It was very hot. Not a breath of air was stirring throughout the western wing of the Greyport Hotel, and the usual feverish life of its four hundred inmates had succumbed to the weather. The great veranda was deserted; the corridors were desolated; no footfall echoed in the passages; the lazy rustle of a wandering […]

They had all known him as a shiftless, worthless creature. From the time he first entered Redwood Camp, carrying his entire effects in a red handkerchief on the end of a long-handled shovel, until he lazily drifted out of it on a plank in the terrible inundation of ’56, they never expected anything better of […]

I On October 10, 1856, about four hundred people were camped in Tasajara Valley, California. It could not have been for the prospect, since a more barren, dreary, monotonous, and uninviting landscape never stretched before human eye; it could not have been for convenience or contiguity, as the nearest settlement was thirty miles away; it […]

PART I “Well!” said the editor of the “Mountain Clarion,” looking up impatiently from his copy. “What’s the matter now?” The intruder in his sanctum was his foreman. He was also acting as pressman, as might be seen from his shirt-sleeves spattered with ink, rolled up over the arm that had just been working “the […]

It was four o’clock in the afternoon, and the hottest hour of the day on that Sierran foothill. The western sun, streaming down the mile-long slope of close-set pine crests, had been caught on an outlying ledge of glaring white quartz, covered with mining tools and debris, and seemed to have been thrown into an […]

I When Joshua Bilson, of the Summit House, Buckeye Hill, lost his wife, it became necessary for him to take a housekeeper to assist him in the management of the hotel. Already all Buckeye had considered this a mere preliminary to taking another wife, after a decent probation, as the relations of housekeeper and landlord […]

I There was a slight jarring though the whole frame of the coach, a grinding and hissing from the brakes, and then a sudden jolt as the vehicle ran upon and recoiled from the taut pole-straps of the now arrested horses. The murmur of a voice in the road was heard, followed by the impatient […]

PART I Mr. Jack Fleming stopped suddenly before a lifeless and decaying redwood-tree with an expression of disgust and impatience. It was the very tree he had passed only an hour before, and he now knew he had been describing that mysterious and hopeless circle familiar enough to those lost in the woods. There was […]

Cissy was tying her hat under her round chin before a small glass at her window. The window gave upon a background of serrated mountain and olive-shadowed canyon, with a faint additional outline of a higher snow level–the only dreamy suggestion of the whole landscape. The foreground was a glaringly fresh and unpicturesque mining town, […]

A FORT POINT IDYL. About an hour’s ride from the Plaza there is a high bluff with the ocean breaking uninterruptedly along its rocky beach. There are several cottages on the sands, which look as if they had recently been cast up by a heavy sea. The cultivated patch behind each tenement is fenced in […]

Not ours, where battle smoke upcurls, And battle dews lie wet, To meet the charge that treason hurls By sword and bayonet. Not ours to guide the fatal scythe The fleshless Reaper wields; The harvest moon looks calmly down Upon our peaceful fields. The long grass dimples on the hill, The pines sing by the […]

Hark! I hear the tramp of thousands, And of armed men the hum; Lo! a nation’s hosts have gathered Round the quick alarming drum,– Saying, “Come, Freemen, come! Ere your heritage be wasted,” said the quick alarming drum. “Let me of my heart take counsel: War is not of life the sum; Who shall stay […]

(MALVERN HILL, 1864) “After the men were ordered to lie down, a white rabbit, which had been hopping hither and thither over the field swept by grape and musketry, took refuge among the skirmishers, in the breast of a corporal.”–Report of the Battle of Malvern Hill. Bunny, lying in the grass, Saw the shining column […]

Down the picket-guarded lane Rolled the comfort-laden wain, Cheered by shouts that shook the plain, Soldier-like and merry: Phrases such as camps may teach, Sabre-cuts of Saxon speech, Such as “Bully!” “Them’s the peach!” “Wade in, Sanitary!” Right and left the caissons drew As the car went lumbering through, Quick succeeding in review Squadrons military; […]

Have you heard the story that gossips tell Of Burns of Gettysburg?–No? Ah, well: Brief is the glory that hero earns, Briefer the story of poor John Burns. He was the fellow who won renown,– The only man who didn’t back down When the rebels rode through his native town; But held his own in […]

(1869) We know him well: no need of praise Or bonfire from the windy hill To light to softer paths and ways The world-worn man we honor still. No need to quote the truths he spoke That burned through years of war and shame, While History carves with surer stroke Across our map his noonday […]

(RE-UNION, ARMY OF THE POTOMAC, 12TH MAY, 1871) Well, you see, the fact is, Colonel, I don’t know as I can come: For the farm is not half planted, and there’s work to do at home; And my leg is getting troublesome,–it laid me up last fall,– And the doctors, they have cut and hacked, […]

Last night, above the whistling wind, I heard the welcome rain,– A fusillade upon the roof, A tattoo on the pane: The keyhole piped; the chimney-top A warlike trumpet blew; Yet, mingling with these sounds of strife, A softer voice stole through. “Give thanks, O brothers!” said the voice, “That He who sent the rains […]

(1864) There is peace in the swamp where the Copperhead sleeps, Where the waters are stagnant, the white vapor creeps, Where the musk of Magnolia hangs thick in the air, And the lilies’ phylacteries broaden in prayer. There is peace in the swamp, though the quiet is death, Though the mist is miasma, the upas-tree’s […]

I read last night of the grand review In Washington’s chiefest avenue,– Two hundred thousand men in blue, I think they said was the number,– Till I seemed to hear their trampling feet, The bugle blast and the drum’s quick beat, The clatter of hoofs in the stony street, The cheers of people who came […]