How the First Generation Once Righted Itself


By some philosophers unhappiness is believed--rather than coming from
deprivation or infliction--to result from the individual's failure to
select from a number of possible occupations one that would afford him
entire satisfaction with life and himself. To this perverse blindness
they attribute the dissatisfaction with great wealth traditional of men
who have it. The fault, they contend, is not with wealth inherently.
The most they will admit against money is that the possession of much
of it tends to destroy that judicial calm necessary to a wise choice of
recreations; to incline the possessor, perhaps, toward those that are
unsalutary.

Concerning the old man that Billy Brue now sought with his news of
death, a philosopher of this school would unhesitatingly declare that
he had sounded the last note of human wisdom. Far up in some mountain
solitude old Peter Bines, multimillionaire, with a lone pack-mule to
bear his meagre outfit, picked up float-rock, tapped and scanned
ledges, and chipped at boulders with the same ardour that had fired him
in his penniless youth.

Back in 1850, a young man of twenty-four, he had joined the rush to
California, working his passage as deck-hand on a vessel that doubled
the Horn. Landing without capital at San Francisco, the little seaport
settlement among the shifting yellow sand-dunes, he had worked six
weeks along the docks as roustabout for money to take him back into the
hills whence came the big fortunes and the bigger tales of fortunes.
For six years he worked over the gravelly benches of the California
creeks for vagrant particles of gold. Then, in the late fifties, he