There was little of pleasant interest in the next eighteen months of
Jack's career. His share of the globe was a twenty-foot circle around
a pole in the yard. The blue hills of the offing, the nearer pine
grove, and even the ranch-house itself were fixed stars, far away and
sending merely faint suggestions of their splendors to his not very
bright eyes. Even the horses and men were outside his little sphere
and related to him about as much as comets are to the earth. The very
tricks that had made him valued were being forgotten as Jack grew up
in chains.

At first a butter-firkin had made him an ample den, but he rapidly
passed through the various stages--butter-firkin, nail-keg,
flour-barrel, oil-barrel--and had now to be graded as a good average
hogshead Bear, though he was far from filling that big round wooden
cavern that formed his latest den.

The ranch hotel lay just where the foothills of the Sierras with their
groves of live oaks were sloping into the golden plains of the
Sacramento. Nature had showered on it every wonderful gift in her lap.
A foreground rich with flowers, luxuriant in fruit, shade and sun, dry
pastures, rushing rivers, and murmuring rills, were here. Great trees
were variants of the view, and the high Sierras to the east overtopped
the wondrous plumy forests of their pines with blocks of sculptured
blue. Back of the house was a noble river of water from the hills,
fouled and chained by sluice and dam, but still a noble stream whose
earliest parent rill had gushed from grim old Tallac's slope.

Things of beauty, life, and color were on every side, and yet most