most enduring of frailties--a human community.

The sight of his town could furnish no novelties to the miner on top of
the final rise, and feeling somewhat tired by the weight of his small
companion, as well as hungry from his walking, old Jim skirted the
rocky slope as best he might, and so came at length to an isolated
cabin.

This dark little house was built in the brush, quite up on the hill
above the town, and not far away from a shallow ravine where a trickle
of water from a spring had encouraged a straggling growth of willows,
alders, and scrub. Some four or five acres of hill-side about the
place constituted the "Babylonian Glory" mining-claim, which Jim
accounted his, and which had seen about as much of his labor as might
be developed by digging for gold in a barrel.

"Nobody home," said the owner to his dog, as he came to the door and
shouldered it open. "Wal, all the more for us."

That any one might have been at home in the place was accounted for
simply by the fact that certain worthies, playing in and out of luck,
as the wheel of fate might turn them down or up, sometimes lived with
Jim for a month at a time, and sometimes left him in solitude for
weeks. One such transient partner he had left at the cabin when he
started off to get the pup now tagging at his heels. This
house-partner, having departed, might and might not return, either now,
a week from now, or ever.

The miner felt his way across the one big room which the shack
afforded, and came to a series of bunks, built like a pantry against