stage was stopped at Grangers; the last mail had been abandoned in the
tules, the rider swimming for his life. "An area," remarked the
"Sierra Avalanche," with pensive local pride, "as large as the State of
Massachusetts is now under water."

Nor was the weather any better in the foothills. The mud lay deep on the
mountain road; wagons that neither physical force nor moral objurgation
could move from the evil ways into which they had fallen, encumbered the
track, and the way to Simpson's Bar was indicated by broken-down teams
and hard swearing. And farther on, cut off and inaccessible, rained
upon and bedraggled, smitten by high winds and threatened by high water,
Simpson's Bar, on the eve of Christmas day, 1862, clung like a swallow's
nest to the rocky entablature and splintered capitals of Table Mountain,
and shook in the blast.

As night shut down on the settlement, a few lights gleamed through
the mist from the windows of cabins on either side of the highway now
crossed and gullied by lawless streams and swept by marauding winds.
Happily most of the population were gathered at Thompson's store,
clustered around a red-hot stove, at which they silently spat in some
accepted sense of social communion that perhaps rendered conversation
unnecessary. Indeed, most methods of diversion had long since been
exhausted on Simpson's Bar; high water had suspended the regular
occupations on gulch and on river, and a consequent lack of money and
whiskey had taken the zest from most illegitimate recreation. Even Mr.
Hamlin was fain to leave the Bar with fifty dollars in his pocket,--the
only amount actually realized of the large sums won by him in the
successful exercise of his arduous profession. "Ef I was asked," he
remarked somewhat later,--"ef I was asked to pint out a purty little
village where a retired sport as didn't care for money could exercise