where the groves were thick and umbrageous; and lastly, but not less
important than either, where agues and fevers came not, bringing clouds
over the warm sunshine, and taking all the hue, and beauty, and odor
from the flower. Those considerations were at all times the most
important to the settler when the place of his abode was to be
determined upon; and, with these advantages at large, the company of
squatters, of whom Mark Forrester, made one, by no means the least
important among them, had regularly, for the purposes of gold-digging,
colonized the little precinct into which we have now ventured to
penetrate.

Before we advance farther in our narrative, it may be quite as well to
say, that the adventurers of which this wild congregation was made up
were impelled to their present common centre by motives and influences
as various as the differing features of their several countenances. They
came, not only from parts of the surrounding country, but many of them
from all parts of the surrounding world; oddly and confusedly jumbled
together; the very _olla-podrida_ of moral and mental combination. They
were chiefly those to whom the ordinary operations of human trade or
labor had proved tedious or unproductive--with whom the toils, aims, and
impulses of society were deficient of interest; or, upon whom, an
inordinate desire of a sudden to acquire wealth had exercised a
sufficiently active influence to impel to the novel employment of
gold-finding--or rather gold-_seeking_, for it was not always that the
search was successful--the very name of such a pursuit carrying with it
to many no small degree of charm and persuasion. To these, a wholesome
assortment of other descriptions may be added, of character and caste
such as will be found ordinarily to compose everywhere the frontier and
outskirts of civilization, as rejected by the wholesome current, and
driven, like the refuse and the scum of the waters, in confused