devotion of a curate. He took an interest in education, was

an active member of the local school-board, and when I was
there, he had recently lost the schoolhouse key. His waggon

was broken, but it never seemed to occur to him to mend it.
Like all truly idle people, he had an artistic eye. He chose

the print stuff for his wife's dresses, and counselled her in
the making of a patchwork quilt, always, as she thought,

wrongly, but to the more educated eye, always with bizarre
and admirable taste - the taste of an Indian. With all this,

he was a perfect, unoffending gentleman in word and act.
Take his clay pipe from him, and he was fit for any society

but that of fools. Quiet as he was, there burned a deep,
permanentexcitement in his dark blue eyes; and when this

grave man smiled, it was like sunshine in a shady place.
Mrs. Hanson (NEE, if you please, Lovelands) was more

commonplace than her lord. She was a comely woman, too,
plump, fair-coloured, with wonderful white teeth; and in her

print dresses (chosen by Rufe) and with a large sun-bonnet
shading her valued complexion, made, I assure you, a very

agreeable figure. But she was on the surface, what there was
of her, out-spoken and loud-spoken. Her noisy laughter had

none of the charm of one of Hanson's rare, slow-spreading
smiles; there was no reticence, no mystery, no manner about

the woman: she was a first-class dairymaid, but her husband
was an unknown quantity between the savage and the nobleman.

She was often in and out with us, merry, and healthy, and
fair; he came far seldomer - only, indeed, when there was

business, or now and again, to pay a visit of ceremony,
brushed up for the occasion, with his wife on his arm, and a

clean clay pipe in his teeth. These visits, in our forest
state, had quite the air of an event, and turned our red

canyon into a salon.
Such was the pair who ruled in the old Silverado Hotel, among

the windy trees, on the mountain shoulder overlooking the
whole length of Napa Valley, as the man aloft looks down on

the ship's deck. There they kept house, with sundry horses
and fowls, and a family of sons, Daniel Webster, and I think

George Washington, among the number. Nor did they want
visitors. An old gentleman, of singular stolidity, and

called Breedlove - I think he had crossed the plains in the
same caravan with Rufe - housed with them for awhile during

our stay; and they had besides a permanent lodger, in the
form of Mrs. Hanson's brother, Irvine Lovelands. I spell

Irvine by guess; for I could get no information on the
subject, just as I could never find out, in spite of many

inquiries, whether or not Rufe was a contraction for Rufus.
They were all cheerfully at sea about their names in that

generation. And this is surely the more notable where the
names are all so strange, and even the family names appear to

have been coined. At one time, at least, the ancestors of
all these Alvins and Alvas, Loveinas, Lovelands, and

Breedloves, must have taken serious council and found a
certain poetry in these denominations; that must have been,

then, their form of literature. But still times change; and
their next descendants, the George Washingtons and Daniel

Websters, will at least be clear upon the point. And anyway,
and however his name should be spelt, this Irvine Lovelands

was the most unmitigated Caliban I ever knew.
Our very first morning at Silverado, when we were full of

business, patching up doors and windows, making beds and
seats, and getting our rough lodging into shape, Irvine and

his sister made their appearance together, she for
neighbourliness and general curiosity; he, because he was

working for me, to my sorrow, cutting firewood at I forget
how much a day. The way that he set about cutting wood was

characteristic. We were at that moment patching up and
unpacking in the kitchen. Down he sat on one side, and down

sat his sister on the other. Both were chewing pine-tree
gum, and he, to my annoyance, accompanied that simple

pleasure with profuse expectoration. She rattled away,
talking up hill and down dale, laughing, tossing her head,

showing her brilliant teeth. He looked on in silence, now
spitting heavily on the floor, now putting his head back and

uttering a loud, discordant, joyless laugh. He had a tangle
of shock hair, the colour of wool; his mouth was a grin;

although as strong as a horse, he looked neither heavy nor
yet adroit, only leggy, coltish, and in the road. But it was

plain he was in high spirits, thoroughly enjoying his visit;
and he laughed franklywhenever we failed to accomplish what

we were about. This was scarcely helpful: it was even, to
amateur carpenters, embarrassing; but it lasted until we

knocked off work and began to get dinner. Then Mrs. Hanson
remembered she should have been gone an hour ago; and the

pair retired, and the lady's laughter died away among the
nutmegs down the path. That was Irvine's first day's work in

my employment - the devil take him!
The next morning he returned and, as he was this time alone,

he bestowed his conversation upon us with great liberality.
He prided himself on his intelligence; asked us if we knew

the school ma'am. HE didn't think much of her, anyway. He
had tried her, he had. He had put a question to her. If a

tree a hundred feet high were to fall a foot a day, how long
would it take to fall right down? She had not been able to

solve the problem. "She don't know nothing," he opined. He
told us how a friend of his kept a school with a revolver,

and chuckled mightily over that; his friend could teach
school, he could. All the time he kept chewing gum and

spitting. He would stand a while looking down; and then he
would toss back his shock of hair, and laugh hoarsely, and

spit, and bring forward a new subject. A man, he told us,
who bore a grudge against him, had poisoned his dog. "That

was a low thing for a man to do now, wasn't it? It wasn't
like a man, that, nohow. But I got even with him: I pisoned

HIS dog." His clumsyutterance, his rude embarrassed manner,
set a fresh value on the stupidity of his remarks. I do not

think I ever appreciated the meaning of two words until I
knew Irvine - the verb, loaf, and the noun, oaf; between

them, they complete his portrait. He could lounge, and
wriggle, and rub himself against the wall, and grin, and be

more in everybody's way than any other two people that I ever
set my eyes on. Nothing that he did became him; and yet you

were conscious that he was one of your own race, that his
mind was cumbrously at work, revolving the problem of

existence like a quid of gum, and in his own cloudy manner
enjoying life, and passing judgment on his fellows. Above

all things, he was delighted with himself. You would not
have thought it, from his uneasy manners and troubled,

struggling utterance; but he loved himself to the marrow, and
was happy and proud like a peacock on a rail.

His self-esteem was, indeed, the one joint in his harness.
He could be got to work, and even kept at work, by flattery.

As long as my wife stood over him, crying out how strong he
was, so long exactly he would stick to the matter in hand;

and the moment she turned her back, or ceased to praise him,
he would stop. His physical strength was wonderful; and to

have a woman stand by and admire his achievements, warmed his
heart like sunshine. Yet he was as cowardly as he was