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tribes had passed away or melted into the civiliza tion and life of the white man, here would be a people untouched, unchanged, to instruct and interest the traveller, the moralist, all men. When the world is done gathering gold, I said, it will come to these forests to look at nature, and be thankful for the wisdom and foresight of the age that preserved this vestige of an all but extinct race. There was a grandeur in the thought, a sort of sublimity, that I shall never feel again. A fervid nature, a vivid imagination, and, above all, the matchless and magnificent scenery, the strangely silent people, the half-pathetic stillness of the forests, all conspired to lift me up into an atmosphere where the soul laughs at doubt and never dreams of failure. A ship wrecked race, I said, shall here take rest. To the east and west, to the north and south, the busy com mercial world may swell and throb and beat and battle like a sea; but on this island, around this mountain, with their backs to this bulwark, they shall look untroubled on it all. Here they shall live as their fathers lived before the newer pyramids cast their little shadows, or camels kneeled in the dried-up seas.
I went to Yreka, the nearest convenient post-office, nearly one hundred miles away, and waited for my answers in vain. I wrote again, but with the same result.
I saw that I must learn something more of the white man, mix with him, observe his ma
