"_O toiling hands of mortals! O unwearied feet, travelling ye know
not whither! Soon, soon, it seems to you, you must come forth on
some conspicuous hill-top, and but a little way further, against the
setting sun, descry the spires of El Dorado. Little do ye know your
own blessedness; for to travel hopefully is a better thing than to
arrive, and the true success is to labour_."--R. L. Stevenson.

"Eucalyptus lies on the eastern slope of the Rockies. It will be
fourteen years back this autumn that the coach dropped me there,
somewhere about nine in the evening, and Hewson, who was waiting,
took me straight to his red-pine house, high up among the foot-hills.
The front of it hung over the edge of a waterfall, down which Hewson
sent his logs with a pleasing certainty of their reaching Eucalyptus
sooner or later; and right at the back the pines climbed away up to
the snow-line. You remember the story of Daniel O'Rourke; how an
eagle carried him up to the moon, and how he found it as smooth as an
egg-plum, with just a reaping-hook sticking out of its side to grip
hold of? Hewson's veranda reminded me of that reaping-hook; and, as
a matter of fact, the cliff was so deeply undercut that a plummet, if
it could be let through between your heels, would drop clean into the
basin below the fall.

"The house was none of Hewson's building. Hewson was a bachelor, and
could have made shift with a two-roomed cabin for himself and his
men. He had taken the place over from a New Englander, who had made
his pile by running the lumbering business up here and a saw-mill
down in the valley at the same time. The place seemed dog-cheap at
the time; but after a while it began to dawn upon Hewson that the
Yankee had the better of the deal. Eucalyptus had not come up to