"THE DREAM OF THOMAS W.
"Tom Clark was dreaming; and, lo! great changes had taken place in the fortunes of the sleeping man. No longer a toiler at the anvil or the plow, he had become a rich and, as times go, therefore an honored man—honored by the crowd which, as a general thing, sees the most virtue in the heaviest sack of dollars.
"The wealth of Mr. Thomas W. had come to him in a very singular and mysterious manner, all since he had become a widower; for Mrs. Thomas was dead, poor woman, having some time previously met her fate through a very melancholy accident. An extract from the 'Daily Truth-Teller,' of Santa Blarneeo, a copy of which paper Tom Clark carried in his pocket all the time, and which pocket I shall take the liberty of picking of the journal aforesaid, and of quoting, will tell the story—sad story—but not the whole of it, quite:
"'Fearful and Fatal Catastrophe!—We learn with deep, sincere, and very profound regret, that another of those fearful calamities, which no human prudence can guard against, no foresight prevent, has just occurred, and by means of which a most estimable woman, an exemplary and loving wife, an excellent Christian, firm friend, and esteemed person, has been suddenly cut off in her prime, and sent prematurely to her final account. It appears that the late heavy rains have rendered all the roads leading from Santa Blarneeo nearly impassable, by reason of the rifts, rocks, boulders, and slides of clay—very dangerous and slippery clay—which they have occasioned.
"'Especially is this the case along the cliff road, and more particularly where it skirts the side of the Bayliss Gulch. Of late it has been exceedingly unsafe to pass that way in broad daylight, and much more so after dark.
"'At about ten o'clock yesterday morning, as Mr. Ellet, the Ranchero, was passing that road, along the brink of what is known as the Scott ravine, his horse shied at some objects in the path, which proved to be a man's hat and woman's shawl, on the very edge of the precipice—a clear fall of something like four hundred feet. It immediately occurred to Farmer Ellet, that if anybody had tumbled over the cliff, that there was a great probability that whoever it was must have been considerably hurt, if nothing more, by the time they reached the bottom, as he well remembered had been the case with a yoke of steers of his that had run off at the same spot some years before, and both of which were killed, very dead, indeed, by the accident. So, at least, he informed our reporter, who took down the statement phonographically. Mr. Ellet discovered the remains of a horse and buggy at the bottom of the ravine, and at a little to the left, about ten feet down the bank, where he had, by a miracle, been thrown when the horse went over, Mr. Ellet found the insensible body of a man, desperately hurt, but still breathing. His fall had been broken by some stout young trees and bushes, amidst the roots of which he now lay. Mr. E. soon rescued the sufferer, who proved to be Mr. Thomas W. Clark, a well-known, honest, sober man, and a neighbor as well. Mr. Clark's injuries are altogether internal, from the shock of falling, otherwise he is almost unscathed. His pains inwardly are very great, besides which he is nearly distracted and insane from the loss of his wife and horse, but mainly for the former. It seems that they had been riding out on a visit to a sick friend, and the horse had slipped on the wet clay, had taken fright, and leaped the bank, just as Clark was hurled from the buggy, and landed where Ellet found him. The horse, carriage, and the precious freight, instantly plunged headlong down through four hundred feet of empty air.
"'We learn that the couple were most devotedly attached to each other, as is notorious from the fact, among others, that whenever they met, after a day's absence, and no matter where, nor in what company, they invariably embraced and kissed each other, in the rich, deep fullness of their impassioned and exhaustless conjugal love. Poor Clark's loss is irreparable. His wife had been twice married, but her affection for her first husband was but as a shallow brook compared to the deep, broad ocean of love for him who now mourns, most bitterly mourns, her untimely fate!'
"There! What d'ye think o' that, my lady?—what d'ye think o' that, my man? That's a newspaper report, the same that Tom Clark carried in his pocket, and read so often in his dream. Singular, isn't it, that the ruling passion triumphs, especially Reporters'—even in Death or Dream-land.
"At the end of two days Mr. Clark recovered sufficiently to go to the foot of the cliff, and when there his first work was to carefully bury what was left of his wife—and her first husband's portrait at the same time—for he had placed that canvas across the backs of two chairs, and amused himself by jumping through it—like a sensible man.
"There is—do you know it?—an almost uncontrollable fascination in Danger. Have you never been seized with the desire to throw yourself down some yawning chasm, into some abyss, over into the ready jaws of a shark, to handle a tiger, play with a rattlesnake, jump into a foundery furnace, write a book, edit a paper, or some other such equally wise and sensible thing? Well, I know many who have thus been tempted—and to their ruin. Human nature always has a morbid streak, and that is one of them, as is also the horrible attraction to an execution—to visit the scene of a homicide or a conflagration—especially if a few people have been burnt up—and the more the stronger the curiosity; or to look at the spot where a score or two of Pat-landers have been mumified by the weakness of walls—and contractors' consciences. With what strange interest we read how the monarch of some distant lovely isle dined with his cabinet, off Potage aux têet de missionaire—how they banqueted on delicate slices of boiled evangelist, all of which viandes were unwillingly supplied by the Rev. Jonadab Convert-'em-all, who had a call that way to supply the bread of life, not slices of cold missionary—and did both! So with Tom Clark. One would have thought that the last scene he would willingly have looked upon, would have been the bottom of the ravine. Not a bit of it. An uncontrollable desire seized him, and for his life he could not keep away from the foot of the cliff. He went there, and day by day searched for every vestige of the poor woman, whose heart, and head likewise, he at last had succeeded in breaking into very small fragments. These relics he buried as he found them, yet still could not forsake his daily haunt. Of course, for a time the people observed his action, attributed it to grief and love, forbore to watch or disturb, and finally cared nothing about the matter whatever. Such things are nothing in California. Well was it for Clark that it was so—that they regarded him as mildly insane, and let his vagaries have full swing, for it gave him ample time and opportunity to fully improve one of the most astounding pieces of good luck that ever befell a human being since the year One.
"It fell out upon a certain day, that, after attending to other duties, Tom Clark, as usual, wound his way, by a zig-zag and circuitous path, to the foot of the hill, and took his accustomed seat near by the rock where it was evident Mrs. C. had landed—the precise spot where her flight had been so rudely checked. There he sat for a while, like Volney, in deep speculative reverie and meditation—not upon the ruins of Empires, but upon those of his horse, his buggy, and his wife. Suddenly he started to his feet, for a very strange fancy had struck upon his brain. I cannot tell the precise spot of its impingement, but it hit him hard. He acted on the idea instantly, and forthwith resolved to dig up all the soil thereabouts, that had perchance drank a single drop of her blood. It was not conscience that was at work, it was destiny. This soil, that had been imbrued with the blood of the horse and buggy—no, the woman, I mean—he resolved to bury out of sight of man and brute, and sun and moon, and little peeping stars; for an instinct told him that the gore-stained soil could not be an acceptable spectacle to anything on earth, upon the velvet air, or in the blue heaven above it; and so he scratched up the mould and buried it out of sight, in a rift hard by, between two mighty rocks, that the earthquake had split asunder a million years before.
"And so he threw it in, and then tried to screen it from the sun with leaves and grass, great stones and logs of wood; after which he again sat down upon the rock to rest.
"Presently he arose to go, when, as he did so, a gleam of sunshine flashed back upon his eyes from a minute spiculæ of, he knew not what. He stooped; picked up the object, and found, to his utter astonishment, that he held in his hand a lump of gold, solid gold—an abraded, glittering lump of actual, shining gold.