and into hills that appeared to toss and scatter spray. The spray
was sunlight, twice reflected: dashed once from the moon, once from
the snow.

In this snow many of the shanties of the abandoned mining camp were
obliterated, (a sailor might have said they had gone down) and at
irregular intervals it had overtopped the tall trestles which had
once supported a river called a flume; for, of course, "flume" is
flumen. Among the advantages of which the mountains cannot deprive
the gold-hunter is the privilege of speaking Latin. He says of his
dead neighbor, "He has gone up the flume." This is not a bad way to
say, "His life has returned to the Fountain of Life."

While putting on its armor against the assaults of the wind, this
snow had neglected no coign of vantage. Snow pursued by the wind is
not wholly unlike a retreating army. In the open field it ranges
itself in ranks and battalions; where it can get a foothold it makes
a stand; where it can take cover it does so. You may see whole
platoons of snow cowering behind a bit of broken wall. The devious
old road, hewn out of the mountain side, was full of it. Squadron
upon squadron had struggled to escape by this line, when suddenly
pursuit had ceased. A more desolate and dreary spot than Deadman's
Gulch in a winter midnight it is impossible to imagine. Yet Mr.
Hiram Beeson elected to live there, the sole inhabitant.

Away up the side of the North Mountain his little pine-log shanty
projected from its single pane of glass a long, thin beam of light,
and looked not altogether unlike a black beetle fastened to the
hillside with a bright new pin. Within it sat Mr. Beeson himself,
before a roaring fire, staring into its hot heart as if he had never