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+Project Gutenberg's Roughing It, Part 8., by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Roughing It, Part 8.
+
+Author: Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
+
+Release Date: July 3, 2004 [EBook #8589]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROUGHING IT, PART 8. ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+                              ROUGHING IT
+
+                             by Mark Twain
+
+                                 1880
+
+                                Part 8.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXXI.
+
+At four o'clock in the afternoon we were winding down a mountain of
+dreary and desolate lava to the sea, and closing our pleasant land
+journey.  This lava is the accumulation of ages; one torrent of fire
+after another has rolled down here in old times, and built up the island
+structure higher and higher.  Underneath, it is honey-combed with caves;
+it would be of no use to dig wells in such a place; they would not hold
+water--you would not find any for them to hold, for that matter.
+Consequently, the planters depend upon cisterns.
+
+The last lava flow occurred here so long ago that there are none now
+living who witnessed it.  In one place it enclosed and burned down a
+grove of cocoa-nut trees, and the holes in the lava where the trunks
+stood are still visible; their sides retain the impression of the bark;
+the trees fell upon the burning river, and becoming partly submerged,
+left in it the perfect counterpart of every knot and branch and leaf,
+and even nut, for curiosity seekers of a long distant day to gaze upon
+and wonder at.
+
+There were doubtless plenty of Kanaka sentinels on guard hereabouts at
+that time, but they did not leave casts of their figures in the lava as
+the Roman sentinels at Herculaneum and Pompeii did.  It is a pity it is
+so, because such things are so interesting; but so it is.  They probably
+went away.  They went away early, perhaps.  However, they had their
+merits; the Romans exhibited the higher pluck, but the Kanakas showed the
+sounder judgment.
+
+Shortly we came in sight of that spot whose history is so familiar to
+every school-boy in the wide world--Kealakekua Bay--the place where
+Captain Cook, the great circumnavigator, was killed by the natives,
+nearly a hundred years ago.  The setting sun was flaming upon it, a
+Summer shower was falling, and it was spanned by two magnificent
+rainbows.  Two men who were in advance of us rode through one of these
+and for a moment their garments shone with a more than regal splendor.
+Why did not Captain Cook have taste enough to call his great discovery
+the Rainbow Islands?  These charming spectacles are present to you at
+every turn; they are common in all the islands; they are visible every
+day, and frequently at night also--not the silvery bow we see once in an
+age in the States, by moonlight, but barred with all bright and beautiful
+colors, like the children of the sun and rain.  I saw one of them a few
+nights ago.  What the sailors call "raindogs"--little patches of rainbow
+--are often seen drifting about the heavens in these latitudes, like
+stained cathedral windows.
+
+Kealakekua Bay is a little curve like the last kink of a snail-shell,
+winding deep into the land, seemingly not more than a mile wide from
+shore to shore.  It is bounded on one side--where the murder was done--by
+a little flat plain, on which stands a cocoanut grove and some ruined
+houses; a steep wall of lava, a thousand feet high at the upper end and
+three or four hundred at the lower, comes down from the mountain and
+bounds the inner extremity of it.  From this wall the place takes its
+name, Kealakekua, which in the native tongue signifies "The Pathway of
+the Gods."  They say, (and still believe, in spite of their liberal
+education in Christianity), that the great god Lono, who used to live
+upon the hillside, always traveled that causeway when urgent business
+connected with heavenly affairs called him down to the seashore in a
+hurry.
+
+As the red sun looked across the placid ocean through the tall, clean
+stems of the cocoanut trees, like a blooming whiskey bloat through the
+bars of a city prison, I went and stood in the edge of the water on the
+flat rock pressed by Captain Cook's feet when the blow was dealt which
+took away his life, and tried to picture in my mind the doomed man
+struggling in the midst of the multitude of exasperated savages--the men
+in the ship crowding to the vessel's side and gazing in anxious dismay
+toward the shore--the--but I discovered that I could not do it.
+
+It was growing dark, the rain began to fall, we could see that the
+distant Boomerang was helplessly becalmed at sea, and so I adjourned to
+the cheerless little box of a warehouse and sat down to smoke and think,
+and wish the ship would make the land--for we had not eaten much for ten
+hours and were viciously hungry.
+
+Plain unvarnished history takes the romance out of Captain Cook's
+assassination, and renders a deliberate verdict of justifiable homicide.
+Wherever he went among the islands, he was cordially received and
+welcomed by the inhabitants, and his ships lavishly supplied with all
+manner of food.  He returned these kindnesses with insult and
+ill-treatment.  Perceiving that the people took him for the long vanished
+and lamented god Lono, he encouraged them in the delusion for the sake of
+the limitless power it gave him; but during the famous disturbance at
+this spot, and while he and his comrades were surrounded by fifteen
+thousand maddened savages, he received a hurt and betrayed his earthly
+origin with a groan.  It was his death-warrant.  Instantly a shout went
+up: "He groans!--he is not a god!" So they closed in upon him and
+dispatched him.
+
+His flesh was stripped from the bones and burned (except nine pounds of
+it which were sent on board the ships).  The heart was hung up in a
+native hut, where it was found and eaten by three children, who mistook
+it for the heart of a dog.  One of these children grew to be a very old
+man, and died in Honolulu a few years ago.  Some of Cook's bones were
+recovered and consigned to the deep by the officers of the ships.
+
+Small blame should attach to the natives for the killing of Cook.
+They treated him well.  In return, he abused them.  He and his men
+inflicted bodily injury upon many of them at different times, and killed
+at least three of them before they offered any proportionate retaliation.
+
+Near the shore we found "Cook's Monument"--only a cocoanut stump, four
+feet high and about a foot in diameter at the butt.  It had lava boulders
+piled around its base to hold it up and keep it in its place, and it was
+entirely sheathed over, from top to bottom, with rough, discolored sheets
+of copper, such as ships' bottoms are coppered with.  Each sheet had a
+rude inscription scratched upon it--with a nail, apparently--and in every
+case the execution was wretched.  Most of these merely recorded the
+visits of British naval commanders to the spot, but one of them bore this
+legend:
+
+     "Near this spot fell
+      CAPTAIN JAMES COOK,
+      The Distinguished Circumnavigator,
+      Who Discovered these Islands
+      A. D.  1778."
+
+After Cook's murder, his second in command, on board the ship, opened
+fire upon the swarms of natives on the beach, and one of his cannon balls
+cut this cocoanut tree short off and left this monumental stump standing.
+It looked sad and lonely enough to us, out there in the rainy twilight.
+But there is no other monument to Captain Cook.  True, up on the mountain
+side we had passed by a large inclosure like an ample hog-pen, built of
+lava blocks, which marks the spot where Cook's flesh was stripped from
+his bones and burned; but this is not properly a monument since it was
+erected by the natives themselves, and less to do honor to the
+circumnavigator than for the sake of convenience in roasting him.
+A thing like a guide-board was elevated above this pen on a tall pole,
+and formerly there was an inscription upon it describing the memorable
+occurrence that had there taken place; but the sun and the wind have long
+ago so defaced it as to render it illegible.
+
+Toward midnight a fine breeze sprang up and the schooner soon worked
+herself into the bay and cast anchor.  The boat came ashore for us, and
+in a little while the clouds and the rain were all gone.  The moon was
+beaming tranquilly down on land and sea, and we two were stretched upon
+the deck sleeping the refreshing sleep and dreaming the happy dreams that
+are only vouchsafed to the weary and the innocent.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXXII.
+
+In the breezy morning we went ashore and visited the ruined temple of the
+last god Lono.  The high chief cook of this temple--the priest who
+presided over it and roasted the human sacrifices--was uncle to Obookia,
+and at one time that youth was an apprentice-priest under him.  Obookia
+was a young native of fine mind, who, together with three other native
+boys, was taken to New England by the captain of a whaleship during the
+reign of Kamehameha I, and they were the means of attracting the
+attention of the religious world to their country.  This resulted in the
+sending of missionaries there.  And this Obookia was the very same
+sensitive savage who sat down on the church steps and wept because his
+people did not have the Bible.  That incident has been very elaborately
+painted in many a charming Sunday School book--aye, and told so
+plaintively and so tenderly that I have cried over it in Sunday School
+myself, on general principles, although at a time when I did not know
+much and could not understand why the people of the Sandwich Islands
+needed to worry so much about it as long as they did not know there was a
+Bible at all.
+
+Obookia was converted and educated, and was to have returned to his
+native land with the first missionaries, had he lived.  The other native
+youths made the voyage, and two of them did good service, but the third,
+William Kanui, fell from grace afterward, for a time, and when the gold
+excitement broke out in California he journeyed thither and went to
+mining, although he was fifty years old.  He succeeded pretty well, but
+the failure of Page, Bacon & Co. relieved him of six thousand dollars,
+and then, to all intents and purposes, he was a bankrupt in his old age
+and he resumed service in the pulpit again.  He died in Honolulu in 1864.
+
+Quite a broad tract of land near the temple, extending from the sea to
+the mountain top, was sacred to the god Lono in olden times--so sacred
+that if a common native set his sacrilegious foot upon it it was
+judicious for him to make his will, because his time had come.  He might
+go around it by water, but he could not cross it.  It was well sprinkled
+with pagan temples and stocked with awkward, homely idols carved out of
+logs of wood.  There was a temple devoted to prayers for rain--and with
+fine sagacity it was placed at a point so well up on the mountain side
+that if you prayed there twenty-four times a day for rain you would be
+likely to get it every time.  You would seldom get to your Amen before
+you would have to hoist your umbrella.
+
+And there was a large temple near at hand which was built in a single
+night, in the midst of storm and thunder and rain, by the ghastly hands
+of dead men!  Tradition says that by the weird glare of the lightning a
+noiseless multitude of phantoms were seen at their strange labor far up
+the mountain side at dead of night--flitting hither and thither and
+bearing great lava-blocks clasped in their nerveless fingers--appearing
+and disappearing as the pallid lustre fell upon their forms and faded
+away again.  Even to this day, it is said, the natives hold this dread
+structure in awe and reverence, and will not pass by it in the night.
+
+At noon I observed a bevy of nude native young ladies bathing in the sea,
+and went and sat down on their clothes to keep them from being stolen.
+I begged them to come out, for the sea was rising and I was satisfied
+that they were running some risk.  But they were not afraid, and
+presently went on with their sport.  They were finished swimmers and
+divers, and enjoyed themselves to the last degree.
+
+They swam races, splashed and ducked and tumbled each other about, and
+filled the air with their laughter.  It is said that the first thing an
+Islander learns is how to swim; learning to walk being a matter of
+smaller consequence, comes afterward.  One hears tales of native men and
+women swimming ashore from vessels many miles at sea--more miles, indeed,
+than I dare vouch for or even mention.  And they tell of a native diver
+who went down in thirty or forty-foot waters and brought up an anvil!
+I think he swallowed the anvil afterward, if my memory serves me.
+However I will not urge this point.
+
+I have spoken, several times, of the god Lono--I may as well furnish two
+or three sentences concerning him.
+
+The idol the natives worshipped for him was a slender, unornamented staff
+twelve feet long.  Tradition says he was a favorite god on the Island of
+Hawaii--a great king who had been deified for meritorious services--just
+our own fashion of rewarding heroes, with the difference that we would
+have made him a Postmaster instead of a god, no doubt.  In an angry
+moment he slew his wife, a goddess named Kaikilani Aiii.  Remorse of
+conscience drove him mad, and tradition presents us the singular
+spectacle of a god traveling "on the shoulder;" for in his gnawing grief
+he wandered about from place to place boxing and wrestling with all whom
+he met.  Of course this pastime soon lost its novelty, inasmuch as it
+must necessarily have been the case that when so powerful a deity sent a
+frail human opponent "to grass" he never came back any more.  Therefore,
+he instituted games called makahiki, and ordered that they should be held
+in his honor, and then sailed for foreign lands on a three-cornered raft,
+stating that he would return some day--and that was the last of Lono.
+He was never seen any more; his raft got swamped, perhaps.  But the
+people always expected his return, and thus they were easily led to
+accept Captain Cook as the restored god.
+
+Some of the old natives believed Cook was Lono to the day of their death;
+but many did not, for they could not understand how he could die if he
+was a god.
+
+Only a mile or so from Kealakekua Bay is a spot of historic interest--the
+place where the last battle was fought for idolatry.  Of course we
+visited it, and came away as wise as most people do who go and gaze upon
+such mementoes of the past when in an unreflective mood.
+
+While the first missionaries were on their way around the Horn, the
+idolatrous customs which had obtained in the island, as far back as
+tradition reached were suddenly broken up.  Old Kamehameha I., was dead,
+and his son, Liholiho, the new King was a free liver, a roystering,
+dissolute fellow, and hated the restraints of the ancient tabu.  His
+assistant in the Government, Kaahumanu, the Queen dowager, was proud and
+high-spirited, and hated the tabu because it restricted the privileges of
+her sex and degraded all women very nearly to the level of brutes.
+So the case stood.  Liholiho had half a mind to put his foot down,
+Kaahumahu had a whole mind to badger him into doing it, and whiskey did
+the rest.  It was probably the rest.  It was probably the first time
+whiskey ever prominently figured as an aid to civilization.  Liholiho
+came up to Kailua as drunk as a piper, and attended a great feast; the
+determined Queen spurred his drunken courage up to a reckless pitch, and
+then, while all the multitude stared in blank dismay, he moved
+deliberately forward and sat down with the women!
+
+They saw him eat from the same vessel with them, and were appalled!
+Terrible moments drifted slowly by, and still the King ate, still he
+lived, still the lightnings of the insulted gods were withheld!
+Then conviction came like a revelation--the superstitions of a hundred
+generations passed from before the people like a cloud, and a shout went
+up, "the tabu is broken!  the tabu is broken!"
+
+Thus did King Liholiho and his dreadful whiskey preach the first sermon
+and prepare the way for the new gospel that was speeding southward over
+the waves of the Atlantic.
+
+The tabu broken and destruction failing to follow the awful sacrilege,
+the people, with that childlike precipitancy which has always
+characterized them, jumped to the conclusion that their gods were a weak
+and wretched swindle, just as they formerly jumped to the conclusion that
+Captain Cook was no god, merely because he groaned, and promptly killed
+him without stopping to inquire whether a god might not groan as well as
+a man if it suited his convenience to do it; and satisfied that the idols
+were powerless to protect themselves they went to work at once and pulled
+them down--hacked them to pieces--applied the torch--annihilated them!
+
+The pagan priests were furious.  And well they might be; they had held
+the fattest offices in the land, and now they were beggared; they had
+been great--they had stood above the chiefs--and now they were vagabonds.
+They raised a revolt; they scared a number of people into joining their
+standard, and Bekuokalani, an ambitious offshoot of royalty, was easily
+persuaded to become their leader.
+
+In the first skirmish the idolaters triumphed over the royal army sent
+against them, and full of confidence they resolved to march upon Kailua.
+The King sent an envoy to try and conciliate them, and came very near
+being an envoy short by the operation; the savages not only refused to
+listen to him, but wanted to kill him.  So the King sent his men forth
+under Major General Kalaimoku and the two host met a Kuamoo.  The battle
+was long and fierce--men and women fighting side by side, as was the
+custom--and when the day was done the rebels were flying in every
+direction in hopeless panic, and idolatry and the tabu were dead in the
+land!
+
+The royalists marched gayly home to Kailua glorifying the new
+dispensation.  "There is no power in the gods," said they; "they are a
+vanity and a lie.  The army with idols was weak; the army without idols
+was strong and victorious!"
+
+The nation was without a religion.
+
+The missionary ship arrived in safety shortly afterward, timed by
+providential exactness to meet the emergency, and the Gospel was planted
+as in a virgin soil.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXXIII.
+
+At noon, we hired a Kanaka to take us down to the ancient ruins at
+Honaunan in his canoe--price two dollars--reasonable enough, for a sea
+voyage of eight miles, counting both ways.
+
+The native canoe is an irresponsible looking contrivance.  I cannot think
+of anything to liken it to but a boy's sled runner hollowed out, and that
+does not quite convey the correct idea.  It is about fifteen feet long,
+high and pointed at both ends, is a foot and a half or two feet deep, and
+so narrow that if you wedged a fat man into it you might not get him out
+again.  It sits on top of the water like a duck, but it has an outrigger
+and does not upset easily, if you keep still.  This outrigger is formed
+of two long bent sticks like plow handles, which project from one side,
+and to their outer ends is bound a curved beam composed of an extremely
+light wood, which skims along the surface of the water and thus saves you
+from an upset on that side, while the outrigger's weight is not so easily
+lifted as to make an upset on the other side a thing to be greatly
+feared.  Still, until one gets used to sitting perched upon this
+knifeblade, he is apt to reason within himself that it would be more
+comfortable if there were just an outrigger or so on the other side also.
+I had the bow seat, and Billings sat amidships and faced the Kanaka, who
+occupied the stern of the craft and did the paddling.  With the first
+stroke the trim shell of a thing shot out from the shore like an arrow.
+There was not much to see.  While we were on the shallow water of the
+reef, it was pastime to look down into the limpid depths at the large
+bunches of branching coral--the unique shrubbery of the sea.  We lost
+that, though, when we got out into the dead blue water of the deep.
+But we had the picture of the surf, then, dashing angrily against the
+crag-bound shore and sending a foaming spray high into the air.
+
+There was interest in this beetling border, too, for it was honey-combed
+with quaint caves and arches and tunnels, and had a rude semblance of the
+dilapidated architecture of ruined keeps and castles rising out of the
+restless sea.  When this novelty ceased to be a novelty, we turned our
+eyes shoreward and gazed at the long mountain with its rich green forests
+stretching up into the curtaining clouds, and at the specks of houses in
+the rearward distance and the diminished schooner riding sleepily at
+anchor.  And when these grew tiresome we dashed boldly into the midst of
+a school of huge, beastly porpoises engaged at their eternal game of
+arching over a wave and disappearing, and then doing it over again and
+keeping it up--always circling over, in that way, like so many
+well-submerged wheels.  But the porpoises wheeled themselves away, and
+then we were thrown upon our own resources.  It did not take many minutes
+to discover that the sun was blazing like a bonfire, and that the weather
+was of a melting temperature.  It had a drowsing effect, too. In one
+place we came upon a large company of naked natives, of both sexes and
+all ages, amusing themselves with the national pastime of surf-bathing.
+Each heathen would paddle three or four hundred yards out to sea, (taking
+a short board with him), then face the shore and wait for a particularly
+prodigious billow to come along; at the right moment he would fling his
+board upon its foamy crest and himself upon the board, and here he would
+come whizzing by like a bombshell!  It did not seem that a lightning
+express train could shoot along at a more hair-lifting speed.  I tried
+surf-bathing once, subsequently, but made a failure of it.  I got the
+board placed right, and at the right moment, too; but missed the
+connection myself.--The board struck the shore in three quarters of a
+second, without any cargo, and I struck the bottom about the same time,
+with a couple of barrels of water in me.  None but natives ever master
+the art of surf-bathing thoroughly.
+
+At the end of an hour, we had made the four miles, and landed on a level
+point of land, upon which was a wide extent of old ruins, with many a
+tall cocoanut tree growing among them.  Here was the ancient City of
+Refuge--a vast inclosure, whose stone walls were twenty feet thick at the
+base, and fifteen feet high; an oblong square, a thousand and forty feet
+one way and a fraction under seven hundred the other.  Within this
+inclosure, in early times, has been three rude temples; each two hundred
+and ten feet long by one hundred wide, and thirteen high.
+
+In those days, if a man killed another anywhere on the island the
+relatives were privileged to take the murderer's life; and then a chase
+for life and liberty began--the outlawed criminal flying through pathless
+forests and over mountain and plain, with his hopes fixed upon the
+protecting walls of the City of Refuge, and the avenger of blood
+following hotly after him!
+
+Sometimes the race was kept up to the very gates of the temple, and the
+panting pair sped through long files of excited natives, who watched the
+contest with flashing eye and dilated nostril, encouraging the hunted
+refugee with sharp, inspiriting ejaculations, and sending up a ringing
+shout of exultation when the saving gates closed upon him and the cheated
+pursuer sank exhausted at the threshold.  But sometimes the flying
+criminal fell under the hand of the avenger at the very door, when one
+more brave stride, one more brief second of time would have brought his
+feet upon the sacred ground and barred him against all harm.  Where did
+these isolated pagans get this idea of a City of Refuge--this ancient
+Oriental custom?
+
+This old sanctuary was sacred to all--even to rebels in arms and invading
+armies.  Once within its walls, and confession made to the priest and
+absolution obtained, the wretch with a price upon his head could go forth
+without fear and without danger--he was tabu, and to harm him was death.
+The routed rebels in the lost battle for idolatry fled to this place to
+claim sanctuary, and many were thus saved.
+
+Close to the corner of the great inclosure is a round structure of stone,
+some six or eight feet high, with a level top about ten or twelve in
+diameter.  This was the place of execution.  A high palisade of cocoanut
+piles shut out the cruel scenes from the vulgar multitude.  Here
+criminals were killed, the flesh stripped from the bones and burned, and
+the bones secreted in holes in the body of the structure.  If the man had
+been guilty of a high crime, the entire corpse was burned.
+
+The walls of the temple are a study.  The same food for speculation that
+is offered the visitor to the Pyramids of Egypt he will find here--the
+mystery of how they were constructed by a people unacquainted with
+science and mechanics.  The natives have no invention of their own for
+hoisting heavy weights, they had no beasts of burden, and they have never
+even shown any knowledge of the properties of the lever.  Yet some of the
+lava blocks quarried out, brought over rough, broken ground, and built
+into this wall, six or seven feet from the ground, are of prodigious size
+and would weigh tons.  How did they transport and how raise them?
+
+Both the inner and outer surfaces of the walls present a smooth front and
+are very creditable specimens of masonry.  The blocks are of all manner
+of shapes and sizes, but yet are fitted together with the neatest
+exactness.  The gradual narrowing of the wall from the base upward is
+accurately preserved.
+
+No cement was used, but the edifice is firm and compact and is capable of
+resisting storm and decay for centuries.  Who built this temple, and how
+was it built, and when, are mysteries that may never be unraveled.
+Outside of these ancient walls lies a sort of coffin-shaped stone eleven
+feet four inches long and three feet square at the small end (it would
+weigh a few thousand pounds), which the high chief who held sway over
+this district many centuries ago brought thither on his shoulder one day
+to use as a lounge!  This circumstance is established by the most
+reliable traditions.  He used to lie down on it, in his indolent way, and
+keep an eye on his subjects at work for him and see that there was no
+"soldiering" done.  And no doubt there was not any done to speak of,
+because he was a man of that sort of build that incites to attention to
+business on the part of an employee.
+
+He was fourteen or fifteen feet high.  When he stretched himself at full
+length on his lounge, his legs hung down over the end, and when he snored
+he woke the dead.  These facts are all attested by irrefragable
+tradition.
+
+On the other side of the temple is a monstrous seven-ton rock, eleven
+feet long, seven feet wide and three feet thick.  It is raised a foot or
+a foot and a half above the ground, and rests upon half a dozen little
+stony pedestals.  The same old fourteen-footer brought it down from the
+mountain, merely for fun (he had his own notions about fun), and propped
+it up as we find it now and as others may find it a century hence, for it
+would take a score of horses to budge it from its position.  They say
+that fifty or sixty years ago the proud Queen Kaahumanu used to fly to
+this rock for safety, whenever she had been making trouble with her
+fierce husband, and hide under it until his wrath was appeased.  But
+these Kanakas will lie, and this statement is one of their ablest
+efforts--for Kaahumanu was six feet high--she was bulky--she was built
+like an ox--and she could no more have squeezed herself under that rock
+than she could have passed between the cylinders of a sugar mill.  What
+could she gain by it, even if she succeeded?  To be chased and abused by
+a savage husband could not be otherwise than humiliating to her high
+spirit, yet it could never make her feel so flat as an hour's repose
+under that rock would.
+
+We walked a mile over a raised macadamized road of uniform width; a road
+paved with flat stones and exhibiting in its every detail a considerable
+degree of engineering skill.  Some say that that wise old pagan,
+Kamehameha I planned and built it, but others say it was built so long
+before his time that the knowledge of who constructed it has passed out
+of the traditions.  In either case, however, as the handiwork of an
+untaught and degraded race it is a thing of pleasing interest.  The
+stones are worn and smooth, and pushed apart in places, so that the road
+has the exact appearance of those ancient paved highways leading out of
+Rome which one sees in pictures.
+
+The object of our tramp was to visit a great natural curiosity at the
+base of the foothills--a congealed cascade of lava.  Some old forgotten
+volcanic eruption sent its broad river of fire down the mountain side
+here, and it poured down in a great torrent from an overhanging bluff
+some fifty feet high to the ground below.  The flaming torrent cooled in
+the winds from the sea, and remains there to-day, all seamed, and frothed
+and rippled a petrified Niagara.  It is very picturesque, and withal so
+natural that one might almost imagine it still flowed.  A smaller stream
+trickled over the cliff and built up an isolated pyramid about thirty
+feet high, which has the semblance of a mass of large gnarled and knotted
+vines and roots and stems intricately twisted and woven together.
+
+We passed in behind the cascade and the pyramid, and found the bluff
+pierced by several cavernous tunnels, whose crooked courses we followed a
+long distance.
+
+Two of these winding tunnels stand as proof of Nature's mining abilities.
+Their floors are level, they are seven feet wide, and their roofs are
+gently arched.  Their height is not uniform, however.  We passed through
+one a hundred feet long, which leads through a spur of the hill and opens
+out well up in the sheer wall of a precipice whose foot rests in the
+waves of the sea.  It is a commodious tunnel, except that there are
+occasional places in it where one must stoop to pass under.  The roof is
+lava, of course, and is thickly studded with little lava-pointed icicles
+an inch long, which hardened as they dripped.  They project as closely
+together as the iron teeth of a corn-sheller, and if one will stand up
+straight and walk any distance there, he can get his hair combed free of
+charge.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXXIV.
+
+We got back to the schooner in good time, and then sailed down to Kau,
+where we disembarked and took final leave of the vessel.  Next day we
+bought horses and bent our way over the summer-clad mountain-terraces,
+toward the great volcano of Kilauea (Ke-low-way-ah).  We made nearly a
+two days' journey of it, but that was on account of laziness.  Toward
+sunset on the second day, we reached an elevation of some four thousand
+feet above sea level, and as we picked our careful way through billowy
+wastes of lava long generations ago stricken dead and cold in the climax
+of its tossing fury, we began to come upon signs of the near presence of
+the volcano--signs in the nature of ragged fissures that discharged jets
+of sulphurous vapor into the air, hot from the molten ocean down in the
+bowels of the mountain.
+
+Shortly the crater came into view.  I have seen Vesuvius since, but it
+was a mere toy, a child's volcano, a soup-kettle, compared to this.
+Mount Vesuvius is a shapely cone thirty-six hundred feet high; its crater
+an inverted cone only three hundred feet deep, and not more than a
+thousand feet in diameter, if as much as that; its fires meagre, modest,
+and docile.--But here was a vast, perpendicular, walled cellar, nine
+hundred feet deep in some places, thirteen hundred in others,
+level-floored, and ten miles in circumference!  Here was a yawning pit
+upon whose floor the armies of Russia could camp, and have room to spare.
+
+Perched upon the edge of the crater, at the opposite end from where we
+stood, was a small look-out house--say three miles away.  It assisted us,
+by comparison, to comprehend and appreciate the great depth of the basin
+--it looked like a tiny martin-box clinging at the eaves of a cathedral.
+After some little time spent in resting and looking and ciphering, we
+hurried on to the hotel.
+
+By the path it is half a mile from the Volcano House to the
+lookout-house.  After a hearty supper we waited until it was thoroughly
+dark and then started to the crater.  The first glance in that direction
+revealed a scene of wild beauty.  There was a heavy fog over the crater
+and it was splendidly illuminated by the glare from the fires below.  The
+illumination was two miles wide and a mile high, perhaps; and if you
+ever, on a dark night and at a distance beheld the light from thirty or
+forty blocks of distant buildings all on fire at once, reflected strongly
+against over-hanging clouds, you can form a fair idea of what this looked
+like.
+
+A colossal column of cloud towered to a great height in the air
+immediately above the crater, and the outer swell of every one of its
+vast folds was dyed with a rich crimson luster, which was subdued to a
+pale rose tint in the depressions between.  It glowed like a muffled
+torch and stretched upward to a dizzy height toward the zenith.  I
+thought it just possible that its like had not been seen since the
+children of Israel wandered on their long march through the desert so
+many centuries ago over a path illuminated by the mysterious "pillar of
+fire."  And I was sure that I now had a vivid conception of what the
+majestic "pillar of fire" was like, which almost amounted to a
+revelation.
+
+Arrived at the little thatched lookout house, we rested our elbows on the
+railing in front and looked abroad over the wide crater and down over the
+sheer precipice at the seething fires beneath us.  The view was a
+startling improvement on my daylight experience.  I turned to see the
+effect on the balance of the company and found the reddest-faced set of
+men I almost ever saw.  In the strong light every countenance glowed like
+red-hot iron, every shoulder was suffused with crimson and shaded
+rearward into dingy, shapeless obscurity!  The place below looked like
+the infernal regions and these men like half-cooled devils just come up
+on a furlough.
+
+I turned my eyes upon the volcano again.  The "cellar" was tolerably well
+lighted up.  For a mile and a half in front of us and half a mile on
+either side, the floor of the abyss was magnificently illuminated; beyond
+these limits the mists hung down their gauzy curtains and cast a
+deceptive gloom over all that made the twinkling fires in the remote
+corners of the crater seem countless leagues removed--made them seem like
+the camp-fires of a great army far away.  Here was room for the
+imagination to work!  You could imagine those lights the width of a
+continent away--and that hidden under the intervening darkness were
+hills, and winding rivers, and weary wastes of plain and desert--and even
+then the tremendous vista stretched on, and on, and on!--to the fires and
+far beyond!  You could not compass it--it was the idea of eternity made
+tangible--and the longest end of it made visible to the naked eye!
+
+The greater part of the vast floor of the desert under us was as black as
+ink, and apparently smooth and level; but over a mile square of it was
+ringed and streaked and striped with a thousand branching streams of
+liquid and gorgeously brilliant fire!  It looked like a colossal railroad
+map of the State of Massachusetts done in chain lightning on a midnight
+sky.  Imagine it--imagine a coal-black sky shivered into a tangled
+net-work of angry fire!
+
+Here and there were gleaming holes a hundred feet in diameter, broken in
+the dark crust, and in them the melted lava--the color a dazzling white
+just tinged with yellow--was boiling and surging furiously; and from
+these holes branched numberless bright torrents in many directions, like
+the spokes of a wheel, and kept a tolerably straight course for a while
+and then swept round in huge rainbow curves, or made a long succession of
+sharp worm-fence angles, which looked precisely like the fiercest jagged
+lightning.  These streams met other streams, and they mingled with and
+crossed and recrossed each other in every conceivable direction, like
+skate tracks on a popular skating ground.  Sometimes streams twenty or
+thirty feet wide flowed from the holes to some distance without dividing
+--and through the opera-glasses we could see that they ran down small,
+steep hills and were genuine cataracts of fire, white at their source,
+but soon cooling and turning to the richest red, grained with alternate
+lines of black and gold.  Every now and then masses of the dark crust
+broke away and floated slowly down these streams like rafts down a river.
+Occasionally the molten lava flowing under the superincumbent crust broke
+through--split a dazzling streak, from five hundred to a thousand feet
+long, like a sudden flash of lightning, and then acre after acre of the
+cold lava parted into fragments, turned up edgewise like cakes of ice
+when a great river breaks up, plunged downward and were swallowed in the
+crimson cauldron.  Then the wide expanse of the "thaw" maintained a ruddy
+glow for a while, but shortly cooled and became black and level again.
+During a "thaw," every dismembered cake was marked by a glittering white
+border which was superbly shaded inward by aurora borealis rays, which
+were a flaming yellow where they joined the white border, and from thence
+toward their points tapered into glowing crimson, then into a rich, pale
+carmine, and finally into a faint blush that held its own a moment and
+then dimmed and turned black.  Some of the streams preferred to mingle
+together in a tangle of fantastic circles, and then they looked something
+like the confusion of ropes one sees on a ship's deck when she has just
+taken in sail and dropped anchor--provided one can imagine those ropes on
+fire.
+
+Through the glasses, the little fountains scattered about looked very
+beautiful.  They boiled, and coughed, and spluttered, and discharged
+sprays of stringy red fire--of about the consistency of mush, for
+instance--from ten to fifteen feet into the air, along with a shower of
+brilliant white sparks--a quaint and unnatural mingling of gouts of blood
+and snow-flakes!
+
+We had circles and serpents and streaks of lightning all twined and
+wreathed and tied together, without a break throughout an area more than
+a mile square (that amount of ground was covered, though it was not
+strictly "square"), and it was with a feeling of placid exultation that
+we reflected that many years had elapsed since any visitor had seen such
+a splendid display--since any visitor had seen anything more than the now
+snubbed and insignificant "North" and "South" lakes in action.  We had
+been reading old files of Hawaiian newspapers and the "Record Book" at
+the Volcano House, and were posted.
+
+I could see the North Lake lying out on the black floor away off in the
+outer edge of our panorama, and knitted to it by a web-work of lava
+streams.  In its individual capacity it looked very little more
+respectable than a schoolhouse on fire.  True, it was about nine hundred
+feet long and two or three hundred wide, but then, under the present
+circumstances, it necessarily appeared rather insignificant, and besides
+it was so distant from us.
+
+I forgot to say that the noise made by the bubbling lava is not great,
+heard as we heard it from our lofty perch.  It makes three distinct
+sounds--a rushing, a hissing, and a coughing or puffing sound; and if you
+stand on the brink and close your eyes it is no trick at all to imagine
+that you are sweeping down a river on a large low-pressure steamer, and
+that you hear the hissing of the steam about her boilers, the puffing
+from her escape-pipes and the churning rush of the water abaft her
+wheels.  The smell of sulphur is strong, but not unpleasant to a sinner.
+
+We left the lookout house at ten o'clock in a half cooked condition,
+because of the heat from Pele's furnaces, and wrapping up in blankets,
+for the night was cold, we returned to our Hotel.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXXV.
+
+The next night was appointed for a visit to the bottom of the crater, for
+we desired to traverse its floor and see the "North Lake" (of fire) which
+lay two miles away, toward the further wall.  After dark half a dozen of
+us set out, with lanterns and native guides, and climbed down a crazy,
+thousand-foot pathway in a crevice fractured in the crater wall, and
+reached the bottom in safety.
+
+The irruption of the previous evening had spent its force and the floor
+looked black and cold; but when we ran out upon it we found it hot yet,
+to the feet, and it was likewise riven with crevices which revealed the
+underlying fires gleaming vindictively.  A neighboring cauldron was
+threatening to overflow, and this added to the dubiousness of the
+situation.  So the native guides refused to continue the venture, and
+then every body deserted except a stranger named Marlette.  He said he
+had been in the crater a dozen times in daylight and believed he could
+find his way through it at night.  He thought that a run of three hundred
+yards would carry us over the hottest part of the floor and leave us our
+shoe-soles.  His pluck gave me back-bone.  We took one lantern and
+instructed the guides to hang the other to the roof of the look-out house
+to serve as a beacon for us in case we got lost, and then the party
+started back up the precipice and Marlette and I made our run.
+We skipped over the hot floor and over the red crevices with brisk
+dispatch and reached the cold lava safe but with pretty warm feet.  Then
+we took things leisurely and comfortably, jumping tolerably wide and
+probably bottomless chasms, and threading our way through picturesque
+lava upheavals with considerable confidence.  When we got fairly away
+from the cauldrons of boiling fire, we seemed to be in a gloomy desert,
+and a suffocatingly dark one, surrounded by dim walls that seemed to
+tower to the sky.  The only cheerful objects were the glinting stars high
+overhead.
+
+By and by Marlette shouted "Stop!" I never stopped quicker in my life.
+I asked what the matter was.  He said we were out of the path.  He said
+we must not try to go on till we found it again, for we were surrounded
+with beds of rotten lava through which we could easily break and plunge
+down a thousand feet.  I thought eight hundred would answer for me, and
+was about to say so when Marlette partly proved his statement by
+accidentally crushing through and disappearing to his arm-pits.
+
+He got out and we hunted for the path with the lantern.  He said there
+was only one path and that it was but vaguely defined.  We could not find
+it.  The lava surface was all alike in the lantern light.  But he was an
+ingenious man.  He said it was not the lantern that had informed him that
+we were out of the path, but his feet.  He had noticed a crisp grinding
+of fine lava-needles under his feet, and some instinct reminded him that
+in the path these were all worn away.  So he put the lantern behind him,
+and began to search with his boots instead of his eyes.  It was good
+sagacity.  The first time his foot touched a surface that did not grind
+under it he announced that the trail was found again; and after that we
+kept up a sharp listening for the rasping sound and it always warned us
+in time.
+
+It was a long tramp, but an exciting one.  We reached the North Lake
+between ten and eleven o'clock, and sat down on a huge overhanging
+lava-shelf, tired but satisfied.  The spectacle presented was worth
+coming double the distance to see.  Under us, and stretching away before
+us, was a heaving sea of molten fire of seemingly limitless extent.  The
+glare from it was so blinding that it was some time before we could bear
+to look upon it steadily.
+
+It was like gazing at the sun at noon-day, except that the glare was not
+quite so white.  At unequal distances all around the shores of the lake
+were nearly white-hot chimneys or hollow drums of lava, four or five feet
+high, and up through them were bursting gorgeous sprays of lava-gouts and
+gem spangles, some white, some red and some golden--a ceaseless
+bombardment, and one that fascinated the eye with its unapproachable
+splendor.  The mere distant jets, sparkling up through an intervening
+gossamer veil of vapor, seemed miles away; and the further the curving
+ranks of fiery fountains receded, the more fairy-like and beautiful they
+appeared.
+
+Now and then the surging bosom of the lake under our noses would calm
+down ominously and seem to be gathering strength for an enterprise; and
+then all of a sudden a red dome of lava of the bulk of an ordinary
+dwelling would heave itself aloft like an escaping balloon, then burst
+asunder, and out of its heart would flit a pale-green film of vapor, and
+float upward and vanish in the darkness--a released soul soaring homeward
+from captivity with the damned, no doubt.  The crashing plunge of the
+ruined dome into the lake again would send a world of seething billows
+lashing against the shores and shaking the foundations of our perch.  By
+and by, a loosened mass of the hanging shelf we sat on tumbled into the
+lake, jarring the surroundings like an earthquake and delivering a
+suggestion that may have been intended for a hint, and may not.  We did
+not wait to see.
+
+We got lost again on our way back, and were more than an hour hunting for
+the path.  We were where we could see the beacon lantern at the look-out
+house at the time, but thought it was a star and paid no attention to it.
+We reached the hotel at two o'clock in the morning pretty well fagged
+out.
+
+Kilauea never overflows its vast crater, but bursts a passage for its
+lava through the mountain side when relief is necessary, and then the
+destruction is fearful.  About 1840 it rent its overburdened stomach and
+sent a broad river of fire careering down to the sea, which swept away
+forests, huts, plantations and every thing else that lay in its path.
+The stream was five miles broad, in places, and two hundred feet deep,
+and the distance it traveled was forty miles.  It tore up and bore away
+acre-patches of land on its bosom like rafts--rocks, trees and all
+intact.  At night the red glare was visible a hundred miles at sea; and
+at a distance of forty miles fine print could be read at midnight.  The
+atmosphere was poisoned with sulphurous vapors and choked with falling
+ashes, pumice stones and cinders; countless columns of smoke rose up and
+blended together in a tumbled canopy that hid the heavens and glowed with
+a ruddy flush reflected from the fires below; here and there jets of lava
+sprung hundreds of feet into the air and burst into rocket-sprays that
+returned to earth in a crimson rain; and all the while the laboring
+mountain shook with Nature's great palsy and voiced its distress in
+moanings and the muffled booming of subterranean thunders.
+
+Fishes were killed for twenty miles along the shore, where the lava
+entered the sea.  The earthquakes caused some loss of human life, and a
+prodigious tidal wave swept inland, carrying every thing before it and
+drowning a number of natives.  The devastation consummated along the
+route traversed by the river of lava was complete and incalculable.  Only
+a Pompeii and a Herculaneum were needed at the foot of Kilauea to make
+the story of the irruption immortal.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXXVI.
+
+We rode horseback all around the island of Hawaii (the crooked road
+making the distance two hundred miles), and enjoyed the journey very
+much.  We were more than a week making the trip, because our Kanaka
+horses would not go by a house or a hut without stopping--whip and spur
+could not alter their minds about it, and so we finally found that it
+economized time to let them have their way.  Upon inquiry the mystery was
+explained: the natives are such thorough-going gossips that they never
+pass a house without stopping to swap news, and consequently their horses
+learn to regard that sort of thing as an essential part of the whole duty
+of man, and his salvation not to be compassed without it.  However, at a
+former crisis of my life I had once taken an aristocratic young lady out
+driving, behind a horse that had just retired from a long and honorable
+career as the moving impulse of a milk wagon, and so this present
+experience awoke a reminiscent sadness in me in place of the exasperation
+more natural to the occasion.  I remembered how helpless I was that day,
+and how humiliated; how ashamed I was of having intimated to the girl
+that I had always owned the horse and was accustomed to grandeur; how
+hard I tried to appear easy, and even vivacious, under suffering that was
+consuming my vitals; how placidly and maliciously the girl smiled, and
+kept on smiling, while my hot blushes baked themselves into a permanent
+blood-pudding in my face; how the horse ambled from one side of the
+street to the other and waited complacently before every third house two
+minutes and a quarter while I belabored his back and reviled him in my
+heart; how I tried to keep him from turning corners and failed; how I
+moved heaven and earth to get him out of town, and did not succeed; how
+he traversed the entire settlement and delivered imaginary milk at a
+hundred and sixty-two different domiciles, and how he finally brought up
+at a dairy depot and refused to budge further, thus rounding and
+completing the revealment of what the plebeian service of his life had
+been; how, in eloquent silence, I walked the girl home, and how, when I
+took leave of her, her parting remark scorched my soul and appeared to
+blister me all over: she said that my horse was a fine, capable animal,
+and I must have taken great comfort in him in my time--but that if I
+would take along some milk-tickets next time, and appear to deliver them
+at the various halting places, it might expedite his movements a little.
+There was a coolness between us after that.
+
+In one place in the island of Hawaii, we saw a laced and ruffled cataract
+of limpid water leaping from a sheer precipice fifteen hundred feet high;
+but that sort of scenery finds its stanchest ally in the arithmetic
+rather than in spectacular effect.  If one desires to be so stirred by a
+poem of Nature wrought in the happily commingled graces of picturesque
+rocks, glimpsed distances, foliage, color, shifting lights and shadows,
+and failing water, that the tears almost come into his eyes so potent is
+the charm exerted, he need not go away from America to enjoy such an
+experience.  The Rainbow Fall, in Watkins Glen (N.Y.), on the Erie
+railway, is an example.  It would recede into pitiable insignificance if
+the callous tourist drew on arithmetic on it; but left to compete for the
+honors simply on scenic grace and beauty--the grand, the august and the
+sublime being barred the contest--it could challenge the old world and
+the new to produce its peer.
+
+In one locality, on our journey, we saw some horses that had been born
+and reared on top of the mountains, above the range of running water, and
+consequently they had never drank that fluid in their lives, but had been
+always accustomed to quenching their thirst by eating dew-laden or
+shower-wetted leaves.  And now it was destructively funny to see them
+sniff suspiciously at a pail of water, and then put in their noses and
+try to take a bite out of the fluid, as if it were a solid.  Finding it
+liquid, they would snatch away their heads and fall to trembling,
+snorting and showing other evidences of fright.  When they became
+convinced at last that the water was friendly and harmless, they thrust
+in their noses up to their eyes, brought out a mouthful of water, and
+proceeded to chew it complacently.  We saw a man coax, kick and spur one
+of them five or ten minutes before he could make it cross a running
+stream.  It spread its nostrils, distended its eyes and trembled all
+over, just as horses customarily do in the presence of a serpent--and for
+aught I know it thought the crawling stream was a serpent.
+
+In due course of time our journey came to an end at Kawaehae (usually
+pronounced To-a-hi--and before we find fault with this elaborate
+orthographical method of arriving at such an unostentatious result, let
+us lop off the ugh from our word "though").  I made this horseback trip
+on a mule.  I paid ten dollars for him at Kau (Kah-oo), added four to get
+him shod, rode him two hundred miles, and then sold him for fifteen
+dollars.  I mark the circumstance with a white stone (in the absence of
+chalk--for I never saw a white stone that a body could mark anything
+with, though out of respect for the ancients I have tried it often
+enough); for up to that day and date it was the first strictly commercial
+transaction I had ever entered into, and come out winner.  We returned to
+Honolulu, and from thence sailed to the island of Maui, and spent several
+weeks there very pleasantly.  I still remember, with a sense of indolent
+luxury, a picnicing excursion up a romantic gorge there, called the Iao
+Valley.  The trail lay along the edge of a brawling stream in the bottom
+of the gorge--a shady route, for it was well roofed with the verdant
+domes of forest trees.  Through openings in the foliage we glimpsed
+picturesque scenery that revealed ceaseless changes and new charms with
+every step of our progress.  Perpendicular walls from one to three
+thousand feet high guarded the way, and were sumptuously plumed with
+varied foliage, in places, and in places swathed in waving ferns.
+Passing shreds of cloud trailed their shadows across these shining
+fronts, mottling them with blots; billowy masses of white vapor hid the
+turreted summits, and far above the vapor swelled a background of
+gleaming green crags and cones that came and went, through the veiling
+mists, like islands drifting in a fog; sometimes the cloudy curtain
+descended till half the canon wall was hidden, then shredded gradually
+away till only airy glimpses of the ferny front appeared through it--then
+swept aloft and left it glorified in the sun again.  Now and then, as our
+position changed, rocky bastions swung out from the wall, a mimic ruin of
+castellated ramparts and crumbling towers clothed with mosses and hung
+with garlands of swaying vines, and as we moved on they swung back again
+and hid themselves once more in the foliage.  Presently a verdure-clad
+needle of stone, a thousand feet high, stepped out from behind a corner,
+and mounted guard over the mysteries of the valley.  It seemed to me that
+if Captain Cook needed a monument, here was one ready made--therefore,
+why not put up his sign here, and sell out the venerable cocoanut stump?
+
+But the chief pride of Maui is her dead volcano of Haleakala--which
+means, translated, "the house of the sun."  We climbed a thousand feet up
+the side of this isolated colossus one afternoon; then camped, and next
+day climbed the remaining nine thousand feet, and anchored on the summit,
+where we built a fire and froze and roasted by turns, all night.  With
+the first pallor of dawn we got up and saw things that were new to us.
+Mounted on a commanding pinnacle, we watched Nature work her silent
+wonders.  The sea was spread abroad on every hand, its tumbled surface
+seeming only wrinkled and dimpled in the distance.  A broad valley below
+appeared like an ample checker-board, its velvety green sugar plantations
+alternating with dun squares of barrenness and groves of trees diminished
+to mossy tufts.  Beyond the valley were mountains picturesquely grouped
+together; but bear in mind, we fancied that we were looking up at these
+things--not down.  We seemed to sit in the bottom of a symmetrical bowl
+ten thousand feet deep, with the valley and the skirting sea lifted away
+into the sky above us!  It was curious; and not only curious, but
+aggravating; for it was having our trouble all for nothing, to climb ten
+thousand feet toward heaven and then have to look up at our scenery.
+However, we had to be content with it and make the best of it; for, all
+we could do we could not coax our landscape down out of the clouds.
+Formerly, when I had read an article in which Poe treated of this
+singular fraud perpetrated upon the eye by isolated great altitudes,
+I had looked upon the matter as an invention of his own fancy.
+
+I have spoken of the outside view--but we had an inside one, too.  That
+was the yawning dead crater, into which we now and then tumbled rocks,
+half as large as a barrel, from our perch, and saw them go careering down
+the almost perpendicular sides, bounding three hundred feet at a jump;
+kicking up cast-clouds wherever they struck; diminishing to our view as
+they sped farther into distance; growing invisible, finally, and only
+betraying their course by faint little puffs of dust; and coming to a
+halt at last in the bottom of the abyss, two thousand five hundred feet
+down from where they started!  It was magnificent sport.  We wore
+ourselves out at it.
+
+The crater of Vesuvius, as I have before remarked, is a modest pit about
+a thousand feet deep and three thousand in circumference; that of Kilauea
+is somewhat deeper, and ten miles in circumference.  But what are either
+of them compared to the vacant stomach of Haleakala?  I will not offer
+any figures of my own, but give official ones--those of Commander Wilkes,
+U.S.N., who surveyed it and testifies that it is twenty-seven miles in
+circumference!  If it had a level bottom it would make a fine site for a
+city like London.  It must have afforded a spectacle worth contemplating
+in the old days when its furnaces gave full rein to their anger.
+
+Presently vagrant white clouds came drifting along, high over the sea and
+the valley; then they came in couples and groups; then in imposing
+squadrons; gradually joining their forces, they banked themselves solidly
+together, a thousand feet under us, and totally shut out land and ocean
+--not a vestige of anything was left in view but just a little of the rim
+of the crater, circling away from the pinnacle whereon we sat (for a
+ghostly procession of wanderers from the filmy hosts without had drifted
+through a chasm in the crater wall and filed round and round, and
+gathered and sunk and blended together till the abyss was stored to the
+brim with a fleecy fog).  Thus banked, motion ceased, and silence
+reigned.  Clear to the horizon, league on league, the snowy floor
+stretched without a break--not level, but in rounded folds, with shallow
+creases between, and with here and there stately piles of vapory
+architecture lifting themselves aloft out of the common plain--some near
+at hand, some in the middle distances, and others relieving the monotony
+of the remote solitudes.  There was little conversation, for the
+impressive scene overawed speech.  I felt like the Last Man, neglected of
+the judgment, and left pinnacled in mid-heaven, a forgotten relic of a
+vanished world.
+
+While the hush yet brooded, the messengers of the coming resurrection
+appeared in the East.  A growing warmth suffused the horizon, and soon
+the sun emerged and looked out over the cloud-waste, flinging bars of
+ruddy light across it, staining its folds and billow-caps with blushes,
+purpling the shaded troughs between, and glorifying the massy
+vapor-palaces and cathedrals with a wasteful splendor of all blendings
+and combinations of rich coloring.
+
+It was the sublimest spectacle I ever witnessed, and I think the memory
+of it will remain with me always.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXXVII.
+
+I stumbled upon one curious character in the Island of Mani.  He became a
+sore annoyance to me in the course of time.  My first glimpse of him was
+in a sort of public room in the town of Lahaina.  He occupied a chair at
+the opposite side of the apartment, and sat eyeing our party with
+interest for some minutes, and listening as critically to what we were
+saying as if he fancied we were talking to him and expecting him to
+reply.  I thought it very sociable in a stranger.  Presently, in the
+course of conversation, I made a statement bearing upon the subject under
+discussion--and I made it with due modesty, for there was nothing
+extraordinary about it, and it was only put forth in illustration of a
+point at issue.  I had barely finished when this person spoke out with
+rapid utterance and feverish anxiety:
+
+"Oh, that was certainly remarkable, after a fashion, but you ought to
+have seen my chimney--you ought to have seen my chimney, sir!  Smoke!
+I wish I may hang if--Mr. Jones, you remember that chimney--you must
+remember that chimney!  No, no--I recollect, now, you warn't living on
+this side of the island then.  But I am telling you nothing but the
+truth, and I wish I may never draw another breath if that chimney didn't
+smoke so that the smoke actually got caked in it and I had to dig it out
+with a pickaxe!  You may smile, gentlemen, but the High Sheriff's got a
+hunk of it which I dug out before his eyes, and so it's perfectly easy
+for you to go and examine for yourselves."
+
+The interruption broke up the conversation, which had already begun to
+lag, and we presently hired some natives and an out-rigger canoe or two,
+and went out to overlook a grand surf-bathing contest.
+
+Two weeks after this, while talking in a company, I looked up and
+detected this same man boring through and through me with his intense
+eye, and noted again his twitching muscles and his feverish anxiety to
+speak.  The moment I paused, he said:
+
+"Beg your pardon, sir, beg your pardon, but it can only be considered
+remarkable when brought into strong outline by isolation.  Sir,
+contrasted with a circumstance which occurred in my own experience, it
+instantly becomes commonplace.  No, not that--for I will not speak so
+discourteously of any experience in the career of a stranger and a
+gentleman--but I am obliged to say that you could not, and you would not
+ever again refer to this tree as a large one, if you could behold, as I
+have, the great Yakmatack tree, in the island of Ounaska, sea of
+Kamtchatka--a tree, sir, not one inch less than four hundred and fifteen
+feet in solid diameter!--and I wish I may die in a minute if it isn't so!
+Oh, you needn't look so questioning, gentlemen; here's old Cap Saltmarsh
+can say whether I know what I'm talking about or not.  I showed him the
+tree."
+
+Captain Saltmarsh--"Come, now, cat your anchor, lad--you're heaving too
+taut.  You promised to show me that stunner, and I walked more than
+eleven mile with you through the cussedest jungle I ever see, a hunting
+for it; but the tree you showed me finally warn't as big around as a beer
+cask, and you know that your own self, Markiss."
+
+"Hear the man talk!  Of course the tree was reduced that way, but didn't
+I explain it?  Answer me, didn't I?  Didn't I say I wished you could have
+seen it when I first saw it?  When you got up on your ear and called me
+names, and said I had brought you eleven miles to look at a sapling,
+didn't I explain to you that all the whale-ships in the North Seas had
+been wooding off of it for more than twenty-seven years?  And did you
+s'pose the tree could last for-ever, con-found it?  I don't see why you
+want to keep back things that way, and try to injure a person that's
+never done you any harm."
+
+Somehow this man's presence made me uncomfortable, and I was glad when a
+native arrived at that moment to say that Muckawow, the most
+companionable and luxurious among the rude war-chiefs of the Islands,
+desired us to come over and help him enjoy a missionary whom he had found
+trespassing on his grounds.
+
+I think it was about ten days afterward that, as I finished a statement I
+was making for the instruction of a group of friends and acquaintances,
+and which made no pretence of being extraordinary, a familiar voice
+chimed instantly in on the heels of my last word, and said:
+
+"But, my dear sir, there was nothing remarkable about that horse, or the
+circumstance either--nothing in the world!  I mean no sort of offence
+when I say it, sir, but you really do not know anything whatever about
+speed.  Bless your heart, if you could only have seen my mare Margaretta;
+there was a beast!--there was lightning for you!  Trot!  Trot is no name
+for it--she flew!  How she could whirl a buggy along!  I started her out
+once, sir--Colonel Bilgewater, you recollect that animal perfectly well
+--I started her out about thirty or thirty-five yards ahead of the
+awfullest storm I ever saw in my life, and it chased us upwards of
+eighteen miles!  It did, by the everlasting hills!  And I'm telling you
+nothing but the unvarnished truth when I say that not one single drop of
+rain fell on me--not a single drop, sir!  And I swear to it!  But my dog
+was a-swimming behind the wagon all the way!"
+
+For a week or two I stayed mostly within doors, for I seemed to meet this
+person everywhere, and he had become utterly hateful to me.  But one
+evening I dropped in on Captain Perkins and his friends, and we had a
+sociable time.  About ten o'clock I chanced to be talking about a
+merchant friend of mine, and without really intending it, the remark
+slipped out that he was a little mean and parsimonious about paying his
+workmen.  Instantly, through the steam of a hot whiskey punch on the
+opposite side of the room, a remembered voice shot--and for a moment I
+trembled on the imminent verge of profanity:
+
+"Oh, my dear sir, really you expose yourself when you parade that as a
+surprising circumstance.  Bless your heart and hide, you are ignorant of
+the very A B C of meanness! ignorant as the unborn babe! ignorant as
+unborn twins!  You don't know anything about it!  It is pitiable to see
+you, sir, a well-spoken and prepossessing stranger, making such an
+enormous pow-wow here about a subject concerning which your ignorance is
+perfectly humiliating!  Look me in the eye, if you please; look me in the
+eye.  John James Godfrey was the son of poor but honest parents in the
+State of Mississippi--boyhood friend of mine--bosom comrade in later
+years.  Heaven rest his noble spirit, he is gone from us now.  John James
+Godfrey was hired by the Hayblossom Mining Company in California to do
+some blasting for them--the "Incorporated Company of Mean Men," the boys
+used to call it.
+
+"Well, one day he drilled a hole about four feet deep and put in an awful
+blast of powder, and was standing over it ramming it down with an iron
+crowbar about nine foot long, when the cussed thing struck a spark and
+fired the powder, and scat! away John Godfrey whizzed like a skyrocket,
+him and his crowbar!  Well, sir, he kept on going up in the air higher
+and higher, till he didn't look any bigger than a boy--and he kept going
+on up higher and higher, till he didn't look any bigger than a doll--and
+he kept on going up higher and higher, till he didn't look any bigger
+than a little small bee--and then he went out of sight!  Presently he
+came in sight again, looking like a little small bee--and he came along
+down further and further, till he looked as big as a doll again--and down
+further and further, till he was as big as a boy again--and further and
+further, till he was a full-sized man once more; and then him and his
+crowbar came a wh-izzing down and lit right exactly in the same old
+tracks and went to r-ramming down, and r-ramming down, and r-ramming down
+again, just the same as if nothing had happened!  Now do you know, that
+poor cuss warn't gone only sixteen minutes, and yet that Incorporated
+Company of Mean Men DOCKED HIM FOR THE LOST TIME!"
+
+I said I had the headache, and so excused myself and went home.  And on
+my diary I entered "another night spoiled" by this offensive loafer.
+And a fervent curse was set down with it to keep the item company.  And
+the very next day I packed up, out of all patience, and left the Island.
+
+Almost from the very beginning, I regarded that man as a liar.
+
+The line of points represents an interval of years.  At the end of which
+time the opinion hazarded in that last sentence came to be gratifyingly
+and remarkably endorsed, and by wholly disinterested persons.  The man
+Markiss was found one morning hanging to a beam of his own bedroom (the
+doors and windows securely fastened on the inside), dead; and on his
+breast was pinned a paper in his own handwriting begging his friends to
+suspect no innocent person of having any thing to do with his death, for
+that it was the work of his own hands entirely.  Yet the jury brought in
+the astounding verdict that deceased came to his death "by the hands of
+some person or persons unknown!"  They explained that the perfectly
+undeviating consistency of Markiss's character for thirty years towered
+aloft as colossal and indestructible testimony, that whatever statement
+he chose to make was entitled to instant and unquestioning acceptance as
+a lie.  And they furthermore stated their belief that he was not dead,
+and instanced the strong circumstantial evidence of his own word that he
+was dead--and beseeched the coroner to delay the funeral as long as
+possible, which was done.  And so in the tropical climate of Lahaina the
+coffin stood open for seven days, and then even the loyal jury gave him
+up.  But they sat on him again, and changed their verdict to "suicide
+induced by mental aberration"--because, said they, with penetration, "he
+said he was dead, and he was dead; and would he have told the truth if he
+had been in his right mind?  No, sir."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXXVIII.
+
+After half a year's luxurious vagrancy in the islands, I took shipping in
+a sailing vessel, and regretfully returned to San Francisco--a voyage in
+every way delightful, but without an incident: unless lying two long
+weeks in a dead calm, eighteen hundred miles from the nearest land, may
+rank as an incident.  Schools of whales grew so tame that day after day
+they played about the ship among the porpoises and the sharks without the
+least apparent fear of us, and we pelted them with empty bottles for lack
+of better sport.  Twenty-four hours afterward these bottles would be
+still lying on the glassy water under our noses, showing that the ship
+had not moved out of her place in all that time.  The calm was absolutely
+breathless, and the surface of the sea absolutely without a wrinkle.
+For a whole day and part of a night we lay so close to another ship that
+had drifted to our vicinity, that we carried on conversations with her
+passengers, introduced each other by name, and became pretty intimately
+acquainted with people we had never heard of before, and have never heard
+of since.  This was the only vessel we saw during the whole lonely
+voyage.  We had fifteen passengers, and to show how hard pressed they
+were at last for occupation and amusement, I will mention that the
+gentlemen gave a good part of their time every day, during the calm, to
+trying to sit on an empty champagne bottle (lying on its side), and
+thread a needle without touching their heels to the deck, or falling
+over; and the ladies sat in the shade of the mainsail, and watched the
+enterprise with absorbing interest.  We were at sea five Sundays; and
+yet, but for the almanac, we never would have known but that all the
+other days were Sundays too.
+
+I was home again, in San Francisco, without means and without employment.
+I tortured my brain for a saving scheme of some kind, and at last a
+public lecture occurred to me!  I sat down and wrote one, in a fever of
+hopeful anticipation.  I showed it to several friends, but they all shook
+their heads.  They said nobody would come to hear me, and I would make a
+humiliating failure of it.
+
+They said that as I had never spoken in public, I would break down in the
+delivery, anyhow.  I was disconsolate now.  But at last an editor slapped
+me on the back and told me to "go ahead."  He said, "Take the largest
+house in town, and charge a dollar a ticket."  The audacity of the
+proposition was charming; it seemed fraught with practical worldly
+wisdom, however.  The proprietor of the several theatres endorsed the
+advice, and said I might have his handsome new opera-house at half price
+--fifty dollars.  In sheer desperation I took it--on credit, for
+sufficient reasons.  In three days I did a hundred and fifty dollars'
+worth of printing and advertising, and was the most distressed and
+frightened creature on the Pacific coast.  I could not sleep--who could,
+under such circumstances?  For other people there was facetiousness in
+the last line of my posters, but to me it was plaintive with a pang when
+I wrote it:
+
+           "Doors open at 7 1/2.  The trouble will begin at 8."
+
+That line has done good service since.  Showmen have borrowed it
+frequently.  I have even seen it appended to a newspaper advertisement
+reminding school pupils in vacation what time next term would begin.  As
+those three days of suspense dragged by, I grew more and more unhappy.
+I had sold two hundred tickets among my personal friends, but I feared
+they might not come.  My lecture, which had seemed "humorous" to me, at
+first, grew steadily more and more dreary, till not a vestige of fun
+seemed left, and I grieved that I could not bring a coffin on the stage
+and turn the thing into a funeral.  I was so panic-stricken, at last,
+that I went to three old friends, giants in stature, cordial by nature,
+and stormy-voiced, and said:
+
+"This thing is going to be a failure; the jokes in it are so dim that
+nobody will ever see them; I would like to have you sit in the parquette,
+and help me through."
+
+They said they would.  Then I went to the wife of a popular citizen, and
+said that if she was willing to do me a very great kindness, I would be
+glad if she and her husband would sit prominently in the left-hand
+stage-box, where the whole house could see them.  I explained that I
+should need help, and would turn toward her and smile, as a signal, when
+I had been delivered of an obscure joke--"and then," I added, "don't wait
+to investigate, but respond!"
+
+She promised.  Down the street I met a man I never had seen before.  He
+had been drinking, and was beaming with smiles and good nature.  He said:
+
+"My name's Sawyer.  You don't know me, but that don't matter.  I haven't
+got a cent, but if you knew how bad I wanted to laugh, you'd give me a
+ticket.  Come, now, what do you say?"
+
+"Is your laugh hung on a hair-trigger?--that is, is it critical, or can
+you get it off easy?"
+
+My drawling infirmity of speech so affected him that he laughed a
+specimen or two that struck me as being about the article I wanted, and I
+gave him a ticket, and appointed him to sit in the second circle, in the
+centre, and be responsible for that division of the house.  I gave him
+minute instructions about how to detect indistinct jokes, and then went
+away, and left him chuckling placidly over the novelty of the idea.
+
+I ate nothing on the last of the three eventful days--I only suffered.
+I had advertised that on this third day the box-office would be opened
+for the sale of reserved seats.  I crept down to the theater at four in
+the afternoon to see if any sales had been made.  The ticket seller was
+gone, the box-office was locked up.  I had to swallow suddenly, or my
+heart would have got out.  "No sales," I said to myself; "I might have
+known it."  I thought of suicide, pretended illness, flight.  I thought
+of these things in earnest, for I was very miserable and scared.  But of
+course I had to drive them away, and prepare to meet my fate.  I could
+not wait for half-past seven--I wanted to face the horror, and end it
+--the feeling of many a man doomed to hang, no doubt.  I went down back
+streets at six o'clock, and entered the theatre by the back door.
+I stumbled my way in the dark among the ranks of canvas scenery, and
+stood on the stage.  The house was gloomy and silent, and its emptiness
+depressing.  I went into the dark among the scenes again, and for an hour
+and a half gave myself up to the horrors, wholly unconscious of
+everything else.  Then I heard a murmur; it rose higher and higher, and
+ended in a crash, mingled with cheers.  It made my hair raise, it was so
+close to me, and so loud.
+
+There was a pause, and then another; presently came a third, and before I
+well knew what I was about, I was in the middle of the stage, staring at
+a sea of faces, bewildered by the fierce glare of the lights, and quaking
+in every limb with a terror that seemed like to take my life away.  The
+house was full, aisles and all!
+
+The tumult in my heart and brain and legs continued a full minute before
+I could gain any command over myself.  Then I recognized the charity and
+the friendliness in the faces before me, and little by little my fright
+melted away, and I began to talk Within three or four minutes I was
+comfortable, and even content.  My three chief allies, with three
+auxiliaries, were on hand, in the parquette, all sitting together, all
+armed with bludgeons, and all ready to make an onslaught upon the
+feeblest joke that might show its head.  And whenever a joke did fall,
+their bludgeons came down and their faces seemed to split from ear to
+ear.
+
+Sawyer, whose hearty countenance was seen looming redly in the centre of
+the second circle, took it up, and the house was carried handsomely.
+Inferior jokes never fared so royally before.  Presently I delivered a
+bit of serious matter with impressive unction (it was my pet), and the
+audience listened with an absorbed hush that gratified me more than any
+applause; and as I dropped the last word of the clause, I happened to
+turn and catch Mrs.--'s intent and waiting eye; my conversation with her
+flashed upon me, and in spite of all I could do I smiled.  She took it
+for the signal, and promptly delivered a mellow laugh that touched off
+the whole audience; and the explosion that followed was the triumph of
+the evening.  I thought that that honest man Sawyer would choke himself;
+and as for the bludgeons, they performed like pile-drivers.  But my poor
+little morsel of pathos was ruined.  It was taken in good faith as an
+intentional joke, and the prize one of the entertainment, and I wisely
+let it go at that.
+
+All the papers were kind in the morning; my appetite returned; I had a
+abundance of money.  All's well that ends well.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXXIX.
+
+I launched out as a lecturer, now, with great boldness.  I had the field
+all to myself, for public lectures were almost an unknown commodity in
+the Pacific market.  They are not so rare, now, I suppose.  I took an old
+personal friend along to play agent for me, and for two or three weeks we
+roamed through Nevada and California and had a very cheerful time of it.
+Two days before I lectured in Virginia City, two stagecoaches were robbed
+within two miles of the town.  The daring act was committed just at dawn,
+by six masked men, who sprang up alongside the coaches, presented
+revolvers at the heads of the drivers and passengers, and commanded a
+general dismount.  Everybody climbed down, and the robbers took their
+watches and every cent they had.  Then they took gunpowder and blew up
+the express specie boxes and got their contents.  The leader of the
+robbers was a small, quick-spoken man, and the fame of his vigorous
+manner and his intrepidity was in everybody's mouth when we arrived.
+
+The night after instructing Virginia, I walked over the desolate "divide"
+and down to Gold Hill, and lectured there.  The lecture done, I stopped
+to talk with a friend, and did not start back till eleven.  The "divide"
+was high, unoccupied ground, between the towns, the scene of twenty
+midnight murders and a hundred robberies.  As we climbed up and stepped
+out on this eminence, the Gold Hill lights dropped out of sight at our
+backs, and the night closed down gloomy and dismal.  A sharp wind swept
+the place, too, and chilled our perspiring bodies through.
+
+"I tell you I don't like this place at night," said Mike the agent.
+
+"Well, don't speak so loud," I said.  "You needn't remind anybody that we
+are here."
+
+Just then a dim figure approached me from the direction of Virginia--a
+man, evidently.  He came straight at me, and I stepped aside to let him
+pass; he stepped in the way and confronted me again.  Then I saw that he
+had a mask on and was holding something in my face--I heard a click-click
+and recognized a revolver in dim outline.  I pushed the barrel aside with
+my hand and said:
+
+"Don't!"
+
+He ejaculated sharply:
+
+"Your watch!  Your money!"
+
+I said:
+
+"You can have them with pleasure--but take the pistol away from my face,
+please.  It makes me shiver."
+
+"No remarks!  Hand out your money!"
+
+"Certainly--I--"
+
+"Put up your hands!  Don't you go for a weapon!  Put 'em up!  Higher!"
+
+I held them above my head.
+
+A pause.  Then:
+
+"Are you going to hand out your money or not?"
+
+I dropped my hands to my pockets and said:
+
+Certainly!  I--"
+
+"Put up your hands!  Do you want your head blown off?  Higher!"
+
+I put them above my head again.
+
+Another pause.
+
+Are you going to hand out your money or not?  Ah-ah--again?  Put up your
+hands!  By George, you want the head shot off you awful bad!"
+
+"Well, friend, I'm trying my best to please you.  You tell me to give up
+my money, and when I reach for it you tell me to put up my hands.  If you
+would only--.  Oh, now--don't!  All six of you at me!  That other man
+will get away while.--Now please take some of those revolvers out of my
+face--do, if you please!  Every time one of them clicks, my liver comes
+up into my throat!  If you have a mother--any of you--or if any of you
+have ever had a mother--or a--grandmother--or a--"
+
+"Cheese it!  Will you give up your money, or have we got to--.  There
+--there--none of that!  Put up your hands!"
+
+"Gentlemen--I know you are gentlemen by your--"
+
+"Silence!  If you want to be facetious, young man, there are times and
+places more fitting.  This is a serious business."
+
+"You prick the marrow of my opinion.  The funerals I have attended in my
+time were comedies compared to it.  Now I think--"
+
+"Curse your palaver!  Your money!--your money!--your money!  Hold!--put
+up your hands!"
+
+"Gentlemen, listen to reason.  You see how I am situated--now don't put
+those pistols so close--I smell the powder.
+
+"You see how I am situated.  If I had four hands--so that I could hold up
+two and--"
+
+"Throttle him!  Gag him!  Kill him!"
+
+"Gentlemen, don't!  Nobody's watching the other fellow.  Why don't some
+of you--.  Ouch!  Take it away, please!
+
+"Gentlemen, you see that I've got to hold up my hands; and so I can't take
+out my money--but if you'll be so kind as to take it out for me, I will
+do as much for you some--"
+
+"Search him Beauregard--and stop his jaw with a bullet, quick, if he wags
+it again.  Help Beauregard, Stonewall."
+
+Then three of them, with the small, spry leader, adjourned to Mike and
+fell to searching him.  I was so excited that my lawless fancy tortured
+me to ask my two men all manner of facetious questions about their rebel
+brother-generals of the South, but, considering the order they had
+received, it was but common prudence to keep still.  When everything had
+been taken from me,--watch, money, and a multitude of trifles of small
+value,--I supposed I was free, and forthwith put my cold hands into my
+empty pockets and began an inoffensive jig to warm my feet and stir up
+some latent courage--but instantly all pistols were at my head, and the
+order came again:
+
+They stood Mike up alongside of me, with strict orders to keep his hands
+above his head, too, and then the chief highwayman said:
+
+"Beauregard, hide behind that boulder; Phil Sheridan, you hide behind
+that other one; Stonewall Jackson, put yourself behind that sage-bush
+there.  Keep your pistols bearing on these fellows, and if they take down
+their hands within ten minutes, or move a single peg, let them have it!"
+
+Then three disappeared in the gloom toward the several ambushes, and the
+other three disappeared down the road toward Virginia.
+
+It was depressingly still, and miserably cold.  Now this whole thing was
+a practical joke, and the robbers were personal friends of ours in
+disguise, and twenty more lay hidden within ten feet of us during the
+whole operation, listening.  Mike knew all this, and was in the joke, but
+I suspected nothing of it.  To me it was most uncomfortably genuine.
+When we had stood there in the middle of the road five minutes, like a
+couple of idiots, with our hands aloft, freezing to death by inches,
+Mike's interest in the joke began to wane.  He said:
+
+"The time's up, now, aint it?"
+
+"No, you keep still.  Do you want to take any chances with these bloody
+savages?"
+
+Presently Mike said:
+
+"Now the time's up, anyway.  I'm freezing."
+
+"Well freeze.  Better freeze than carry your brains home in a basket.
+Maybe the time is up, but how do we know?--got no watch to tell by.
+I mean to give them good measure.  I calculate to stand here fifteen
+minutes or die.  Don't you move."
+
+So, without knowing it, I was making one joker very sick of his contract.
+When we took our arms down at last, they were aching with cold and
+fatigue, and when we went sneaking off, the dread I was in that the time
+might not yet be up and that we would feel bullets in a moment, was not
+sufficient to draw all my attention from the misery that racked my
+stiffened body.
+
+The joke of these highwayman friends of ours was mainly a joke upon
+themselves; for they had waited for me on the cold hill-top two full
+hours before I came, and there was very little fun in that; they were so
+chilled that it took them a couple of weeks to get warm again.  Moreover,
+I never had a thought that they would kill me to get money which it was
+so perfectly easy to get without any such folly, and so they did not
+really frighten me bad enough to make their enjoyment worth the trouble
+they had taken.  I was only afraid that their weapons would go off
+accidentally.  Their very numbers inspired me with confidence that no
+blood would be intentionally spilled.  They were not smart; they ought to
+have sent only one highwayman, with a double-barrelled shot gun, if they
+desired to see the author of this volume climb a tree.
+
+However, I suppose that in the long run I got the largest share of the
+joke at last; and in a shape not foreseen by the highwaymen; for the
+chilly exposure on the "divide" while I was in a perspiration gave me a
+cold which developed itself into a troublesome disease and kept my hands
+idle some three months, besides costing me quite a sum in doctor's bills.
+Since then I play no practical jokes on people and generally lose my
+temper when one is played upon me.
+
+When I returned to San Francisco I projected a pleasure journey to Japan
+and thence westward around the world; but a desire to see home again
+changed my mind, and I took a berth in the steamship, bade good-bye to
+the friendliest land and livest, heartiest community on our continent,
+and came by the way of the Isthmus to New York--a trip that was not much
+of a pic-nic excursion, for the cholera broke out among us on the passage
+and we buried two or three bodies at sea every day.  I found home a
+dreary place after my long absence; for half the children I had known
+were now wearing whiskers or waterfalls, and few of the grown people I
+had been acquainted with remained at their hearthstones prosperous and
+happy--some of them had wandered to other scenes, some were in jail, and
+the rest had been hanged.  These changes touched me deeply, and I went
+away and joined the famous Quaker City European Excursion and carried my
+tears to foreign lands.
+
+Thus, after seven years of vicissitudes, ended a "pleasure trip" to the
+silver mines of Nevada which had originally been intended to occupy only
+three months.  However, I usually miss my calculations further than that.
+
+
+MORAL.
+
+If the reader thinks he is done, now, and that this book has no moral to
+it, he is in error.  The moral of it is this: If you are of any account,
+stay at home and make your way by faithful diligence; but if you are "no
+account," go away from home, and then you will have to work, whether you
+want to or not.  Thus you become a blessing to your friends by ceasing to
+be a nuisance to them--if the people you go among suffer by the
+operation.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX. A.
+
+BRIEF SKETCH OF MORMON HISTORY.
+
+Mormonism is only about forty years old, but its career has been full of
+stir and adventure from the beginning, and is likely to remain so to the
+end.  Its adherents have been hunted and hounded from one end of the
+country to the other, and the result is that for years they have hated
+all "Gentiles" indiscriminately and with all their might.  Joseph Smith,
+the finder of the Book of Mormon and founder of the religion, was driven
+from State to State with his mysterious copperplates and the miraculous
+stones he read their inscriptions with.  Finally he instituted his
+"church" in Ohio and Brigham Young joined it.  The neighbors began to
+persecute, and apostasy commenced.  Brigham held to the faith and worked
+hard.  He arrested desertion.  He did more--he added converts in the
+midst of the trouble.  He rose in favor and importance with the brethren.
+He was made one of the Twelve Apostles of the Church.  He shortly fought
+his way to a higher post and a more powerful--President of the Twelve.
+The neighbors rose up and drove the Mormons out of Ohio, and they settled
+in Missouri.  Brigham went with them.  The Missourians drove them out and
+they retreated to Nauvoo, Illinois.  They prospered there, and built a
+temple which made some pretensions to architectural grace and achieved
+some celebrity in a section of country where a brick court-house with a
+tin dome and a cupola on it was contemplated with reverential awe.
+But the Mormons were badgered and harried again by their neighbors.
+All the proclamations Joseph Smith could issue denouncing polygamy and
+repudiating it as utterly anti-Mormon were of no avail; the people of the
+neighborhood, on both sides of the Mississippi, claimed that polygamy was
+practised by the Mormons, and not only polygamy but a little of
+everything that was bad.  Brigham returned from a mission to England,
+where he had established a Mormon newspaper, and he brought back with him
+several hundred converts to his preaching.  His influence among the
+brethren augmented with every move he made.  Finally Nauvoo was invaded
+by the Missouri and Illinois Gentiles, and Joseph Smith killed.  A Mormon
+named Rigdon assumed the Presidency of the Mormon church and government,
+in Smith's place, and even tried his hand at a prophecy or two.  But a
+greater than he was at hand.  Brigham seized the advantage of the hour
+and without other authority than superior brain and nerve and will,
+hurled Rigdon from his high place and occupied it himself.  He did more.
+He launched an elaborate curse at Rigdon and his disciples; and he
+pronounced Rigdon's "prophecies" emanations from the devil, and ended by
+"handing the false prophet over to the buffetings of Satan for a thousand
+years"--probably the longest term ever inflicted in Illinois.  The people
+recognized their master.  They straightway elected Brigham Young
+President, by a prodigious majority, and have never faltered in their
+devotion to him from that day to this.  Brigham had forecast--a quality
+which no other prominent Mormon has probably ever possessed.
+He recognized that it was better to move to the wilderness than be moved.
+By his command the people gathered together their meagre effects, turned
+their backs upon their homes, and their faces toward the wilderness, and
+on a bitter night in February filed in sorrowful procession across the
+frozen Mississippi, lighted on their way by the glare from their burning
+temple, whose sacred furniture their own hands had fired!  They camped,
+several days afterward, on the western verge of Iowa, and poverty, want,
+hunger, cold, sickness, grief and persecution did their work, and many
+succumbed and died--martyrs, fair and true, whatever else they might have
+been.  Two years the remnant remained there, while Brigham and a small
+party crossed the country and founded Great Salt Lake City, purposely
+choosing a land which was outside the ownership and jurisdiction of the
+hated American nation.  Note that.  This was in 1847.  Brigham moved his
+people there and got them settled just in time to see disaster fall
+again.  For the war closed and Mexico ceded Brigham's refuge to the
+enemy--the United States!  In 1849 the Mormons organized a "free and
+independent" government and erected the "State of Deseret," with Brigham
+Young as its head.  But the very next year Congress deliberately snubbed
+it and created the "Territory of Utah" out of the same accumulation of
+mountains, sage-brush, alkali and general desolation,--but made Brigham
+Governor of it.  Then for years the enormous migration across the plains
+to California poured through the land of the Mormons and yet the church
+remained staunch and true to its lord and master.  Neither hunger,
+thirst, poverty, grief, hatred, contempt, nor persecution could drive the
+Mormons from their faith or their allegiance; and even the thirst for
+gold, which gleaned the flower of the youth and strength of many nations
+was not able to entice them!  That was the final test.  An experiment
+that could survive that was an experiment with some substance to it
+somewhere.
+
+Great Salt Lake City throve finely, and so did Utah.  One of the last
+things which Brigham Young had done before leaving Iowa, was to appear in
+the pulpit dressed to personate the worshipped and lamented prophet
+Smith, and confer the prophetic succession, with all its dignities,
+emoluments and authorities, upon "President Brigham Young!"  The people
+accepted the pious fraud with the maddest enthusiasm, and Brigham's power
+was sealed and secured for all time.  Within five years afterward he
+openly added polygamy to the tenets of the church by authority of a
+"revelation" which he pretended had been received nine years before by
+Joseph Smith, albeit Joseph is amply on record as denouncing polygamy to
+the day of his death.
+
+Now was Brigham become a second Andrew Johnson in the small beginning and
+steady progress of his official grandeur.  He had served successively as
+a disciple in the ranks; home missionary; foreign missionary; editor and
+publisher; Apostle; President of the Board of Apostles; President of all
+Mormondom, civil and ecclesiastical; successor to the great Joseph by the
+will of heaven; "prophet," "seer," "revelator."  There was but one
+dignity higher which he could aspire to, and he reached out modestly and
+took that--he proclaimed himself a God!
+
+He claims that he is to have a heaven of his own hereafter, and that he
+will be its God, and his wives and children its goddesses, princes and
+princesses.  Into it all faithful Mormons will be admitted, with their
+families, and will take rank and consequence according to the number of
+their wives and children.  If a disciple dies before he has had time to
+accumulate enough wives and children to enable him to be respectable in
+the next world any friend can marry a few wives and raise a few children
+for him after he is dead, and they are duly credited to his account and
+his heavenly status advanced accordingly.
+
+Let it be borne in mind that the majority of the Mormons have always been
+ignorant, simple, of an inferior order of intellect, unacquainted with
+the world and its ways; and let it be borne in mind that the wives of
+these Mormons are necessarily after the same pattern and their children
+likely to be fit representatives of such a conjunction; and then let it
+be remembered that for forty years these creatures have been driven,
+driven, driven, relentlessly!  and mobbed, beaten, and shot down; cursed,
+despised, expatriated; banished to a remote desert, whither they
+journeyed gaunt with famine and disease, disturbing the ancient solitudes
+with their lamentations and marking the long way with graves of their
+dead--and all because they were simply trying to live and worship God in
+the way which they believed with all their hearts and souls to be the
+true one.  Let all these things be borne in mind, and then it will not be
+hard to account for the deathless hatred which the Mormons bear our
+people and our government.
+
+That hatred has "fed fat its ancient grudge" ever since Mormon Utah
+developed into a self-supporting realm and the church waxed rich and
+strong.  Brigham as Territorial Governor made it plain that Mormondom was
+for the Mormons.  The United States tried to rectify all that by
+appointing territorial officers from New England and other anti-Mormon
+localities, but Brigham prepared to make their entrance into his
+dominions difficult.  Three thousand United States troops had to go
+across the plains and put these gentlemen in office.  And after they were
+in office they were as helpless as so many stone images.  They made laws
+which nobody minded and which could not be executed.  The federal judges
+opened court in a land filled with crime and violence and sat as holiday
+spectacles for insolent crowds to gape at--for there was nothing to try,
+nothing to do nothing on the dockets!  And if a Gentile brought a suit,
+the Mormon jury would do just as it pleased about bringing in a verdict,
+and when the judgment of the court was rendered no Mormon cared for it
+and no officer could execute it.  Our Presidents shipped one cargo of
+officials after another to Utah, but the result was always the same--they
+sat in a blight for awhile they fairly feasted on scowls and insults day
+by day, they saw every attempt to do their official duties find its
+reward in darker and darker looks, and in secret threats and warnings of
+a more and more dismal nature--and at last they either succumbed and
+became despised tools and toys of the Mormons, or got scared and
+discomforted beyond all endurance and left the Territory.  If a brave
+officer kept on courageously till his pluck was proven, some pliant
+Buchanan or Pierce would remove him and appoint a stick in his place.
+In 1857 General Harney came very near being appointed Governor of Utah.
+And so it came very near being Harney governor and Cradlebaugh judge!
+--two men who never had any idea of fear further than the sort of murky
+comprehension of it which they were enabled to gather from the
+dictionary.  Simply (if for nothing else) for the variety they would have
+made in a rather monotonous history of Federal servility and
+helplessness, it is a pity they were not fated to hold office together in
+Utah.
+
+Up to the date of our visit to Utah, such had been the Territorial
+record.  The Territorial government established there had been a hopeless
+failure, and Brigham Young was the only real power in the land.  He was
+an absolute monarch--a monarch who defied our President--a monarch who
+laughed at our armies when they camped about his capital--a monarch who
+received without emotion the news that the august Congress of the United
+States had enacted a solemn law against polygamy, and then went forth
+calmly and married twenty-five or thirty more wives.
+
+
+
+
+B.
+THE MOUNTAIN MEADOWS MASSACRE.
+
+The persecutions which the Mormons suffered so long--and which they
+consider they still suffer in not being allowed to govern themselves
+--they have endeavored and are still endeavoring to repay.  The now almost
+forgotten "Mountain Meadows massacre" was their work.  It was very famous
+in its day.  The whole United States rang with its horrors.  A few items
+will refresh the reader's memory.  A great emigrant train from Missouri
+and Arkansas passed through Salt Lake City and a few disaffected Mormons
+joined it for the sake of the strong protection it afforded for their
+escape.  In that matter lay sufficient cause for hot retaliation by the
+Mormon chiefs.  Besides, these one hundred and forty-five or one hundred
+and fifty unsuspecting emigrants being in part from Arkansas, where a
+noted Mormon missionary had lately been killed, and in part from
+Missouri, a State remembered with execrations as a bitter persecutor of
+the saints when they were few and poor and friendless, here were
+substantial additional grounds for lack of love for these wayfarers.
+And finally, this train was rich, very rich in cattle, horses, mules and
+other property--and how could the Mormons consistently keep up their
+coveted resemblance to the Israelitish tribes and not seize the "spoil"
+of an enemy when the Lord had so manifestly "delivered it into their
+hand?"
+
+Wherefore, according to Mrs. C. V. Waite's entertaining book, "The Mormon
+Prophet," it transpired that--
+
+"A 'revelation' from Brigham Young, as Great Grand Archee or God, was
+dispatched to President J. C. Haight, Bishop Higbee and J. D. Lee
+(adopted son of Brigham), commanding them to raise all the forces they
+could muster and trust, follow those cursed Gentiles (so read the
+revelation), attack them disguised as Indians, and with the arrows of the
+Almighty make a clean sweep of them, and leave none to tell the tale; and
+if they needed any assistance they were commanded to hire the Indians as
+their allies, promising them a share of the booty.  They were to be
+neither slothful nor negligent in their duty, and to be punctual in
+sending the teams back to him before winter set in, for this was the
+mandate of Almighty God."
+
+The command of the "revelation" was faithfully obeyed.  A large party of
+Mormons, painted and tricked out as Indians, overtook the train of
+emigrant wagons some three hundred miles south of Salt Lake City, and
+made an attack.  But the emigrants threw up earthworks, made fortresses
+of their wagons and defended themselves gallantly and successfully for
+five days!  Your Missouri or Arkansas gentleman is not much afraid of the
+sort of scurvy apologies for "Indians" which the southern part of Utah
+affords.  He would stand up and fight five hundred of them.
+
+At the end of the five days the Mormons tried military strategy.  They
+retired to the upper end of the "Meadows," resumed civilized apparel,
+washed off their paint, and then, heavily armed, drove down in wagons to
+the beleaguered emigrants, bearing a flag of truce!  When the emigrants
+saw white men coming they threw down their guns and welcomed them with
+cheer after cheer!  And, all unconscious of the poetry of it, no doubt,
+they lifted a little child aloft, dressed in white, in answer to the flag
+of truce!
+
+The leaders of the timely white "deliverers" were President Haight and
+Bishop John D. Lee, of the Mormon Church.  Mr. Cradlebaugh, who served a
+term as a Federal Judge in Utah and afterward was sent to Congress from
+Nevada, tells in a speech delivered in Congress how these leaders next
+proceeded:
+
+"They professed to be on good terms with the Indians, and represented
+them as being very mad.  They also proposed to intercede and settle the
+matter with the Indians.  After several hours parley they, having
+(apparently) visited the Indians, gave the ultimatum of the savages;
+which was, that the emigrants should march out of their camp, leaving
+everything behind them, even their guns.  It was promised by the Mormon
+bishops that they would bring a force and guard the emigrants back to the
+settlements.  The terms were agreed to, the emigrants being desirous of
+saving the lives of their families.  The Mormons retired, and
+subsequently appeared with thirty or forty armed men.  The emigrants were
+marched out, the women and children in front and the men behind, the
+Mormon guard being in the rear.  When they had marched in this way about
+a mile, at a given signal the slaughter commenced.  The men were almost
+all shot down at the first fire from the guard.  Two only escaped, who
+fled to the desert, and were followed one hundred and fifty miles before
+they were overtaken and slaughtered.  The women and children ran on, two
+or three hundred yards further, when they were overtaken and with the aid
+of the Indians they were slaughtered.  Seventeen individuals only, of all
+the emigrant party, were spared, and they were little children, the
+eldest of them being only seven years old.  Thus, on the 10th day of
+September, 1857, was consummated one of the most cruel, cowardly and
+bloody murders known in our history."
+
+The number of persons butchered by the Mormons on this occasion was one
+hundred and twenty.
+
+With unheard-of temerity Judge Cradlebaugh opened his court and proceeded
+to make Mormondom answer for the massacre.  And what a spectacle it must
+have been to see this grim veteran, solitary and alone in his pride and
+his pluck, glowering down on his Mormon jury and Mormon auditory,
+deriding them by turns, and by turns "breathing threatenings and
+slaughter!"
+
+An editorial in the Territorial Enterprise of that day says of him and of
+the occasion:
+
+"He spoke and acted with the fearlessness and resolution of a Jackson;
+but the jury failed to indict, or even report on the charges, while
+threats of violence were heard in every quarter, and an attack on the
+U.S. troops intimated, if he persisted in his course.
+
+"Finding that nothing could be done with the juries, they were discharged
+with a scathing rebuke from the judge.  And then, sitting as a committing
+magistrate, he commenced his task alone.  He examined witnesses, made
+arrests in every quarter, and created a consternation in the camps of the
+saints greater than any they had ever witnessed before, since Mormondom
+was born.  At last accounts terrified elders and bishops were decamping
+to save their necks; and developments of the most starling character were
+being made, implicating the highest Church dignitaries in the many
+murders and robberies committed upon the Gentiles during the past eight
+years."
+
+Had Harney been Governor, Cradlebaugh would have been supported in his
+work, and the absolute proofs adduced by him of Mormon guilt in this
+massacre and in a number of previous murders, would have conferred
+gratuitous coffins upon certain citizens, together with occasion to use
+them.  But Cumming was the Federal Governor, and he, under a curious
+pretense of impartiality, sought to screen the Mormons from the demands
+of justice.  On one occasion he even went so far as to publish his
+protest against the use of the U.S. troops in aid of Cradlebaugh's
+proceedings.
+
+Mrs. C. V. Waite closes her interesting detail of the great massacre with
+the following remark and accompanying summary of the testimony--and the
+summary is concise, accurate and reliable:
+
+"For the benefit of those who may still be disposed to doubt the guilt of
+Young and his Mormons in this transaction, the testimony is here collated
+and circumstances given which go not merely to implicate but to fasten
+conviction upon them by 'confirmations strong as proofs of Holy Writ:'
+
+"1.  The evidence of Mormons themselves, engaged in the affair, as shown
+by the statements of Judge Cradlebaugh and Deputy U.S.  Marshall Rodgers.
+
+"2.  The failure of Brigham Young to embody any account of it in his
+Report as Superintendent of Indian Affairs.  Also his failure to make any
+allusion to it whatever from the pulpit, until several years after the
+occurrence
+
+"3.  The flight to the mountains of men high in authority in the Mormon
+Church and State, when this affair was brought to the ordeal of a
+judicial investigation.
+
+"4.  The failure of the Deseret News, the Church organ, and the only
+paper then published in the Territory, to notice the massacre until
+several months afterward, and then only to deny that Mormons were engaged
+in it.
+
+"5.  The testimony of the children saved from the massacre.
+
+"6.  The children and the property of the emigrants found in possession
+of the Mormons, and that possession traced back to the very day after the
+massacre.
+
+"7.  The statements of Indians in the neighborhood of the scene of the
+massacre: these statements are shown, not only by Cradlebaugh and
+Rodgers, but by a number of military officers, and by J. Forney, who was,
+in 1859, Superintendent of Indian Affairs for the Territory.  To all
+these were such statements freely and frequently made by the Indians.
+
+"8.  The testimony of R. P. Campbell, Capt.  2d Dragoons, who was sent in
+the Spring of 1859 to Santa Clara, to protect travelers on the road to
+California and to inquire into Indian depredations."
+
+
+
+
+C.
+CONCERNING A FRIGHTFUL ASSASSINATION THAT WAS NEVER CONSUMMATED
+
+If ever there was a harmless man, it is Conrad Wiegand, of Gold Hill,
+Nevada.  If ever there was a gentle spirit that thought itself unfired
+gunpowder and latent ruin, it is Conrad Wiegand.  If ever there was an
+oyster that fancied itself a whale; or a jack-o'lantern, confined to a
+swamp, that fancied itself a planet with a billion-mile orbit; or a
+summer zephyr that deemed itself a hurricane, it is Conrad Wiegand.
+Therefore, what wonder is it that when he says a thing, he thinks the
+world listens; that when he does a thing the world stands still to look;
+and that when he suffers, there is a convulsion of nature?  When I met
+Conrad, he was "Superintendent of the Gold Hill Assay Office"--and he was
+not only its Superintendent, but its entire force.  And he was a street
+preacher, too, with a mongrel religion of his own invention, whereby he
+expected to regenerate the universe.  This was years ago.  Here latterly
+he has entered journalism; and his journalism is what it might be
+expected to be: colossal to ear, but pigmy to the eye.  It is extravagant
+grandiloquence confined to a newspaper about the size of a double letter
+sheet.  He doubtless edits, sets the type, and prints his paper, all
+alone; but he delights to speak of the concern as if it occupies a block
+and employs a thousand men.
+
+[Something less than two years ago, Conrad assailed several people
+mercilessly in his little "People's Tribune," and got himself into
+trouble.  Straightway he airs the affair in the "Territorial Enterprise,"
+in a communication over his own signature, and I propose to reproduce it
+here, in all its native simplicity and more than human candor.  Long as
+it is, it is well worth reading, for it is the richest specimen of
+journalistic literature the history of America can furnish, perhaps:]
+
+From the Territorial Enterprise, Jan. 20, 1870.
+
+SEEMING PLOT FOR ASSASSINATION MISCARRIED.
+
+TO THE EDITOR OF THE ENTERPRISE: Months ago, when Mr. Sutro incidentally
+exposed mining management on the Comstock, and among others roused me to
+protest against its continuance, in great kindness you warned me that any
+attempt by publications, by public meetings and by legislative action,
+aimed at the correction of chronic mining evils in Storey County, must
+entail upon me (a) business ruin, (b) the burden of all its costs, (c)
+personal violence, and if my purpose were persisted in, then (d)
+assassination, and after all nothing would be effected.
+
+YOUR PROPHECY FULFILLING.
+In large part at least your prophecies have been fulfilled, for (a)
+assaying, which was well attended to in the Gold Hill Assay Office (of
+which I am superintendent), in consequence of my publications, has been
+taken elsewhere, so the President of one of the companies assures me.
+With no reason assigned, other work has been taken away.  With but one or
+two important exceptions, our assay business now consists simply of the
+gleanings of the vicinity.  (b) Though my own personal donations to the
+People's Tribune Association have already exceeded $1,500, outside of our
+own numbers we have received (in money) less than $300 as contributions
+and subscriptions for the journal.  (c) On Thursday last, on the main
+street in Gold Hill, near noon, with neither warning nor cause assigned,
+by a powerful blow I was felled to the ground, and while down I was
+kicked by a man who it would seem had been led to believe that I had
+spoken derogatorily of him.  By whom he was so induced to believe I am as
+yet unable to say.  On Saturday last I was again assailed and beaten by a
+man who first informed me why he did so, and who persisted in making his
+assault even after the erroneous impression under which he also was at
+first laboring had been clearly and repeatedly pointed out.  This same
+man, after failing through intimidation to elicit from me the names of
+our editorial contributors, against giving which he knew me to be
+pledged, beat himself weary upon me with a raw hide, I not resisting, and
+then pantingly threatened me with permanent disfiguring mayhem, if ever
+again I should introduce his name into print, and who but a few minutes
+before his attack upon me assured me that the only reason I was
+"permitted" to reach home alive on Wednesday evening last (at which time
+the PEOPLE'S TRIBUNE was issued) was, that he deems me only half-witted,
+and be it remembered the very next morning I was knocked down and kicked
+by a man who seemed to be prepared for flight.
+
+[He sees doom impending:]
+
+WHEN WILL THE CIRCLE JOIN?
+How long before the whole of your prophecy will be fulfilled I cannot
+say, but under the shadow of so much fulfillment in so short a time, and
+with such threats from a man who is one of the most prominent exponents
+of the San Francisco mining-ring staring me and this whole community
+defiantly in the face and pointing to a completion of your augury, do you
+blame me for feeling that this communication is the last I shall ever
+write for the Press, especially when a sense alike of personal
+self-respect, of duty to this money-oppressed and fear-ridden community,
+and of American fealty to the spirit of true Liberty all command me, and
+each more loudly than love of life itself, to declare the name of that
+prominent man to be JOHN B. WINTERS, President of the Yellow Jacket
+Company, a political aspirant and a military General?  The name of his
+partially duped accomplice and abettor in this last marvelous assault, is
+no other than PHILIP LYNCH, Editor and Proprietor of the Gold Hill News.
+
+Despite the insult and wrong heaped upon me by John B. Winters, on
+Saturday afternoon, only a glimpse of which I shall be able to afford
+your readers, so much do I deplore clinching (by publicity) a serious
+mistake of any one, man or woman, committed under natural and not
+self-wrought passion, in view of his great apparent excitement at the
+time and in view of the almost perfect privacy of the assault, I am far
+from sure that I should not have given him space for repentance before
+exposing him, were it not that he himself has so far exposed the matter
+as to make it the common talk of the town that he has horsewhipped me.
+That fact having been made public, all the facts in connection need to be
+also, or silence on my part would seem more than singular, and with many
+would be proof either that I was conscious of some unworthy aim in
+publishing the article, or else that my "non-combatant" principles are
+but a convenient cloak alike of physical and moral cowardice.  I
+therefore shall try to present a graphic but truthful picture of this
+whole affair, but shall forbear all comments, presuming that the editors
+of our own journal, if others do not, will speak freely and fittingly
+upon this subject in our next number, whether I shall then be dead or
+living, for my death will not stop, though it may suspend, the
+publication of the PEOPLE'S TRIBUNE. [The "non-combatant" sticks to
+principle, but takes along a friend or two of a conveniently different
+stripe:]
+
+THE TRAP SET.
+On Saturday morning John B. Winters sent verbal word to the Gold Hill
+Assay Office that he desired to see me at the Yellow Jacket office.
+Though such a request struck me as decidedly cool in view of his own
+recent discourtesies to me there alike as a publisher and as a
+stockholder in the Yellow Jacket mine, and though it seemed to me more
+like a summons than the courteous request by one gentleman to another for
+a favor, hoping that some conference with Sharon looking to the
+betterment of mining matters in Nevada might arise from it, I felt
+strongly inclined to overlook what possibly was simply an oversight in
+courtesy.  But as then it had only been two days since I had been bruised
+and beaten under a hasty and false apprehension of facts, my caution was
+somewhat aroused.  Moreover I remembered sensitively his contemptuousness
+of manner to me at my last interview in his office.  I therefore felt it
+needful, if I went at all, to go accompanied by a friend whom he would
+not dare to treat with incivility, and whose presence with me might
+secure exemption from insult.  Accordingly I asked a neighbor to
+accompany me.
+
+THE TRAP ALMOST DETECTED.
+Although I was not then aware of this fact, it would seem that previous
+to my request this same neighbor had heard Dr. Zabriskie state publicly
+in a saloon, that Mr. Winters had told him he had decided either to kill
+or to horsewhip me, but had not finally decided on which.  My neighbor,
+therefore, felt unwilling to go down with me until he had first called on
+Mr. Winters alone.  He therefore paid him a visit.  From that interview
+he assured me that he gathered the impression that he did not believe I
+would have any difficulty with Mr. Winters, and that he (Winters) would
+call on me at four o'clock in my own office.
+
+MY OWN PRECAUTIONS.
+As Sheriff Cummings was in Gold Hill that afternoon, and as I desired to
+converse with him about the previous assault, I invited him to my office,
+and he came.  Although a half hour had passed beyond four o'clock, Mr.
+Winters had not called, and we both of us began preparing to go home.
+Just then, Philip Lynch, Publisher of the Gold Hill News, came in and
+said, blandly and cheerily, as if bringing good news:
+
+"Hello, John B. Winters wants to see you."
+
+I replied, "Indeed!  Why he sent me word that he would call on me here
+this afternoon at four o'clock!"
+
+"O, well, it don't do to be too ceremonious just now, he's in my office,
+and that will do as well--come on in, Winters wants to consult with you
+alone.  He's got something to say to you."
+
+Though slightly uneasy at this change of programme, yet believing that in
+an editor's house I ought to be safe, and anyhow that I would be within
+hail of the street, I hurriedly, and but partially whispered my dim
+apprehensions to Mr. Cummings, and asked him if he would not keep near
+enough to hear my voice in case I should call.  He consented to do so
+while waiting for some other parties, and to come in if he heard my voice
+or thought I had need of protection.
+
+On reaching the editorial part of the News office, which viewed from the
+street is dark, I did not see Mr. Winters, and again my misgivings arose.
+Had I paused long enough to consider the case, I should have invited
+Sheriff Cummings in, but as Lynch went down stairs, he said: "This way,
+Wiegand--it's best to be private," or some such remark.
+
+[I do not desire to strain the reader's fancy, hurtfully, and yet it
+would be a favor to me if he would try to fancy this lamb in battle, or
+the duelling ground or at the head of a vigilance committee--M.  T.:]
+
+I followed, and without Mr. Cummings, and without arms, which I never do
+or will carry, unless as a soldier in war, or unless I should yet come to
+feel I must fight a duel, or to join and aid in the ranks of a necessary
+Vigilance Committee.  But by following I made a fatal mistake.  Following
+was entering a trap, and whatever animal suffers itself to be caught
+should expect the common fate of a caged rat, as I fear events to come
+will prove.
+
+Traps commonly are not set for benevolence.
+[His body-guard is shut out:]
+
+THE TRAP INSIDE.
+I followed Lynch down stairs.  At their foot a door to the left opened
+into a small room.  From that room another door opened into yet another
+room, and once entered I found myself inveigled into what many will ever
+henceforth regard as a private subterranean Gold Hill den, admirably
+adapted in proper hands to the purposes of murder, raw or disguised, for
+from it, with both or even one door closed, when too late, I saw that I
+could not be heard by Sheriff Cummings, and from it, BY VIOLENCE AND BY
+FORCE, I was prevented from making a peaceable exit, when I thought I saw
+the studious object of this "consultation" was no other than to compass
+my killing, in the presence of Philip Lynch as a witness, as soon as by
+insult a proverbially excitable man should be exasperated to the point of
+assailing Mr. Winters, so that Mr. Lynch, by his conscience and by his
+well known tenderness of heart toward the rich and potent would be
+compelled to testify that he saw Gen. John B. Winters kill Conrad Wiegand
+in "self-defence."  But I am going too fast.
+
+OUR HOST.
+Mr. Lynch was present during the most of the time (say a little short of
+an hour), but three times he left the room.  His testimony, therefore,
+would be available only as to the bulk of what transpired.  On entering
+this carpeted den I was invited to a seat near one corner of the room.
+Mr. Lynch took a seat near the window.  J. B. Winters sat (at first) near
+the door, and began his remarks essentially as follows:
+
+"I have come here to exact of you a retraction, in black and white, of
+those damnably false charges which you have preferred against me in
+that---infamous lying sheet of yours, and you must declare yourself their
+author, that you published them knowing them to be false, and that your
+motives were malicious."
+
+"Hold, Mr. Winters.  Your language is insulting and your demand an
+enormity.  I trust I was not invited here either to be insulted or
+coerced.  I supposed myself here by invitation of Mr. Lynch, at your
+request."
+
+"Nor did I come here to insult you.  I have already told you that I am
+here for a very different purpose."
+
+"Yet your language has been offensive, and even now shows strong
+excitement.  If insult is repeated I shall either leave the room or call
+in Sheriff Cummings, whom I just left standing and waiting for me outside
+the door."
+
+"No, you won't, sir.  You may just as well understand it at once as not.
+Here you are my man, and I'll tell you why!  Months ago you put your
+property out of your hands, boasting that you did so to escape losing it
+on prosecution for libel."
+
+"It is true that I did convert all my immovable property into personal
+property, such as I could trust safely to others, and chiefly to escape
+ruin through possible libel suits."
+
+"Very good, sir.  Having placed yourself beyond the pale of the law, may
+God help your soul if you DON'T make precisely such a retraction as I
+have demanded.  I've got you now, and by--before you can get out of this
+room you've got to both write and sign precisely the retraction I have
+demanded, and before you go, anyhow--you---low-lived--lying---, I'll
+teach you what personal responsibility is outside of the law; and, by--,
+Sheriff Cummings and all the friends you've got in the world besides,
+can't save you, you---, etc.!  No, sir.  I'm alone now, and I'm prepared
+to be shot down just here and now rather than be villified by you as I
+have been, and suffer you to escape me after publishing those charges,
+not only here where I am known and universally respected, but where I am
+not personally known and may be injured."
+
+I confess this speech, with its terrible and but too plainly implied
+threat of killing me if I did not sign the paper he demanded, terrified
+me, especially as I saw he was working himself up to the highest possible
+pitch of passion, and instinct told me that any reply other than one of
+seeming concession to his demands would only be fuel to a raging fire,
+so I replied:
+
+"Well, if I've got to sign--," and then I paused some time.  Resuming,
+I said, "But, Mr. Winters, you are greatly excited.  Besides, I see you
+are laboring under a total misapprehension.  It is your duty not to
+inflame but to calm yourself.  I am prepared to show you, if you will
+only point out the article that you allude to, that you regard as
+'charges' what no calm and logical mind has any right to regard as such.
+Show me the charges, and I will try, at all events; and if it becomes
+plain that no charges have been preferred, then plainly there can be
+nothing to retract, and no one could rightly urge you to demand a
+retraction.  You should beware of making so serious a mistake, for
+however honest a man may be, every one is liable to misapprehend.
+Besides you assume that I am the author of some certain article which you
+have not pointed out.  It is hasty to do so."
+
+He then pointed to some numbered paragraphs in a TRIBUNE article, headed
+"What's the Matter with Yellow Jacket?" saying "That's what I refer to."
+
+To gain time for general reflection and resolution, I took up the paper
+and looked it over for awhile, he remaining silent, and as I hoped,
+cooling.  I then resumed saying, "As I supposed.  I do not admit having
+written that article, nor have you any right to assume so important a
+point, and then base important action upon your assumption.  You might
+deeply regret it afterwards.  In my published Address to the People, I
+notified the world that no information as to the authorship of any
+article would be given without the consent of the writer.  I therefore
+cannot honorably tell you who wrote that article, nor can you exact it."
+
+"If you are not the author, then I do demand to know who is?"
+
+"I must decline to say."
+
+"Then, by--, I brand you as its author, and shall treat you accordingly."
+
+"Passing that point, the most important misapprehension which I notice
+is, that you regard them as 'charges' at all, when their context, both at
+their beginning and end, show they are not.  These words introduce them:
+'Such an investigation [just before indicated], we think MIGHT result in
+showing some of the following points.' Then follow eleven specifications,
+and the succeeding paragraph shows that the suggested investigation
+'might EXONERATE those who are generally believed guilty.' You see,
+therefore, the context proves they are not preferred as charges, and this
+you seem to have overlooked."
+
+While making those comments, Mr. Winters frequently interrupted me in
+such a way as to convince me that he was resolved not to consider
+candidly the thoughts contained in my words.  He insisted upon it that
+they were charges, and "By--," he would make me take them back as
+charges, and he referred the question to Philip Lynch, to whom I then
+appealed as a literary man, as a logician, and as an editor, calling his
+attention especially to the introductory paragraph just before quoted.
+He replied, "if they are not charges, they certainly are insinuations,"
+whereupon Mr. Winters renewed his demands for retraction precisely such
+as he had before named, except that he would allow me to state who did
+write the article if I did not myself, and this time shaking his fist in
+my face with more cursings and epithets.
+
+When he threatened me with his clenched fist, instinctively I tried to
+rise from my chair, but Winters then forcibly thrust me down, as he did
+every other time (at least seven or eight), when under similar imminent
+danger of bruising by his fist (or for aught I could know worse than that
+after the first stunning blow), which he could easily and safely to
+himself have dealt me so long as he kept me down and stood over me.
+
+This fact it was, which more than anything else, convinced me that by
+plan and plot I was purposely made powerless in Mr. Winters' hands, and
+that he did not mean to allow me that advantage of being afoot, which he
+possessed.  Moreover, I then became convinced, that Philip Lynch (and for
+what reason I wondered) would do absolutely nothing to protect me in his
+own house.  I realized then the situation thoroughly.  I had found it
+equally vain to protest or argue, and I would make no unmanly appeal for
+pity, still less apologize.  Yet my life had been by the plainest
+possible implication threatened.  I was a weak man.  I was unarmed.  I
+was helplessly down, and Winters was afoot and probably armed.  Lynch was
+the only "witness."  The statements demanded, if given and not explained,
+would utterly sink me in my own self-respect, in my family's eyes, and in
+the eyes of the community.  On the other hand, should I give the author's
+name how could I ever expect that confidence of the People which I should
+no longer deserve, and how much dearer to me and to my family was my life
+than the life of the real author to his friends.  Yet life seemed dear
+and each minute that remained seemed precious if not solemn.  I sincerely
+trust that neither you nor any of your readers, and especially none with
+families, may ever be placed in such seeming direct proximity to death
+while obliged to decide the one question I was compelled to, viz.: What
+should I do--I, a man of family, and not as Mr. Winters is, "alone."
+[The reader is requested not to skip the following.--M.  T.:]
+
+STRATEGY AND MESMERISM.
+To gain time for further reflection, and hoping that by a seeming
+acquiescence I might regain my personal liberty, at least till I could
+give an alarm, or take advantage of some momentary inadvertence of
+Winters, and then without a cowardly flight escape, I resolved to write a
+certain kind of retraction, but previously had inwardly decided:
+
+First.--That I would studiously avoid every action which might be
+construed into the drawing of a weapon, even by a self-infuriated man, no
+matter what amount of insult might be heaped upon me, for it seemed to me
+that this great excess of compound profanity, foulness and epithet must
+be more than a mere indulgence, and therefore must have some object.
+"Surely in vain the net is spread in the sight of any bird."  Therefore,
+as before without thought, I thereafter by intent kept my hands away from
+my pockets, and generally in sight and spread upon my knees.
+
+Second.--I resolved to make no motion with my arms or hands which could
+possibly be construed into aggression.
+
+Third.--I resolved completely to govern my outward manner and suppress
+indignation.  To do this, I must govern my spirit.  To do that, by force
+of imagination I was obliged like actors on the boards to resolve myself
+into an unnatural mental state and see all things through the eyes of an
+assumed character.
+
+Fourth.--I resolved to try on Winters, silently, and unconsciously to
+himself a mesmeric power which I possess over certain kinds of people,
+and which at times I have found to work even in the dark over the lower
+animals.
+
+Does any one smile at these last counts?  God save you from ever being
+obliged to beat in a game of chess, whose stake is your life, you having
+but four poor pawns and pieces and your adversary with his full force
+unshorn.  But if you are, provided you have any strength with breadth of
+will, do not despair.  Though mesmeric power may not save you, it may
+help you; try it at all events.  In this instance I was conscious of
+power coming into me, and by a law of nature, I know Winters was
+correspondingly weakened.  If I could have gained more time I am sure he
+would not even have struck me.
+
+It takes time both to form such resolutions and to recite them.  That
+time, however, I gained while thinking of my retraction, which I first
+wrote in pencil, altering it from time to time till I got it to suit me,
+my aim being to make it look like a concession to demands, while in fact
+it should tersely speak the truth into Mr. Winters' mind.  When it was
+finished, I copied it in ink, and if correctly copied from my first draft
+it should read as follows.  In copying I do not think I made any material
+change.
+
+COPY.
+To Philip Lynch, Editor of the Gold Hill News: I learn that Gen. John B.
+Winters believes the following (pasted on) clipping from the PEOPLE'S
+TRIBUNE of January to contain distinct charges of mine against him
+personally, and that as such he desires me to retract them unqualifiedly.
+
+In compliance with his request, permit me to say that, although Mr.
+Winters and I see this matter differently, in view of his strong feelings
+in the premises, I hereby declare that I do not know those "charges" (if
+such they are) to be true, and I hope that a critical examination would
+altogether disprove them.
+                              CONRAD WIEGAND.
+                         Gold Hill, January 15, 1870.
+
+
+I then read what I had written and handed it to Mr. Lynch, whereupon Mr.
+Winters said:
+
+"That's not satisfactory, and it won't do;" and then addressing himself
+to Mr. Lynch, he further said: "How does it strike you?"
+
+"Well, I confess I don't see that it retracts anything."
+
+"Nor do I," said Winters; "in fact, I regard it as adding insult to
+injury.  Mr. Wiegand you've got to do better than that.  You are not the
+man who can pull wool over my eyes."
+
+"That, sir, is the only retraction I can write."
+
+"No it isn't, sir, and if you so much as say so again you do it at your
+peril, for I'll thrash you to within an inch of your life, and, by--,
+sir, I don't pledge myself to spare you even that inch either.  I want
+you to understand I have asked you for a very different paper, and that
+paper you've got to sign."
+
+"Mr. Winters, I assure you that I do not wish to irritate you, but, at
+the same time, it is utterly impossible for me to write any other paper
+than that which I have written.  If you are resolved to compel me to sign
+something, Philip Lynch's hand must write at your dictation, and if, when
+written, I can sign it I will do so, but such a document as you say you
+must have from me, I never can sign.  I mean what I say."
+
+"Well, sir, what's to be done must be done quickly, for I've been here
+long enough already.  I'll put the thing in another shape (and then
+pointing to the paper); don't you know those charges to be false?"
+
+"I do not."
+
+"Do you know them to be true?"
+
+"Of my own personal knowledge I do not."
+
+"Why then did you print them?"
+
+"Because rightly considered in their connection they are not charges, but
+pertinent and useful suggestions in answer to the queries of a
+correspondent who stated facts which are inexplicable."
+
+"Don't you know that I know they are false?"
+
+"If you do, the proper course is simply to deny them and court an
+investigation."
+
+"And do YOU claim the right to make ME come out and deny anything you may
+choose to write and print?"
+
+To that question I think I made no reply, and he then further said:
+
+"Come, now, we've talked about the matter long enough.  I want your final
+answer--did you write that article or not?"
+
+"I cannot in honor tell you who wrote it."
+
+"Did you not see it before it was printed?"
+
+"Most certainly, sir."
+
+"And did you deem it a fit thing to publish?"
+
+"Most assuredly, sir, or I would never have consented to its appearance.
+Of its authorship I can say nothing whatever, but for its publication I
+assume full, sole and personal responsibility."
+
+"And do you then retract it or not?"
+
+"Mr. Winters, if my refusal to sign such a paper as you have demanded
+must entail upon me all that your language in this room fairly implies,
+then I ask a few minutes for prayer."
+
+"Prayer!---you, this is not your hour for prayer--your time to pray was
+when you were writing those--lying charges.  Will you sign or not?"
+
+"You already have my answer."
+
+"What!  do you still refuse?"
+
+"I do, sir."
+
+"Take that, then," and to my amazement and inexpressible relief he drew
+only a rawhide instead of what I expected--a bludgeon or pistol.  With
+it, as he spoke, he struck at my left ear downwards, as if to tear it
+off, and afterwards on the side of the head.  As he moved away to get a
+better chance for a more effective shot, for the first time I gained a
+chance under peril to rise, and I did so pitying him from the very bottom
+of my soul, to think that one so naturally capable of true dignity, power
+and nobility could, by the temptations of this State, and by unfortunate
+associations and aspirations, be so deeply debased as to find in such
+brutality anything which he could call satisfaction--but the great hope
+for us all is in progress and growth, and John B.  Winters, I trust, will
+yet be able to comprehend my feelings.
+
+He continued to beat me with all his great force, until absolutely weary,
+exhausted and panting for breath.  I still adhered to my purpose of
+non-aggressive defence, and made no other use of my arms than to defend
+my head and face from further disfigurement.  The mere pain arising from
+the blows he inflicted upon my person was of course transient, and my
+clothing to some extent deadened its severity, as it now hides all
+remaining traces.
+
+When I supposed he was through, taking the butt end of his weapon and
+shaking it in my face, he warned me, if I correctly understood him, of
+more yet to come, and furthermore said, if ever I again dared introduce
+his name to print, in either my own or any other public journal, he would
+cut off my left ear (and I do not think he was jesting) and send me home
+to my family a visibly mutilated man, to be a standing warning to all
+low-lived puppies who seek to blackmail gentlemen and to injure their
+good names.  And when he did so operate, he informed me that his
+implement would not be a whip but a knife.
+
+When he had said this, unaccompanied by Mr. Lynch, as I remember it, he
+left the room, for I sat down by Mr. Lynch, exclaiming: "The man is mad
+--he is utterly mad--this step is his ruin--it is a mistake--it would be
+ungenerous in me, despite of all the ill usage I have here received, to
+expose him, at least until he has had an opportunity to reflect upon the
+matter.  I shall be in no haste."
+
+"Winters is very mad just now," replied Mr. Lynch, "but when he is
+himself he is one of the finest men I ever met.  In fact, he told me the
+reason he did not meet you upstairs was to spare you the humiliation of a
+beating in the sight of others."
+
+I submit that that unguarded remark of Philip Lynch convicts him of
+having been privy in advance to Mr. Winters' intentions whatever they may
+have been, or at least to his meaning to make an assault upon me, but I
+leave to others to determine how much censure an editor deserves for
+inveigling a weak, non-combatant man, also a publisher, to a pen of his
+own to be horsewhipped, if no worse, for the simple printing of what is
+verbally in the mouth of nine out of ten men, and women too, upon the
+street.
+
+While writing this account two theories have occurred to me as possibly
+true respecting this most remarkable assault:
+First--The aim may have been simply to extort from me such admissions as
+in the hands of money and influence would have sent me to the
+Penitentiary for libel.  This, however, seems unlikely, because any
+statements elicited by fear or force could not be evidence in law or
+could be so explained as to have no force.  The statements wanted so
+badly must have been desired for some other purpose.
+Second--The other theory has so dark and wilfully murderous a look that I
+shrink from writing it, yet as in all probability my death at the
+earliest practicable moment has already been decreed, I feel I should do
+all I can before my hour arrives, at least to show others how to break up
+that aristocratic rule and combination which has robbed all Nevada of
+true freedom, if not of manhood itself.  Although I do not prefer this
+hypothesis as a "charge," I feel that as an American citizen I still have
+a right both to think and to speak my thoughts even in the land of Sharon
+and Winters, and as much so respecting the theory of a brutal assault
+(especially when I have been its subject) as respecting any other
+apparent enormity.  I give the matter simply as a suggestion which may
+explain to the proper authorities and to the people whom they should
+represent, a well ascertained but notwithstanding a darkly mysterious
+fact.  The scheme of the assault may have been:
+
+First--To terrify me by making me conscious of my own helplessness after
+making actual though not legal threats against my life.
+
+Second--To imply that I could save my life only by writing or signing
+certain specific statements which if not subsequently explained would
+eternally have branded me as infamous and would have consigned my family
+to shame and want, and to the dreadful compassion and patronage of the
+rich.
+
+Third--To blow my brains out the moment I had signed, thereby preventing
+me from making any subsequent explanation such as could remove the
+infamy.
+
+Fourth--Philip Lynch to be compelled to testify that I was killed by John
+B.  Winters in self-defence, for the conviction of Winters would bring
+him in as an accomplice.  If that was the programme in John B.  Winters'
+mind nothing saved my life but my persistent refusal to sign, when that
+refusal seemed clearly to me to be the choice of death.
+
+The remarkable assertion made to me by Mr. Winters, that pity only spared
+my life on Wednesday evening last, almost compels me to believe that at
+first he could not have intended me to leave that room alive; and why I
+was allowed to, unless through mesmeric or some other invisible
+influence, I cannot divine.  The more I reflect upon this matter, the
+more probable as true does this horrible interpretation become.
+
+The narration of these things I might have spared both to Mr. Winters and
+to the public had he himself observed silence, but as he has both
+verbally spoken and suffered a thoroughly garbled statement of facts to
+appear in the Gold Hill News I feel it due to myself no less than to this
+community, and to the entire independent press of America and Great
+Britain, to give a true account of what even the Gold Hill News has
+pronounced a disgraceful affair, and which it deeply regrets because of
+some alleged telegraphic mistake in the account of it.  [Who received the
+erroneous telegrams?]
+
+Though he may not deem it prudent to take my life just now, the
+publication of this article I feel sure must compel Gen. Winters (with
+his peculiar views about his right to exemption from criticism by me) to
+resolve on my violent death, though it may take years to compass it.
+Notwithstanding I bear him no ill will; and if W. C. Ralston and William
+Sharon, and other members of the San Francisco mining and milling Ring
+feel that he above all other men in this State and California is the most
+fitting man to supervise and control Yellow Jacket matters, until I am
+able to vote more than half their stock I presume he will be retained to
+grace his present post.
+
+Meantime, I cordially invite all who know of any sort of important
+villainy which only can be cured by exposure (and who would expose it if
+they felt sure they would not be betrayed under bullying threats), to
+communicate with the PEOPLE'S TRIBUNE; for until I am murdered, so long
+as I can raise the means to publish, I propose to continue my efforts at
+least to revive the liberties of the State, to curb oppression, and to
+benefit man's world and God's earth.
+
+                              CONRAD WIEGAND.
+
+
+[It does seem a pity that the Sheriff was shut out, since the good sense
+of a general of militia and of a prominent editor failed to teach them
+that the merited castigation of this weak, half-witted child was a thing
+that ought to have been done in the street, where the poor thing could
+have a chance to run.  When a journalist maligns a citizen, or attacks
+his good name on hearsay evidence, he deserves to be thrashed for it,
+even if he is a "non-combatant" weakling; but a generous adversary would
+at least allow such a lamb the use of his legs at such a time.--M.  T.]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Roughing It, Part 8.
+by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROUGHING IT, PART 8. ***
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