The settlement of Smith’s Pocket owed its origin to the finding of a “pocket” on its site by a veritable Smith.  Five thousand dollars were taken out of it in one half-hour by Smith.  Three thousand dollars were expended by Smith and others in erecting a flume and in tunneling.  And then Smith’s Pocket was found to be only a pocket, and subject like other pockets to depletion.  Although Smith pierced the bowels of the great red mountain, that five thousand dollars was the first and last return of his labor.  The mountain grew reticent of its golden secrets, and the flume steadily ebbed away the remainder of Smith’s fortune.  Then Smith went into quartz-mining; then into quartz-milling; then into hydraulics and ditching, and then by easy degrees into saloonkeeping.  Presently it was whispered that Smith was drinking a great deal; then it was known that Smith was a habitual drunkard, and then people began to think, as they are apt to, that he had never been anything else.  But the settlement of Smith’s Pocket, like that of most discoveries, was happily not dependent on the fortune of its pioneer, and other parties projected tunnels and found pockets.  So Smith’s Pocket became a settlement, with its two fancy stores, its two hotels, its one express office, and its two first families.  Occasionally its one long straggling street was overawed by the assumption of the latest San Francisco fashions, imported per express, exclusively to the first families; making outraged Nature, in the ragged outline of her furrowed surface, look still more homely, and putting personal insult on that greater portion of the population to whom the Sabbath, with a change of linen, brought merely the necessity of cleanliness without the luxury of adornment.  Then there was a Methodist Church, and hard by a Monte Bank, and a little beyond, on the mountainside, a graveyard; and then a little schoolhouse.

“The Master,” as he was known to his little flock, sat alone one night in the schoolhouse, with some open copybooks before him, carefully making those bold and full characters which are supposed to combine the extremes of chirographical and moral excellence, and had got as far as “Riches are deceitful,” and was elaborating the noun with an insincerity of flourish that was quite in the spirit of his text, when he heard a gentle tapping.  The woodpeckers had been busy about the roof during the day, and the noise did not disturb his work.  But the opening of the door, and the tapping continuing from the inside, caused him to look up.  He was slightly startled by the figure of a young girl, dirty and shabbily clad.  Still, her great black eyes, her coarse, uncombed, lusterless black hair falling over her sunburned face, her red arms and feet streaked with the red soil, were all familiar to him.  It was Melissa Smith—­Smith’s motherless child.