He had been a great traveller—had seen much of the world—and his stories were none the less interesting for being delivered in such outlandish phrase. According to his own account he had been in the allied army in 1813, and consequently entertained the most profound aversion towards Napoleon whom he allowed to possess no other merit than that of a great legislator.
"Napoleon," said he, in his most characteristic manner, "was mean—disagreeable—not handsome: he made the monks of St. Bernard furnish piece bread—piece cheese—glass wine—to sixty-seven thousand men, and then! only paid them forty thousand francs."
In this sentence the words in italics were thrown up with a sort of jerking emphasis, in the highest falsetto; while the rest, especially the forty thousand francs, was ground slowly out in most scornful gutturals.
Like most of his countrymen, he was jealous, and extremely irritable—had no relish of a jest—and was furthermore opinionative and dogmatical to the last degree; so that to continue long on good terms with him required no little caution and subserviency.
He remained but a short time at Ford's Bar, for, finding the air of the place unfavourable to his rheumatic affections, he was obliged to return to Mormon Island, leaving his son, who had hitherto accompanied him, still mining on the Middle Fork. "Well, doctor, and how much have you made?" cried Col. Oldbuck one day soon after his return.
"Five hundred dollar," returned the sturdy Knickerbocker, in his gruffest tones, and not deigning to turn his eyes on his inquisitor, who, stepping out the next moment, the doctor exclaimed, "Impudent fellaar! I did tell him lie—ask how much I made!—I would tell any man lie."
Sunday, the 9th of June, I attended church for the first and last time in California. The services were held in the open air, under the shadow of a huge pine, a short way up the creek. The congregation were seated on a pine-log, and the preacher, a strapping hirsute individual, who went by the name of Old Grizzly, stood at one end, and thus poured his eloquence into our left ear.
It was impossible not to feel the influences of the occasion. The listening mountains, older than the pyramids—the laughing brook, their twin-sister, yet so suggestive of eternal youth—the clouds that swept over the valley, and the breeze that had haunted there since creation—all disposed the soul to the most devout and lofty contemplations.
The next day we were invited to attend a funeral. Poor Van Scheick, a miner who had been suffering several weeks under two dreadful diseases, scurvy and dysentery, in more dreadful combination, had at length given up the unequal contest. He was buried high up on the hillside, that his grave might never be desecrated by the unrelenting hands of toiling avarice. No useless coffin enclosed his breast; and there, in more than regal solitude, with none to elbow him for room or grudge him his scanty six feet of earth, he laid him down to his last sleep.
There is something very affecting in this utter isolation from one's kind even in death. On our frequent visits to Georgetown we had often noticed, in a secluded spot a little way from the road, two graves side by side, with rude head-boards containing the names and residence of the deceased. I was more affected by this simple emblem of mortality than by the costliest monuments of populous graveyards. There death has become, as it were, common; it is the rule, and not the exception—it ceases to be a distinction, and no longer affects the imagination. But, in a new country, death comes to us with something of the freshness of novelty. We are not yet familiar with its aspect. We thought, perhaps, that we had left it behind—had escaped beyond its jurisdiction. Indeed, it always seemed to me strange and unaccountable that men should die in California—they came there for so short a time, and for so different a purpose; unless it should be thought they had gone twenty thousand miles simply for that!