within hearing distance of Stumpy’s.  The men conversed in whispers or smoked with Indian gravity.  Profanity was tacitly given up in these sacred precincts, and throughout the camp a popular form of expletive, known as “D—­n the luck!” and “Curse the luck!” was abandoned, as having a new personal bearing.  Vocal music was not interdicted, being supposed to have a soothing, tranquilizing quality; and one song, sung by “Man-o’-War Jack,” an English sailor from her Majesty’s Australian colonies, was quite popular as a lullaby.  It was a lugubrious recital of the exploits of “the Arethusa, Seventy-four,” in a muffled minor, ending with a prolonged dying fall at the burden of each verse, “On b-oo-o-ard of the Arethusa.”  It was a fine sight to see Jack holding The Luck, rocking from side to side as if with the motion of a ship, and crooning forth this naval ditty.  Either through the peculiar rocking of Jack or the length of his song,—­it contained ninety stanzas, and was continued with conscientious deliberation to the bitter end,—­the lullaby generally had the desired effect.  At such times the men would lie at full length under the trees in the soft summer twilight, smoking their pipes and drinking in the melodious utterances.  An indistinct idea that this was pastoral happiness pervaded the camp.  “This ‘ere kind o’ think,” said the Cockney Simmons, meditatively reclining on his elbow, “is ’evingly.”  It reminded him of Greenwich.

On the long summer days The Luck was usually carried to the gulch from whence the golden store of Roaring Camp was taken.  There, on a blanket spread over pine boughs, he would lie while the men were working in the ditches below.  Latterly there was a rude attempt to decorate this bower with flowers and sweet-smelling shrubs, and generally some one would bring him a cluster of wild honeysuckles, azaleas, or the painted blossoms of Las Mariposas.  The men had suddenly awakened to the fact that there were beauty and significance in these trifles, which they had so long trodden carelessly beneath their feet.  A flake of glittering mica, a fragment of variegated quartz, a bright pebble from the bed of the creek, became beautiful to eyes thus cleared and strengthened, and were invariably pat aside for The Luck.  It was wonderful how many treasures the woods and hillsides yielded that “would do for Tommy.”  Surrounded by playthings such as never child out of fairyland had before, it is to be hoped that Tommy was content.  He appeared to be serenely happy, albeit there was an infantine gravity about him, a contemplative light in his round gray eyes, that sometimes worried Stumpy.  He was always tractable and quiet, and it is recorded that once, having crept beyond his “corral,”—­a hedge of tessellated pine boughs, which surrounded his bed,—­he dropped over the bank on his head in the soft earth, and remained with his mottled legs in the air in that position for at least five minutes with unflinching gravity.  He was extricated