men--half curiously, half jestingly, but all good-humoredly--strolled
along beside the cart; some in advance, some a little in the rear of the
homely catafalque. But, whether from the narrowing of the road or some
present sense of decorum, as the cart passed on, the company fell to the
rear in couples, keeping step, and otherwise assuming the external show
of a formal procession. Jack Folinsbee, who had at the outset played a
funeral march in dumb show upon an imaginary trombone, desisted, from
a lack of sympathy and appreciation--not having, perhaps, your true
humorist's capacity to be content with the enjoyment of his own fun.

The way led through Grizzly Canyon--by this time clothed in funereal
drapery and shadows. The redwoods, burying their moccasined feet in
the red soil, stood in Indian file along the track, trailing an uncouth
benediction from their bending boughs upon the passing bier. A hare,
surprised into helpless inactivity, sat upright and pulsating in the
ferns by the roadside as the cortege went by. Squirrels hastened to gain
a secure outlook from higher boughs; and the bluejays, spreading their
wings, fluttered before them like outriders, until the outskirts of
Sandy Bar were reached, and the solitary cabin of Tennessee's Partner.

Viewed under more favorable circumstances, it would not have been a
cheerful place. The unpicturesque site, the rude and unlovely outlines,
the unsavory details, which distinguish the nest-building of the
California miner, were all here, with the dreariness of decay
superadded. A few paces from the cabin there was a rough enclosure,
which in the brief days of Tennessee's Partner's matrimonial felicity
had been used as a garden, but was now overgrown with fern. As we
approached it we were surprised to find that what we had taken for a
recent attempt at cultivation was the broken soil about an open grave.