itself added to the unvarying picture. One of the wagons bore on
its canvas hood the inscription, in large black letters, "Off to
California!" on the other "Root, Hog, or Die," but neither of them
awoke in the minds of the children the faintest idea of playfulness or
jocularity. Perhaps it was difficult to connect the serious men, who
occasionally walked beside them and seemed to grow more taciturn and
depressed as the day wore on, with this past effusive pleasantry.

Yet the impressions of the two children differed slightly. The eldest, a
boy of eleven, was apparently new to the domestic habits and customs of
a life to which the younger, a girl of seven, was evidently native and
familiar. The food was coarse and less skillfully prepared than that to
which he had been accustomed. There was a certain freedom and roughness
in their intercourse, a simplicity that bordered almost on rudeness
in their domestic arrangements, and a speech that was at times almost
untranslatable to him. He slept in his clothes, wrapped up in blankets;
he was conscious that in the matter of cleanliness he was left to
himself to overcome the difficulties of finding water and towels. But it
is doubtful if in his youthfulness it affected him more than a novelty.
He ate and slept well, and found his life amusing. Only at times the
rudeness of his companions, or, worse, an indifference that made him
feel his dependency upon them, awoke a vague sense of some wrong that
had been done to him which while it was voiceless to all others and
even uneasily put aside by himself, was still always slumbering in his
childish consciousness.

To the party he was known as an orphan put on the train at "St. Jo" by
some relative of his stepmother, to be delivered to another relative at
Sacramento. As his stepmother had not even taken leave of him, but had
entrusted his departure to the relative with whom he had been lately