words for rock, and sky, and picture, and the names of her brothers and sisters. The mother, leaning on the railing of the rough balcony above, smiled down at me and counted them on her fingers-six in all and then crossed both hands on her breast with a proud and gentle gesture of triumph in the possession of the six. The cheerfulness of the whole family,-brown, ragged, ill-fed, sickly and numerous as they were,a cheerfulness which implied no hope or even understanding of anything better, was the saddest thing in the whole of that warm, sunny desolation.

Early morning at New Almaden is worth getting up betimes to see. Sometimes the valley is like a great lake filled with billows of fog,-pearly white billows, tumbling and surging with noiseless motion. It is more as if the clouds had all fallen out of the sky, leaving its blue intensity unbroken, and heaping the valley with fleecy whiteness. On windy mornings, the fog rolls grandly out to sea along the defiles of the triple chain of hills; when there is no wind, it rises and drifts in masses over the mountains, making the clear sunlight hazy for a moment before dissolving into it. After the rains, when the morning air has a frosty crispness, the mountains are outlined in sharp, dark blue against a sky of reddish-gold; even the tops of the distant red-woods may be traced, "bristling strange, in fiery light," along the horizon. As the sun lifts its head, the dark blue hills flush purple, long shadows stream

across the valley, the windows and spires of San José sparkle into sight, and the bay reveals itself, a streak of silver in the far distance. There is no chorus of birds to break the stillness.

The first morning sounds I remember noticing as peculiar to the place came up to us from a camp of Chinamen, happily out of sight, below the hill,-a cackling of discordant voices and a brazen beating and drumming which was explained to me as the Chinese cook's signal for breakfast, beating on a frying-pan. Half an hour later came the long ringing call of the seven o'clock whistle from the nearest shaft-house. Still later, a rustling and tinkling among the live-oak boughs, which screen the trail, announced the panadero from the Mexican camp. His gray mule pushed her way out from the scrub, with the great bread-baskets swinging, one on either side, their canvas covers damp with dew. The panadero sat in front serenely smoking a cigarette; a little bell tinkled at the mule's bridle. I was half sorry when we became a well-regulated household with bread of our own baking, for then no panadero stopped at the gate on the foggy mornings, and went swaying and tinkling up the trail.

I was not encouraged to investigate that camp of Chinamen below the hill, but once we went to "China Sam's" to buy a lantern. Like "Taffy," he wasn't "home" (there is another respect in which most

Chinamen are said to resemble "Taffy "), but his wife was. She seemed not more than fourteen years old-a mere child with the smallest hands. She carried a baby slung at her back in the folds of a dark-red silk scarf, which was crossed over her breast. The baby had a tiny black cap worked with embroidery on its head,-a chubby little thing, fast asleep, swaying from side to side as the small mother trotted about. She examined my dress, hands and ornaments, and, pointing to her baby, put her fingers on her under teeth and held up two fingers to tell me it had two teeth. Whenever I tried to say anything to her she laughed and said, "No sabe." She was very delicately formed, her hands small as a child's, and perfect in shape, yet when she took one of mine to look at a ring which had caught her eye, I felt uncomfortable at the touch of those slim, tawny fingers. She offered a cigar to my companion, which he accepted

Chinaman tried to get his place by underhand means. Sam carefully noted his movements; there was a journey to San José, which ended badly for the other Chinaman, and not too well for Sam, as he was tried soon after for murder. He spent a few months in jail, but he had only killed another Chinaman, and he was an excellent cook,-probably a much better one than his rival,-so he was finally acquitted. Two or three years ago he sent to China for his wife; she excused herself from coming on the plea of being too old for so long a journey, and sent this young girl instead. Sam says his young wife is "heap fool! Allee time play chile [with the child]!" and he beats the "chile" because it is a girl.

Toward the close of the dry season, when brown and dusty August burns into browner, dustier September, a keen remembrance of all cool, watery joys takes posses

-all these once common sounds and sights haunt the memory. Every day the dust-cloud grows thicker in the valley, the mountains fade almost out of sight against a sky which is all glare without color; a dry wind searches over the bare, brown hills for any lingering drop of moisture the sun may have left there; but morning and evening still keep a spell which makes one forget the burden of the day. At sunset the dust-cloud in the valley becomes a bar of color stretching across the base of the mountains, deep rose and orange, shading by softest gradations into cool blue. I remember one sunset especially. The clouds of dust rolling up from the valley

MEXICAN POTTERY.

MEXICAN CAMP-AFTER THE FIRE.

below were transformed by the light into level bars of color like a horizontal rainbow sweeping across the entire valley; above it the mountains rose; a wonderful variety of constantly changing hues made them look like something unreal. Then there came a sudden darkening of the lower part of the mountains so that the sunlit peaks seemed to float in the air above the bars of sun-colored dust, with a strip of cool shadow between. All is quiet; as in the morning, no birds chirp and twitter themselves to sleep; the stillness is only broken by the dull throbbing of the engine like a stifled breath in the distant shaft-house.

Every evening repeats this silent symphony of color, and every day it seems like something one has dreamed of. The rose and orange and blue have faded into the same dull, gray pall, which, to the valley stretched beneath, is never anything more; only those who see it from the hills know that sometimes this pall is a robe of glory.

We rode home one evening across the low, bare hills beyond the Mexican camp. It was during the "earth-shock weather" (as the miners call those last, dry, lurid weeks before the early rain-fall), and one of the dull, red sunsets, peculiar to that season, had been flaming on the sky and mountains; its lingering glow colored the edge of the early moonlight. The soil here

has a vermilion tinge, which is stronger after sundown; it was intensified that evening by the flush in the sky. There was no positive light or shadow, only a pink glow spreading over all the wide landscape, except where the cañon held its glooms, and above it a young moon slowly brightened in a sky of twilight blue. It was in sentiment like William Morris's poetry. I always think of it as the "land east of the sun, and west of the moon." While the moon is young and her light faint and pale, one can scarcely mark the time when the lingering twilight passes into the soft, dim radiance that spreads like a spell over the valley, across part of which lies the shadow of a mountain. We cannot see the moon itself, only its light. The mountains opposite remain always shrouded in silence and mystery. But when nights come for the full moon the place is a paradise: in the foreground the winding trails with black masses of shadow from the clumps of liveoak crossing them, the dark mountain lines rising grandly on every side, the mysterious depths of the cañons, the lights of the Mexican camp scattered over the hills, the closer clustered lights of the Cornish camp on the lower range, the wide, dim valley below, and the far-off barrier of mountains.

WOOD-PACKERS.

At this season every one is storing up wood in anticipation of the winter rains. Every day a train of loaded mules winds over the hills from the "wood-packers' "

camp in the cañon. They are fine at a distance, but I did not fully appreciate them until a troop came down the trail one morning, in charge of an old Mexican, and stopped at our gate. I could then study the delightful intricacy of their pack-saddles, the clumsy leather breeching, the cruel "cincho," the knots and ends and lacings of leather string, the bits of colored cloth escaping from the padding, and the different phase of depression each mule exhibited under its burden.

The wood is fastened with ropes in two great bundles, one on either side, giving the mule from front or rear, the appearance of an animated wood-pile. Three hundred pounds makes a load or "carga." Two Mexicans came with the mules, drove them into the yard and unloaded the wood. I felt glad to see the weary burden fall from those "galled jades." I was on the piazza watching them; when I asked the elder of the men how much to pay for the wood, he told me in broken English; and as he was below, the piazza on that side being high above the yard,-he unrolled a red silk handkerchief from his neck, made it into a ball and tossed it up. The maid came out and rolled the money up in it and tossed it down. with a face the color

um saw.

He was an old man of chocolate and with shaggy gray hair. He smiled and looked like something inhuman in his gaunt old age.

A Mexican brought our wood-of course a Chinaman chopped

Come back to-mollow! "Allee light!" John said, and departed with a smiling face. Next morning another came who had succeeded in catching a saw.

climbing or descending the trail with buckets of water on each side. A procession of half a dozen will be driven by a man or boy mounted on one behind. The donkeys and mules in their picturesque trappings are in fact the great feature of the place. The wood-packers and water-carriers are as fine as anything in the Orient.

There is a little spring by the road-sidemerely a barrel sunk in the ground; overhead is a shaggy bank with gray roots projecting in light, deep shadows falling over the water. Above is the mountainside, below the wide outlook across the valley to the coast range opposite. Here saw one afternoon an old donkey, standing perfectly motionless looking into the pool. He was unsaddled, but his back showed the galled places his burdens had made. His ears and under-lip drooped. There were a few dead leaves dropping

I

When summer passes into winter a new phase of the climate is experienced. Morning and evening we are wrapped in fog that blows in wildly from the sea, fills the valley and rises until we are muffled in its chill whiteness. Going out for a walk after breakfast, I seem to be the only person in the whole world. It is impossible to describe the curious feeling it gives one to walk in this veiled landscape. I pass along the edge of steep ravines and know that on ahead, where the road goes out of sight around a bend of the mountain, lies a great stretch of valley and mountain, but it is all a blank white wall everywhere. It is always very still here (except just in the camps where children are playing in the streets) and the fog seems to deaden what little sound there usually is. The silence then is complete.

What strange Christmas weather at New