bit of the chaperone and match-maker. It is the last way of reviving the
past.

She consented, and Carmen De Haro could not well refuse.

The ladies found the "Blue Mass" mills very much as Thatcher had
previously delivered it to them, "a trifle rough and mannish." But he
made over to them the one tenement reserved for himself, and slept with
his men, or more likely under the trees. At first Mrs. Plodgitt missed
gas and running water, and these several conveniences of civilization,
among which I fear may be mentioned sheets and pillow cases; but the
balsam of the mountain air soothed her neuralgia and her temper. As for
Carmen, she rioted in the unlimited license of her absolute freedom from
conventional restraint and the indulgence of her child-like impulses.
She scoured the ledges far and wide alone; she dipped into dark copses,
and scrambled over sterile patches of chemisal, and came back laden with
the spoil of buckeye blossoms, manzanita berries and laurel. But
she would not make a sketch of the "Blue Mass Company's" mills on a
Mercator's projection--something that could be afterwards lithographed
or chromoed, with the mills turning out tons of quicksilver through the
energies of a happy and picturesque assemblage of miners--even to please
her padrone, Don Royal Thatcher. On the contrary, she made a study of
the ruins of the crumbled and decayed red-rock furnace, with the black
mountain above it, and the light of a dying camp fire shining upon it,
and the dull-red excavations in the ledge. But even this did not satisfy
her until she had made some alterations; and when she finally brought
her finished study to Don Royal, she looked at him a little defiantly.
Thatcher admired honestly, and then criticised a little humorously and
dishonestly. "But couldn't you, for a consideration, put up a sign-board
on that rock with the inscription, 'Road to the Blue Mass Company's new