Indeed, it was this tendency to elaborate her feelings in a metrical manner, and deliver them to the cold world through the medium of the newspapers, that first attracted the attention of Tretherick.  Several poems descriptive of the effects of California scenery upon a too-sensitive soul, and of the vague yearnings for the infinite which an enforced study of the heartlessness of California society produced in the poetic breast, impressed Mr. Tretherick, who was then driving a six-mule freight wagon between Knight’s Ferry and Stockton, to seek out the unknown poetess.  Mr. Tretherick was himself dimly conscious of a certain hidden sentiment in his own nature; and it is possible that some reflections on the vanity of his pursuit—­he supplied several mining camps with whisky and tobacco—­in conjunction with the dreariness of the dusty plain on which he habitually drove, may have touched some chord in sympathy with this sensitive woman.  Howbeit, after a brief courtship—­as brief as was consistent with some previous legal formalities—­they were married; and Mr. Tretherick brought his blushing bride to Fiddletown, or “Fideletown,” as Mrs. Tretherick preferred to call it in her poems.

The union was not a felicitous one.  It was not long before Mr. Tretherick discovered that the sentiment he had fostered while freighting between Stockton and Knight’s Ferry was different from that which his wife had evolved from the contemplation of California scenery and her own soul.  Being a man of imperfect logic, this caused him to beat her; and she, being equally faulty in deduction, was impelled to a certain degree of unfaithfulness on the same premise.  Then Mr. Tretherick began to drink, and Mrs. Tretherick to contribute regularly to the columns of the Avalanche.  It was at this time that Colonel Starbottle discovered a similarity in Mrs. Tretherick’s verse to the genius of Sappho, and pointed it out to the citizens of Fiddletown in a two-columned criticism, signed “A.  S.,” also published in the Avalanche, and supported by extensive quotation.  As the Avalanche did not possess a font of Greek type, the editor was obliged to reproduce the Leucadian numbers in the ordinary Roman letter, to the intense disgust of Colonel Starbottle, and the vast delight of Fiddletown, who saw fit to accept the text as an excellent imitation of Choctaw—­a language with which the colonel, as a whilom resident of the Indian Territories, was supposed to be familiar.  Indeed, the next week’s intelligencer contained some vile doggerel supposed to be an answer to Mrs. Tretherick’s poem, ostensibly written by the wife of a Digger Indian chief, accompanied by a glowing eulogium signed “A.  S. S.”