an Eskimo, I was shapeless in winter; like a Red Indian, I wore in hot summers nothing but a pair of leather trousers, with a great straw hat as big as a parasol to defend me from the sun.  I had a bowie knife at my belt and a long gun under my arm; and I dare say I produced a pretty wild impression on the few peaceable travellers that could climb up to my place.  But I promise you I never looked as mad as that man did.  Compared with him I was Fifth Avenue.

“I dare say that living under the very top of the Sierras has an odd effect on the mind; one tends to think of those lonely rocks not as peaks coming to a point, but rather as pillars holding up heaven itself.  Straight cliffs sail up and away beyond the hope of the eagles; cliffs so tall that they seem to attract the stars and collect them as sea-crags collect a mere glitter of phosphorous.  These terraces and towers of rock do not, like smaller crests, seem to be the end of the world.  Rather they seem to be its awful beginning:  its huge foundations.  We could almost fancy the mountain branching out above us like a tree of stone, and carrying all those cosmic lights like a candelabrum.  For just as the peaks failed us, soaring impossibly far, so the stars crowded us (as it seemed), coming impossibly near.  The spheres burst about us more like thunderbolts hurled at the earth than planets circling placidly about it.

“All this may have driven me mad; I am not sure.  I know there is one angle of the road down the pass where the rock leans out a little, and on windy nights I seem to hear it clashing overhead with other rocks—­ yes, city against city and citadel against citadel, far up into the night.  It was on such an evening that the strange man struggled up the pass.  Broadly speaking, only strange men did struggle up the pass.  But I had never seen one like this one before.

“He carried (I cannot conceive why) a long, dilapidated garden rake, all bearded and bedraggled with grasses, so that it looked like the ensign of some old barbarian tribe.  His hair, which was as long and rank as the grass, hung down below his huge shoulders; and such clothes as clung about him were rags and tongues of red and yellow, so that he had the air of being dressed like an Indian in feathers or autumn leaves.  The rake or pitchfork, or whatever it was, he used sometimes as an alpenstock, sometimes (I was told) as a weapon.  I do not know why he should have used it as a weapon, for he had, and afterwards showed me, an excellent six-shooter in his pocket. `But that,’ he said, `I use only for peaceful purposes.’  I have no notion what he meant.

“He sat down on the rough bench outside my inn and drank some wine from the vineyards below, sighing with ecstasy over it like one who had travelled long among alien, cruel things and found at last something that he knew.  Then he sat staring rather foolishly at the rude lantern of lead and coloured glass that hangs over my door.  It is old, but of no value; my grandmother gave it to me long ago:  she was devout, and it happens that the glass is painted with a crude picture of Bethlehem and the Wise Men and the Star.  He seemed so mesmerized with the transparent glow of Our Lady’s blue gown and the big gold star behind, that he led me also to look at the thing, which I had not done for fourteen years.