It was a beautiful moonlight night, and he was returning to a bedroom at the hotel which he temporarily occupied during the painting of his house.  It was quite late, he having spent the evening with a San Francisco friend after a business conference which assured him of the remarkable prosperity of Excelsior.  It was therefore with some human exaltation that he looked around the sleeping settlement which had sprung up under the magic wand of their good fortune.  The full moon had idealized their youthful designs with something of their own youthful coloring, graciously softening the garish freshness of paint and plaster, hiding with discreet obscurity the disrupted banks and broken woods at the beginning and end of their broad avenues, paving the rough river terrace with tessellated shadows, and even touching the rapid stream which was the source of their wealth with a Pactolean glitter.

The windows of the hotel before him, darkened within, flashed in the moonbeams like the casements of Aladdin’s palace.  Mingled with his ambition, to-night, were some softer fancies, rarely indulged by him in his forecast of the future of Excelsior—­a dream of some fair partner in his life, after this task was accomplished, yet always of some one moving in a larger world than his youth had known.  Rousing the half sleeping porter, he found, however, only the spectral gold-seeker in the vestibule,—­the rays of his solitary candle falling upon her divining-rod with a quaint persistency that seemed to point to the stairs he was ascending.  When he reached the first landing the rising wind through an open window put out his light, but, although the staircase was in darkness, he could see the long corridor above illuminated by the moonlight throughout its whole length.  He had nearly reached it when the slow but unmistakable rustle of a dress in the distance caught his ear.  He paused, not only in the interest of delicacy, but with a sudden nervous thrill he could not account for.  The rustle came nearer—­he could hear the distinct frou-frou of satin; and then, to his bewildered eyes, what seemed to be the figure of the dummy, arrayed in the pale blue evening dress he knew so well, passed gracefully and majestically down the corridor.  He could see the shapely folds of the skirt, the symmetry of the bodice, even the harmony of the trimmings.  He raised his eyes, half affrightedly, prepared to see the headless shoulders, but they—­and what seemed to be a head—­were concealed in a floating “cloud” or nubia of some fleecy tissue, as if for protection from the evening air.  He remained for an instant motionless, dazed by this apparent motion of an inanimate figure; but as the absurdity of the idea struck him he hurriedly but stealthily ascended the remaining stairs, resolved to follow it.  But he was only in time to see it turn into the angle of another corridor, which, when he had reached it, was empty.  The figure had vanished!