Page:The New Penelope.djvu/203



HE mining season was ended in the narrow valley of one of the Sacramento's northern tributaries, as, in fact, it was throughout the whole region of "placer diggings;" for it was October of a dry year, and water had failed early in all the camps. The afternoon of a long, idle day at Wilson's Bar was drawing to a close. The medium through which the sun's hot rays reached the parched earth was one of red dust, the effect of which was that of a mellow Indian summer haze, pleasing to the eye, if abhorred by the skin and lungs, compelled to take it in, whether brute or human. In the landscape was an incongruous mingling of beauty and deformity; the first, the work of nature; the last, the marring of man.

To the east and to the west rose hills, whose ruggedness was softened by distance to outlines of harmonious grandeur. Scattered over the valley between them, the stately "digger," or nut-pines, grew at near intervals, singly or in groups of three or five, harmonizing by their pale gray-green with the other half-tints of earth, air, and sky. Following the course of the dried up river was a line, more or less continuous, of the evergreen oaks, whose round, spreading tops are such a grateful relief to the eye in the immense levels of the lower Sacramento and upper San Joaquin valleys. Depending from these, hung long, venerable-looking beards of gray moss, as devoid of color as everything else in the landscape; everything else, except the California wild grape, which, so far from being devoid of color, was gorgeous enough in itself to lighten up the whole foreground of the picture. Growing in clumps upon the ground, it was gay as a bed of tulips. Clambering up occasional tall trees, it flaunted its crimson and party-colored