Surrounded by playthings such as never child out of fairyland had
before, it is to be hoped that Tommy was content. He appeared to be
serenely happy, albeit there was an infantine gravity about him, a
contemplative light in his round gray eyes, that sometimes worried
Stumpy. He was always tractable and quiet, and it is recorded that once,
having crept beyond his "corral,"--a hedge of tessellated pine boughs,
which surrounded his bed,--he dropped over the bank on his head in
the soft earth, and remained with his mottled legs in the air in that
position for at least five minutes with unflinching gravity. He was
extricated without a murmur. I hesitate to record the many other
instances of his sagacity, which rest, unfortunately, upon the
statements of prejudiced friends. Some of them were not without a tinge
of superstition. "I crep' up the bank just now," said Kentuck one
day, in a breathless state of excitement "and dern my skin if he was
a-talking to a jay bird as was a-sittin' on his lap. There they was,
just as free and sociable as anything you please, a-jawin' at each
other just like two cherrybums." Howbeit, whether creeping over the pine
boughs or lying lazily on his back blinking at the leaves above him, to
him the birds sang, the squirrels chattered, and the flowers bloomed.
Nature was his nurse and playfellow. For him she would let slip between
the leaves golden shafts of sunlight that fell just within his grasp;
she would send wandering breezes to visit him with the balm of bay and
resinous gum; to him the tall redwoods nodded familiarly and sleepily,
the bumblebees buzzed, and the rooks cawed a slumbrous accompaniment.

Such was the golden summer of Roaring Camp. They were "flush times," and
the luck was with them. The claims had yielded enormously. The camp
was jealous of its privileges and looked suspiciously on strangers. No
encouragement was given to immigration, and, to make their seclusion
more perfect, the land on either side of the mountain wall that