“Do you know that tomorrow is Christmas-day?”

“Yes, I know it.”

Another pause.  I had nothing to say just then.  “Well, if—­if—­if any thing is to be done about that turkey, it is time it were done.”

“Do you mean Dick?”

“Yes,” with a little quiver in her voice.

“I understand you—­you mean to kill him—­poor Dick! the only pet we ever had.”

She broke right down at this, and began to cry.

“What is the matter here?” said our kind, energetic neighbor, Mrs. T—­, who came in to pay us one of her informal visits.  She was from Philadelphia, and, though a gifted woman, with a wide range of reading and observation of human life, was not a sentimentalist.  She laughed at the weeping mistress of the parsonage, and, going to the back-door, she called out: 

“Dick!” “Dick!”

Dick, who was taking the air high up on the hillside, came at the call, making long strides, and sounding his “Oot,” “oot,” “oot,” which was the formula by which he expressed all his emotions, varying only the tone.

Dick, as he stood with outstretched neck and a look of expectation in his honest eyes, was scooped up by our neighbor, and carried off down the hill in the most summary manner.

In about an hour Dick was brought back.  He was dressed.  He was also stuffed.

The Diggers.

The Digger Indian holds a low place in the scale of humanity.  He is not intelligent; he is not handsome; he is not very brave.  He stands near the foot of his class, and I fear he is not likely to go up any higher.  It is more likely that the places that know him now will soon know him no more, for the reason that he seems readier to adopt the bad white man’s whisky and diseases than the good white man’s morals and religion.  Ethnologically he has given rise to much conflicting speculation, with which I will not trouble the gentle reader.  He has been in California a long time, and he does not know that he was ever anywhere else.  His pedigree does not trouble him; he is more concerned about getting something to eat.  It is not because he is an agriculturist that he is called a Digger, but because he grabbles for wild roots, and has a general fondness for dirt.  I said he was not handsome, and when we consider his rusty, dark-brown color, his heavy features, fishy black eyes, coarse black hair, and clumsy gait, nobody will dispute the statement.  But one Digger is uglier than another, and an old squaw caps the climax.

The first Digger I ever saw was the best-looking.  He had picked up a little English, and loafed around the mining-camps picking up a meal where he could get it.  He called himself “Captain Charley,” and, like a true native American, was proud of his title.  If it was self-assumed, he was still following the precedent set by a vast host of captains, majors, colonels, and generals, who never wore a uniform or hurt anybody.  He made his appearance at the little parsonage on the hill-side in Sonora one day, and, thrusting his bare head into the door, he said: