Trustful in this fine weather, we kept the house for kitchen and
bedroom, and used the platform as our summer parlour.  The sense of
privacy, as I have said already, was complete.  We could look over
the clump on miles of forest and rough hilltop; our eyes commanded
some of Napa Valley, where the train ran, and the little country
townships sat so close together along the line of the rail.  But
here there was no man to intrude.  None but the Hansons were our
visitors.  Even they came but at long intervals, or twice daily, at
a stated hour, with milk.  So our days, as they were never
interrupted, drew out to the greater length; hour melted insensibly
into hour; the household duties, though they were many, and some of
them laborious, dwindled into mere islets of business in a sea of
sunny day-time; and it appears to me, looking back, as though the
far greater part of our life at Silverado had been passed, propped
upon an elbow, or seated on a plank, listening to the silence that
there is among the hills.

My work, it is true, was over early in the morning.  I rose before
any one else, lit the stove, put on the water to boil, and strolled
forth upon the platform to wait till it was ready.  Silverado would
then be still in shadow, the sun shining on the mountain higher up.
A clean smell of trees, a smell of the earth at morning, hung in
the air.  Regularly, every day, there was a single bird, not
singing, but awkwardly chirruping among the green madronas, and the
sound was cheerful, natural, and stirring.  It did not hold the
attention, nor interrupt the thread of meditation, like a blackbird
or a nightingale; it was mere woodland prattle, of which the mind
was conscious like a perfume.  The freshness of these morning
seasons remained with me far on into the day.

As soon as the kettle boiled, I made porridge and coffee; and that,
beyond the literal drawing of water, and the preparation of
kindling, which it would be hyperbolical to call the hewing of
wood, ended my domestic duties for the day.  Thenceforth my wife
laboured single-handed in the palace, and I lay or wandered on the
platform at my own sweet will.  The little corner near the forge,
where we found a refuge under the madronas from the unsparing early
sun, is indeed connected in my mind with some nightmare encounters
over Euclid, and the Latin Grammar.  These were known as Sam's
lessons.  He was supposed to be the victim and the sufferer; but
here there must have been some misconception, for whereas I
generally retired to bed after one of these engagements, he was no
sooner set free than he dashed up to the Chinaman's house, where he
had installed a printing press, that great element of civilization,
and the sound of his labours would be faintly audible about the
canyon half the day.

To walk at all was a laborious business; the foot sank and slid,
the boots were cut to pieces, among sharp, uneven, rolling stones.
When we crossed the platform in any direction, it was usual to lay
a course, following as much as possible the line of waggon rails.
Thus, if water were to be drawn, the water-carrier left the house
along some tilting planks that we had laid down, and not laid down
very well.  These carried him to that great highroad, the railway;
and the railway served him as far as to the head of the shaft.  But
from thence to the spring and back again he made the best of his
unaided way, staggering among the stones, and wading in low growth
of the calcanthus, where the rattlesnakes lay hissing at his
passage.  Yet I liked to draw water.  It was pleasant to dip the
gray metal pail into the clean, colourless, cool water; pleasant to
carry it back, with the water ripping at the edge, and a broken
sunbeam quivering in the midst.

But the extreme roughness of the walking confined us in common
practice to the platform, and indeed to those parts of it that were
most easily accessible along the line of rails.  The rails came
straight forward from the shaft, here and there overgrown with
little green bushes, but still entire, and still carrying a truck,
which it was Sam's delight to trundle to and fro by the hour with
various ladings.  About midway down the platform, the railroad
trended to the right, leaving our house and coasting along the far
side within a few yards of the madronas and the forge, and not far
of the latter, ended in a sort of platform on the edge of the dump.
There, in old days, the trucks were tipped, and their load sent
thundering down the chute.  There, besides, was the only spot where
we could approach the margin of the dump.  Anywhere else, you took
your life in your right hand when you came within a yard and a half
to peer over.  For at any moment the dump might begin to slide and
carry you down and bury you below its ruins.  Indeed, the
neighbourhood of an old mine is a place beset with dangers.  For as
still as Silverado was, at any moment the report of rotten wood
might tell us that the platform had fallen into the shaft; the dump
might begin to pour into the road below; or a wedge slip in the
great upright seam, and hundreds of tons of mountain bury the scene
of our encampment.

I have already compared the dump to a rampart, built certainly by
some rude people, and for prehistoric wars.  It was likewise a
frontier.  All below was green and woodland, the tall pines soaring
one above another, each with a firm outline and full spread of
bough.  All above was arid, rocky, and bald.  The great spout of
broken mineral, that had dammed the canyon up, was a creature of
man's handiwork, its material dug out with a pick and powder, and
spread by the service of the tracks.  But nature herself, in that
upper district, seemed to have had an eye to nothing besides
mining; and even the natural hill-side was all sliding gravel and
precarious boulder.  Close at the margin of the well leaves would
decay to skeletons and mummies, which at length some stronger gust
would carry clear of the canyon and scatter in the subjacent woods.
Even moisture and decaying vegetable matter could not, with all
nature's alchemy, concoct enough soil to nourish a few poor
grasses.  It is the same, they say, in the neighbourhood of all
silver mines; the nature of that precious rock being stubborn with
quartz and poisonous with cinnabar.  Both were plenty in our
Silverado.  The stones sparkled white in the sunshine with quartz;
they were all stained red with cinnabar.  Here, doubtless, came the
Indians of yore to paint their faces for the war-path; and
cinnabar, if I remember rightly, was one of the few articles of
Indian commerce.  Now, Sam had it in his undisturbed possession, to
pound down and slake, and paint his rude designs with.  But to me
it had always a fine flavour of poetry, compounded out of Indian
story and Hawthornden's allusion:


"Desire, alas! I desire a Zeuxis new,
From Indies borrowing gold, from Eastern skies
Most bright cinoper . . ."


Yet this is but half the picture; our Silverado platform has
another side to it.  Though there was no soil, and scarce a blade
of grass, yet out of these tumbled gravel-heaps and broken
boulders, a flower garden bloomed as at home in a conservatory.
Calcanthus crept, like a hardy weed, all over our rough parlour,
choking the railway, and pushing forth its rusty, aromatic cones
from between two blocks of shattered mineral.  Azaleas made a big
snow-bed just above the well.  The shoulder of the hill waved white
with Mediterranean heath.  In the crannies of the ledge and about
the spurs of the tall pine, a red flowering stone-plant hung in
clusters.  Even the low, thorny chaparral was thick with pea-like
blossom.  Close at the foot of our path nutmegs prospered,
delightful to the sight and smell.  At sunrise, and again late at
night, the scent of the sweet bay trees filled the canyon, and the
down-blowing night wind must have borne it hundreds of feet into
the outer air.

All this vegetation, to be sure, was stunted.  The madrona was here
no bigger than the manzanita; the bay was but a stripling shrub;
the very pines, with four or five exceptions in all our upper
canyon, were not so tall as myself, or but a little taller, and the
most of them came lower than my waist.  For a prosperous forest
tree, we must look below, where the glen was crowded with green
spires.  But for flowers and ravishing perfume, we had none to
envy:  our heap of road-metal was thick with bloom, like a hawthorn
in the front of June; our red, baking angle in the mountain, a
laboratory of poignant scents.  It was an endless wonder to my
mind, as I dreamed about the platform, following the progress of
the shadows, where the madrona with its leaves, the azalea and
calcanthus with their blossoms, could find moisture to support such
thick, wet, waxy growths, or the bay tree collect the ingredients
of its perfume.  But there they all grew together, healthy, happy,
and happy-making, as though rooted in a fathom of black soil.

Nor was it only vegetable life that prospered.  We had, indeed, few
birds, and none that had much of a voice or anything worthy to be
called a song.  My morning comrade had a thin chirp, unmusical and
monotonous, but friendly and pleasant to hear.  He had but one
rival:  a fellow with an ostentatious cry of near an octave
descending, not one note of which properly followed another.  This
is the only bird I ever knew with a wrong ear; but there was
something enthralling about his performance.  You listened and
listened, thinking each time he must surely get it right; but no,
it was always wrong, and always wrong the same way.  Yet he seemed
proud of his song, delivered it with execution and a manner of his
own, and was charming to his mate.  A very incorrect, incessant
human whistler had thus a chance of knowing how his own music
pleased the world.  Two great birds--eagles, we thought--dwelt at
the top of the canyon, among the crags that were printed on the
sky.  Now and again, but very rarely, they wheeled high over our
heads in silence, or with a distant, dying scream; and then, with a
fresh impulse, winged fleetly forward, dipped over a hilltop, and
were gone.  They seemed solemn and ancient things, sailing the blue
air:  perhaps co-oeval with the mountain where they haunted,
perhaps emigrants from Rome, where the glad legions may have
shouted to behold them on the morn of battle.

But if birds were rare, the place abounded with rattlesnakes--the
rattlesnake's nest, it might have been named.  Wherever we brushed
among the bushes, our passage woke their angry buzz.  One dwelt
habitually in the wood-pile, and sometimes, when we came for
firewood, thrust up his small head between two logs, and hissed at
the intrusion.  The rattle has a legendary credit; it is said to be
awe-inspiring, and, once heard, to stamp itself for ever in the
memory.  But the sound is not at all alarming; the hum of many
insects, and the buzz of the wasp convince the ear of danger quite
as readily.  As a matter of fact, we lived for weeks in Silverado,
coming and going, with rattles sprung on every side, and it never
occurred to us to be afraid.  I used to take sun-baths and do
calisthenics in a certain pleasant nook among azalea and
calcanthus, the rattles whizzing on every side like spinning-
wheels, and the combined hiss or buzz rising louder and angrier at
any sudden movement; but I was never in the least impressed, nor
ever attacked.  It was only towards the end of our stay, that a man
down at Calistoga, who was expatiating on the terrifying nature of
the sound, gave me at last a very good imitation; and it burst on
me at once that we dwelt in the very metropolis of deadly snakes,
and that the rattle was simply the commonest noise in Silverado.
Immediately on our return, we attacked the Hansons on the subject.
They had formerly assured us that our canyon was favoured, like
Ireland, with an entire immunity from poisonous reptiles; but, with
the perfect inconsequence of the natural man, they were no sooner
found out than they went off at score in the contrary direction,
and we were told that in no part of the world did rattlesnakes
attain to such a monstrous bigness as among the warm, flower-dotted
rocks of Silverado.  This is a contribution rather to the natural
history of the Hansons, than to that of snakes.

One person, however, better served by his instinct, had known the
rattle from the first; and that was Chuchu, the dog.  No rational
creature has ever led an existence more poisoned by terror than
that dog's at Silverado.  Every whiz of the rattle made him bound.
His eyes rolled; he trembled; he would be often wet with sweat.
One of our great mysteries was his terror of the mountain.  A
little away above our nook, the azaleas and almost all the
vegetation ceased.  Dwarf pines not big enough to be Christmas
trees, grew thinly among loose stone and gravel scaurs.  Here and
there a big boulder sat quiescent on a knoll, having paused there
till the next rain in his long slide down the mountain.  There was
here no ambuscade for the snakes, you could see clearly where you
trod; and yet the higher I went, the more abject and appealing
became Chuchu's terror.  He was an excellent master of that
composite language in which dogs communicate with men, and he would
assure me, on his honour, that there was some peril on the
mountain; appeal to me, by all that I held holy, to turn back; and
at length, finding all was in vain, and that I still persisted,
ignorantly foolhardy, he would suddenly whip round and make a bee-
line down the slope for Silverado, the gravel showering after him.
What was he afraid of?  There were admittedly brown bears and
California lions on the mountain; and a grizzly visited Rufe's
poultry yard not long before, to the unspeakable alarm of Caliban,
who dashed out to chastise the intruder, and found himself, by
moonlight, face to face with such a tartar.  Something at least
there must have been:  some hairy, dangerous brute lodged
permanently among the rocks a little to the north-west of
Silverado, spending his summer thereabout, with wife and family.

And there was, or there had been, another animal.  Once, under the
broad daylight, on that open stony hillside, where the baby pines
were growing, scarcely tall enough to be a badge for a MacGregor's
bonnet, I came suddenly upon his innocent body, lying mummified by
the dry air and sun:  a pigmy kangaroo.  I am ingloriously ignorant
of these subjects; had never heard of such a beast; thought myself
face to face with some incomparable sport of nature; and began to
cherish hopes of immortality in science.  Rarely have I been
conscious of a stranger thrill than when I raised that singular
creature from the stones, dry as a board, his innocent heart long
quiet, and all warm with sunshine.  His long hind legs were stiff,
his tiny forepaws clutched upon his breast, as if to leap; his poor
life cut short upon that mountain by some unknown accident.  But
the kangaroo rat, it proved, was no such unknown animal; and my
discovery was nothing.

Crickets were not wanting.  I thought I could make out exactly four
of them, each with a corner of his own, who used to make night
musical at Silverado.  In the matter of voice, they far excelled
the birds, and their ringing whistle sounded from rock to rock,
calling and replying the same thing, as in a meaningless opera.
Thus, children in full health and spirits shout together, to the
dismay of neighbours; and their idle, happy, deafening
vociferations rise and fall, like the song of the crickets.  I used
to sit at night on the platform, and wonder why these creatures
were so happy; and what was wrong with man that he also did not
wind up his days with an hour or two of shouting; but I suspect
that all long-lived animals are solemn.  The dogs alone are hardly
used by nature; and it seems a manifest injustice for poor Chuchu
to die in his teens, after a life so shadowed and troubled,
continually shaken with alarm, and the tear of elegant sentiment
permanently in his eye.

There was another neighbour of ours at Silverado, small but very
active, a destructive fellow.  This was a black, ugly fly--a bore,
the Hansons called him--who lived by hundreds in the boarding of
our house.  He entered by a round hole, more neatly pierced than a
man could do it with a gimlet, and he seems to have spent his life
in cutting out the interior of the plank, but whether as a dwelling
or a store-house, I could never find.  When I used to lie in bed in
the morning for a rest--we had no easy-chairs in Silverado--I would
hear, hour after hour, the sharp cutting sound of his labours, and
from time to time a dainty shower of sawdust would fall upon the
blankets.  There lives no more industrious creature than a bore.

And now that I have named to the reader all our animals and insects
without exception--only I find I have forgotten the flies--he will
be able to appreciate the singular privacy and silence of our days.
It was not only man who was excluded:  animals, the song of birds,
the lowing of cattle, the bleating of sheep, clouds even, and the
variations of the weather, were here also wanting; and as, day
after day, the sky was one dome of blue, and the pines below us
stood motionless in the still air, so the hours themselves were
marked out from each other only by the series of our own affairs,
and the sun's great period as he ranged westward through the
heavens.  The two birds cackled a while in the early morning; all
day the water tinkled in the shaft, the bores ground sawdust in the
planking of our crazy palace--infinitesimal sounds; and it was only
with the return of night that any change would fall on our
surroundings, or the four crickets begin to flute together in the
dark.

Indeed, it would be hard to exaggerate the pleasure that we took in
the approach of evening.  Our day was not very long, but it was
very tiring.  To trip along unsteady planks or wade among shifting
stones, to go to and fro for water, to clamber down the glen to the
Toll House after meat and letters, to cook, to make fires and beds,
were all exhausting to the body.  Life out of doors, besides, under
the fierce eye of day, draws largely on the animal spirits.  There
are certain hours in the afternoon when a man, unless he is in
strong health or enjoys a vacant mind, would rather creep into a
cool corner of a house and sit upon the chairs of civilization.
About that time, the sharp stones, the planks, the upturned boxes
of Silverado, began to grow irksome to my body; I set out on that
hopeless, never-ending quest for a more comfortable posture; I
would be fevered and weary of the staring sun; and just then he
would begin courteously to withdraw his countenance, the shadows
lengthened, the aromatic airs awoke, and an indescribable but happy
change announced the coming of the night.

The hours of evening, when we were once curtained in the friendly
dark, sped lightly.  Even as with the crickets, night brought to us
a certain spirit of rejoicing.  It was good to taste the air; good
to mark the dawning of the stars, as they increased their
glittering company; good, too, to gather stones, and send them
crashing down the chute, a wave of light.  It seemed, in some way,
the reward and the fulfilment of the day.  So it is when men dwell
in the open air; it is one of the simple pleasures that we lose by
living cribbed and covered in a house, that, though the coming of
the day is still the most inspiriting, yet day's departure, also,
and the return of night refresh, renew, and quiet us; and in the
pastures of the dusk we stand, like cattle, exulting in the absence
of the load.

Our nights wore never cold, and they were always still, but for one
remarkable exception.  Regularly, about nine o'clock, a warm wind
sprang up, and blew for ten minutes, or maybe a quarter of an hour,
right down the canyon, fanning it well out, airing it as a mother
airs the night nursery before the children sleep.  As far as I
could judge, in the clear darkness of the night, this wind was
purely local:  perhaps dependant on the configuration of the glen.
At least, it was very welcome to the hot and weary squatters; and
if we were not abed already, the springing up of this lilliputian
valley-wind would often be our signal to retire.

I was the last to go to bed, as I was still the first to rise.
Many a night I have strolled about the platform, taking a bath of
darkness before I slept.  The rest would be in bed, and even from
the forge I could hear them talking together from bunk to bunk.  A
single candle in the neck of a pint bottle was their only
illumination; and yet the old cracked house seemed literally
bursting with the light.  It shone keen as a knife through all the
vertical chinks; it struck upward through the broken shingles; and
through the eastern door and window, it fell in a great splash upon
the thicket and the overhanging rock.  You would have said a
conflagration, or at the least a roaring forge; and behold, it was
but a candle.  Or perhaps it was yet more strange to see the
procession moving bedwards round the corner of the house, and up
the plank that brought us to the bedroom door; under the immense
spread of the starry heavens, down in a crevice of the giant
mountain these few human shapes, with their unshielded taper, made
so disproportionate a figure in the eye and mind.  But the more he
is alone with nature, the greater man and his doings bulk in the
consideration of his fellow-men.  Miles and miles away upon the
opposite hill-tops, if there were any hunter belated or any
traveller who had lost his way, he must have stood, and watched and
wondered, from the time the candle issued from the door of the
assayer's office till it had mounted the plank and disappeared
again into the miners' dormitory.