And so with this honor of Daddy and Mammy, the days of the miners
were long and profitable in the land of the foot-hills. The mines
yielded their abundance, the winters were singularly open and yet
there was no drouth nor lack of water, and peace and plenty smiled
on the Sierrean foothills, from their highest sunny upland to the
trailing falda of wild oats and poppies. If a certain superstition
got abroad among the other camps, connecting the fortunes of Rough-
and-Ready with Daddy and Mammy, it was a gentle, harmless fancy,
and was not, I think, altogether rejected by the old people. A
certain large, patriarchal, bountiful manner, of late visible in
Daddy, and the increase of much white hair and beard, kept up the
poetic illusion, while Mammy, day by day, grew more and more like
somebody's fairy godmother. An attempt was made by a rival camp to
emulate these paying virtues of reverence, and an aged mariner was
procured from the Sailor's Snug Harbor in San Francisco, on trial.
But the unfortunate seaman was more or less diseased, was not
always presentable, through a weakness for ardent spirits, and
finally, to use the powerful idiom of one of his disappointed
foster-children, "up and died in a week, without slinging ary
blessin'."

But vicissitude reaches young and old alike. Youthful Rough-and-
Ready and the Saints had climbed to their meridian together, and it
seemed fit that they should together decline. The first shadow
fell with the immigration to Rough-and-Ready of a second aged pair.
The landlady of the Independence Hotel had not abated her
malevolence towards the Saints, and had imported at considerable
expense her grand-aunt and grand-uncle, who had been enjoying for
some years a sequestered retirement in the poorhouse at East