mustache, and took other liberties,--as the helpless are apt to do.
And when he had built a fire against a tree, and had shown them other
mysteries of woodcraft, their admiration knew no bounds. At the close
of two such foolish, idle, happy hours he found himself lying at the
feet of the schoolmistress, gazing dreamily in her face as she sat
upon the sloping hillside weaving wreaths of laurel and syringa, in
very much the same attitude as he had lain when first they met. Nor
was the similitude greatly forced. The weakness of an easy, sensuous
nature, that had found a dreamy exaltation in liquor, it is to be
feared was now finding an equal intoxication in love.

I think that Sandy was dimly conscious of this himself. I know that he
longed to be doing something,--slaying a grizzly, scalping a savage,
or sacrificing himself in some way for the sake of this sallow-faced,
gray-eyed schoolmistress. As I should like to present him in an heroic
attitude, I stay my hand with great difficulty at this moment, being
only withheld from introducing such an episode by a strong conviction
that it does not usually occur at such times. And I trust that my
fairest reader, who remembers that, in a real crisis, it is always
some uninteresting stranger or unromantic policeman, and not
Adolphus, who rescues, will forgive the omission.

So they sat there undisturbed,--the woodpeckers chattering overhead
and the voices of the children coming pleasantly from the hollow
below. What they said matters little. What they thought--which might
have been interesting--did not transpire. The woodpeckers only learned
how Miss Mary was an orphan; how she left her uncle's house to come to
California for the sake of health and independence; how Sandy was an
orphan too; how he came to California for excitement; how he had lived
a wild life, and how he was trying to reform; and other details,