THE BANKS OF THE SACRAMENTO

"And it's blow, ye winds, heigh-ho,
For Cal-i-for-ni-o;
For there's plenty of gold so I've been told,
On the banks of the Sacramento!"


It was only a little boy, singing in a shrill treble the sea chantey
which seamen sing the wide world over when they man the capstan bars and
break the anchors out for "Frisco" port. It was only a little boy who
had never seen the sea, but two hundred feet beneath him rolled the
Sacramento. "Young" Jerry he was called, after "Old" Jerry, his father,
from whom he had learned the song, as well as received his shock of
bright-red hair, his blue, dancing eyes, and his fair and inevitably
freckled skin.

For Old Jerry had been a sailor, and had followed the sea till middle
life, haunted always by the words of the ringing chantey. Then one day
he had sung the song in earnest, in an Asiatic port, swinging and
thrilling round the capstan-circle with twenty others. And at San
Francisco he turned his back upon his ship and upon the sea, and went
to behold with his own eyes the banks of the Sacramento.

He beheld the gold, too, for he found employment at the Yellow Dream
mine, and proved of utmost usefulness in rigging the great ore-cables
across the river and two hundred feet above its surface.

After that he took charge of the cables and kept them in repair, and ran
them and loved them, and became himself an indispensable fixture of the