In our rule at Silverado, there was a melancholy interregnum.  The queen and the crown prince with one accord fell sick; and, as I was sick to begin with, our lone position on Mount Saint Helena was no longer tenable, and we had to hurry back to Calistoga and a cottage on the green.  By that time we had begun to realize the difficulties of our position.  We had found what an amount of labour it cost to support life in our red canyon; and it was the dearest desire of our hearts to get a China-boy to go along with us when we returned.  We could have given him a whole house to himself, self-contained, as they say in the advertisements; and on the money question we were prepared to go far.  Kong Sam Kee, the Calistoga washerman, was entrusted with the affair; and from day to day it languished on, with protestations on our part and mellifluous excuses on the part of Kong Sam Kee.

At length, about half-past eight of our last evening, with the waggon ready harnessed to convey us up the grade, the washerman, with a somewhat sneering air, produced the boy.  He was a handsome, gentlemanly lad, attired in rich dark blue, and shod with snowy white; but, alas! he had heard rumours of Silverado.  He know it for a lone place on the mountain-side, with no friendly wash-house near by, where he might smoke a pipe of opium o’ nights with other China-boys, and lose his little earnings at the game of tan; and he first backed out for more money; and then, when that demand was satisfied, refused to come point-blank.  He was wedded to his wash-houses; he had no taste for the rural life; and we must go to our mountain servantless.  It must have been near half an hour before we reached that conclusion, standing in the midst of Calistoga high street under the stars, and the China-boy and Kong Sam Kee singing their pigeon English in the sweetest voices and with the most musical inflections.

We were not, however, to return alone; for we brought with us Joe Strong, the painter, a most good-natured comrade and a capital hand at an omelette.  I do not know in which capacity he was most valued—­as a cook or a companion; and he did excellently well in both.

The Kong Sam Kee negotiation had delayed us unduly; it must have been half-past nine before we left Calistoga, and night came fully ere we struck the bottom of the grade.  I have never seen such a night.  It seemed to throw calumny in the teeth of all the painters that ever dabbled in starlight.  The sky itself was of a ruddy, powerful, nameless, changing colour, dark and glossy like a serpent’s back.  The stars, by innumerable millions, stuck boldly forth like lamps.  The milky way was bright, like a moonlit cloud; half heaven seemed milky way.  The greater luminaries shone each more clearly than a winter’s moon.  Their light was dyed in every sort of colour—­red, like fire; blue, like steel; green, like the tracks of sunset; and so sharply did each stand forth in its own lustre that there was no appearance of that flat, star-spangled arch we know so well in pictures, but all the hollow of heaven was one chaos of contesting luminaries—­a hurry-burly of stars.  Against this the hills and rugged treetops stood out redly dark.