Trustful in this fine weather, we kept the house for kitchen and bedroom, and used the platform as our summer parlour.  The sense of privacy, as I have said already, was complete.  We could look over the clump on miles of forest and rough hilltop; our eyes commanded some of Napa Valley, where the train ran, and the little country townships sat so close together along the line of the rail.  But here there was no man to intrude.  None but the Hansons were our visitors.  Even they came but at long intervals, or twice daily, at a stated hour, with milk.  So our days, as they were never interrupted, drew out to the greater length; hour melted insensibly into hour; the household duties, though they were many, and some of them laborious, dwindled into mere islets of business in a sea of sunny day-time; and it appears to me, looking back, as though the far greater part of our life at Silverado had been passed, propped upon an elbow, or seated on a plank, listening to the silence that there is among the hills.

My work, it is true, was over early in the morning.  I rose before any one else, lit the stove, put on the water to boil, and strolled forth upon the platform to wait till it was ready.  Silverado would then be still in shadow, the sun shining on the mountain higher up.  A clean smell of trees, a smell of the earth at morning, hung in the air.  Regularly, every day, there was a single bird, not singing, but awkwardly chirruping among the green madronas, and the sound was cheerful, natural, and stirring.  It did not hold the attention, nor interrupt the thread of meditation, like a blackbird or a nightingale; it was mere woodland prattle, of which the mind was conscious like a perfume.  The freshness of these morning seasons remained with me far on into the day.

As soon as the kettle boiled, I made porridge and coffee; and that, beyond the literal drawing of water, and the preparation of kindling, which it would be hyperbolical to call the hewing of wood, ended my domestic duties for the day.  Thenceforth my wife laboured single-handed in the palace, and I lay or wandered on the platform at my own sweet will.  The little corner near the forge, where we found a refuge under the madronas from the unsparing early sun, is indeed connected in my mind with some nightmare encounters over Euclid, and the Latin Grammar.  These were known as Sam’s lessons.  He was supposed to be the victim and the sufferer; but here there must have been some misconception, for whereas I generally retired to bed after one of these engagements, he was no sooner set free than he dashed up to the Chinaman’s house, where he had installed a printing press, that great element of civilization, and the sound of his labours would be faintly audible about the canyon half the day.