in getting things into the settlement were never surmounted for getting things out of it.  The lumber was practically valueless for export to other settlements across the mountain roads, which were equally rich in timber.  The theory so enthusiastically held by the original locators, that Devil’s Ford was a vast sink that had, through ages, exhausted and absorbed the trickling wealth of the adjacent hills and valleys, was suffering an ironical corroboration.

One morning it was known that work was stopped at the Devil’s Ford Ditch—­temporarily only, it was alleged, and many of the old workmen simply had their labor for the present transferred to excavating the river banks, and the collection of vast heaps of “pay gravel.”  Specimens from these mounds, taken from different localities, and at different levels, were sent to San Francisco for more rigid assay and analysis.  It was believed that this would establish the fact of the permanent richness of the drifts, and not only justify past expenditure, but a renewed outlay of credit and capital.  The suspension of engineering work gave Mr. Carr an opportunity to visit San Francisco on general business of the mine, which could not, however, prevent him from arranging further combinations with capital.  His two daughters accompanied him.  It offered an admirable opportunity for a shopping expedition, a change of scene, and a peaceful solution of their perplexing and anomalous social relations with Devil’s Ford.  In the first flush of gratitude to their father for this opportune holiday, something of harmony had been restored to the family circle that had of late been shaken by discord.

But their sanguine hopes of enjoyment were not entirely fulfilled.  Both Jessie and Christie were obliged to confess to a certain disappointment in the aspect of the civilization they were now reentering.  They at first attributed it to the change in their own habits during the last three months, and their having become barbarous and countrified in their seclusion.  Certainly in the matter of dress they were behind the fashions as revealed in Montgomery Street.  But when the brief solace afforded them by the modiste and dressmaker was past, there seemed little else to be gained.  They missed at first, I fear, the chivalrous and loyal devotion that had only amused them at Devil’s Ford, and were the more inclined, I think, to distrust the conscious and more civilized gallantry of the better dressed and more carefully presented men they met.  For it must be admitted that, for obvious reasons, their criticisms were at first confined to the sex they had been most in contact with.  They could not help noticing that the men were more eager, annoyingly feverish, and self-asserting in their superior elegance and external show than their old associates were in their frank, unrestrained habits.  It seemed to them that the five millionaires of Devil’s Ford, in their radical simplicity and thoroughness, were perhaps nearer the type of true gentlemanhood than these citizens who imitated a civilization they were unable yet to reach.