in those days, but
the circumstances seem to have been such that he did not dare go back
there. Yet, with one of those strange contrasts so common in the life
of the mines, he was a kind-hearted, domestic soul, and on baking days
he made little dogs and cats and elephants out of sweetened dough,
with currants for eyes, for his little pal, Isobel Osbourne. One day
he bestowed upon the child the rather incongruous present of a bottle
of quicksilver and a bowie-knife, which she proudly carried home.

Other neighbours in a cabin on the mountainside were two young
Englishmen, mere boys of twenty or thereabout, named John Lloyd and
Tom Reid. Wishing to celebrate the Queen's birthday in true British
fashion, they went to Mrs. Osbourne to learn how to concoct a plum
pudding. They learned, only the string broke and the pudding had to be
served in soup-plates.

Whatever else the life and the society may have been, they were never
dull or tame. On one occasion, while crossing the desert in a
stage-coach, Mrs. Osbourne met the man said to be the original of Bret
Harte's Colonel Starbottle. When the coach stopped at a little
station, this gentleman politely asked his pretty fellow passenger
what he could bring her. He was so flowery and pompous that as a
little joke she asked for strawberries, thinking them the most
impossible thing to be found at the forlorn little place. To her
amazement he actually brought her the berries.

On another desert trip she was allowed, as a special favour, to sit on
the front seat, between the driver and the express messenger. There
had been, not long before, a number of hold-ups by "road agents," and
when the stage came to suspicious-looking turns in the road the
messenger made her put her head down on her knees while he laid his
gun across her back. She could have gone inside with the other women,
of course, but it was like her to prefer the seat with the driver,
with its risk and its adventure.

Later the Osbournes moved to Virginia City, where the life, while not
quite so primitive as at Austin, was still highly flavoured with all
the spice of a wild mining town. Gambling went on night and day, and
the killing of men over the games still happened often enough. In the
diary of a pioneer of that time, Samuel Orr, of Alameda, who later
married one of Mrs. Osbourne's sisters, Cora Van de Grift, I find this
entry: "This is th