"His face fell pathetically; but he contrived a rueful little laugh as he answered: 'And I must have been a boy of nine at the time, and playing about Portissick Street, no doubt! Never mind. It's good, anyway, to speak of home to you; for you've seen it, you know!'
"He said this with his eyes fixed on the flashing mountain; and, as he finished, he sighed."
"During the next three or four days—for a relapse followed his rally, and he had to give up all thought of departing immediately—I talked much with the Bishop; and I think that each talk added to my respect and wonder. In the first place, though I had read in a good many poetry books of maidens who walked through all manner of deadliness unhurt—Una and the lion, you know, and the rest of them— I hadn't imagined that kind or amount of innocence in a young man. But what startled me even more was the size of his ambitions. 'Bishop'—in partibus infidelium with a vengeance—was too small a title for him. 'Twas a Peter the Hermit's part, or a Savonarola's, or Whitefield's at least, he was going to play all along the Pacific Slope; and his outfit no more than a small Bible and the strength of a mouse. And with all this the poor boy was just wearying for home, and every small fibre in his sick heart pulling him back while he fixed his eyes on the lights up the mountain and stiffened his back and talked about putting a hand to the plough and not turning back.
"'Hewson,' I said one morning, as we were breakfasting at the Cornice House, 'what's the cause of those curious lights up by the cinnabar mines, over Eucalyptus?'
"'Lights?' said he, 'what lights? I never heard of any.'
"'Well, it's something that flashes, anyway—a regular line of it.'
"'I'll tell you what it's not; and that's quicksilver,' Hewson answered.
"On my way down to Eucalyptus early that morning, I hitched my horse up to the Necropolis gate and determined to explore the secret of the lights before visiting the Bishop. The track towards the cinnabar works was pretty easy to follow, first along; but when I had climbed some four or five hundred feet it grew fainter, and was lost at length under the pine-needles. Luckily some hand had notched a tree here and there, and these guided me to the dry bed of a torrent, on the far side of which the track reappeared, and continued pretty plain for the rest of the journey, though broken in several places by the rains. I had missed my way three times at the most; but it took me three-quarters of an hour to reach the lowest of the works, and another twenty minutes to get into anything like clear country. At length, on the edge of a steep depression that widened and shallowed as it neared the valley, I got a fair look up the slope. So far I had met nothing to account for the lights—nothing at all, in fact, but the broken spade-handles, old boots, empty meat-cans, and other refuse of the miners' camps; but every now and then I would catch a glimpse of the hillside high overhead: and always those lights were flashing there, though in varying numbers. Now, having a clear view, I found to my dismay that they had shrunk to one. It was like a story in the Arabian Nights. I swore, though, that I would not be cheated of this last chance. The flashing object, whatever it was, lay some two hundred yards above me on the slope; and I approached cautiously, with my eyes fixed on it, much like a child hunting grasshoppers in a hay-field. I was less than ten paces from it when the light suddenly vanished, and five paces more knocked the bottom out of the mystery. The object was a battered and empty meat-can.
"I had passed a hundred such, at least, on my way. The camps had lain pretty close to the track, and the rains descending upon their refuse heaps had washed the labels off these cans, that now, as sun and moon rose and passed over the mountain side, flashed moving signals down to Eucalyptus in the valley—signals of failure and desolation. And these had been the Bishop's pillar of fire in the wilderness!"
'Was it weary, then,
In the wilderness?'…