It was noon when the body of Tennessee was delivered into the hands of his Partner.  As the cart drew up to the fatal tree, we noticed that it contained a rough, oblong box—­apparently made from a section of sluicing and half-filled with bark and the tassels of pine.  The cart was further decorated with slips of willow, and made fragrant with buckeye blossoms.  When the body was deposited in the box, Tennessee’s Partner drew over it a piece of tarred canvas, and gravely mounting the narrow seat in front, with his feet upon the shafts, urged the little donkey forward.  The equipage moved slowly on, at that decorous pace which was habitual with “Jenny” even under less solemn circumstances.  The men—­half curiously, half jestingly, but all good-humoredly—­strolled along beside the cart; some in advance, some a little in the rear of the homely catafalque.  But, whether from the narrowing of the road or some present sense of decorum, as the cart passed on, the company fell to the rear in couples, keeping step, and otherwise assuming the external show of a formal procession.  Jack Folinsbee, who had at the outset played a funeral march in dumb show upon an imaginary trombone, desisted, from a lack of sympathy and appreciation—­not having, perhaps, your true humorist’s capacity to be content with the enjoyment of his own fun.

The way led through Grizzly Canyon—­by this time clothed in funereal drapery and shadows.  The redwoods, burying their moccasined feet in the red soil, stood in Indian file along the track, trailing an uncouth benediction from their bending boughs upon the passing bier.  A hare, surprised into helpless inactivity, sat upright and pulsating in the ferns by the roadside as the cortege went by.  Squirrels hastened to gain a secure outlook from higher boughs; and the bluejays, spreading their wings, fluttered before them like outriders, until the outskirts of Sandy Bar were reached, and the solitary cabin of Tennessee’s Partner.

Viewed under more favorable circumstances, it would not have been a cheerful place.  The unpicturesque site, the rude and unlovely outlines, the unsavory details, which distinguish the nest-building of the California miner, were all here, with the dreariness of decay superadded.  A few paces from the cabin there was a rough enclosure, which in the brief days of Tennessee’s Partner’s matrimonial felicity had been used as a garden, but was now overgrown with fern.  As we approached it we were surprised to find that what we had taken for a recent attempt at cultivation was the broken soil about an open grave.

The cart was halted before the enclosure; and rejecting the offers of assistance with the same air of simple self-reliance he had displayed throughout, Tennessee’s Partner lifted the rough coffin on his back and deposited it, unaided, within the shallow grave.  He then nailed down the board which served as a lid; and mounting the little mound of earth beside it, took off his hat, and slowly mopped his face with his handkerchief.  This the crowd felt was a preliminary to speech; and they disposed themselves variously on stumps and boulders, and sat expectant.