and the scenery back of it so beautiful. And the roar of the water falling over the Mill Dam gave it a thrill never to be forgotten by me. For years it held me in that trance. It inspired me to draw pictures, and day after day, month after month I used to draw its people on the smooth surface of the pine boxes that brought dry goods to the town, and, strangely, many of them I mounted on fiery Arabian steeds, and the strangest part of Silverton is that it never releases me a day from its hold. A day never passes that I don’t hurry over its streets and see its last remaining pioneers, and in my vision replace those that have gone. I yet hear the roar of Silver Creek as it pours like a sheet of silver over the Mill Dam below the “old red shop;” then again I see it each day as the years go by as I first remember seeing it the evening I lost the copper toe from the new boot. I have thought of it while seated in the ruins of the Coloseum at Rome, thought of it in London and Paris and Constantinople, thought of it while resting in the death-like silence of the shadow of the Sphinx, and told of it near the Euphrates River in Arabia, while among the wild tribes
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14
PREFACE
