and panning it for him in the heavy iron pan, fascinated to see what we
should find. Usually only a few small nuggets in a group of colors
(flake gold), but once we found a good sized nugget which Quong
gallantly gave me for a "Chinese New Year" gift. At dusk he sent us
home, each with a bar of brown barley sugar - smelling to the blue of
opium - which he fished out of one of his numerous jumpers with his
long-fingered, sensitive hands.

They are dead, long ago - Ah Quong, old Sing, Shotgun-Chinaman - and
gone to the blessed region of the Five Immortals, I know, but every true
Californian will understand the regard the pioneer families had for
these faithful Chinese servitors who took as much loving pride in the
aristocratic and unblemished names of their "familees" as the white
persons who bore them. Four generations of my family, old Sing lived to
serve - but I must get on with my forty-niner's tale of the hanging of
Charlie Price!

"Eh, mon, but the spring is here again," said Jim "Hutch" (Hutchinson)
to Old Man Greeley.

"Is it so, now?" returned the little man, gazing off through the sunny,
velvet air to a world which had been painted clean, new green. His
shrewd, blue eyes returned to the ponderous Scotchman.

"And how came you to realize that it was spring?" he asked maliciously.

"How came you to lick Sandy McArthur-r-r?" Hutchinson came back at him.
"Tell me that."

"Well, but whisper, man," said old Jimmie plaintively, "what else could