to make you wish it were morning all the day; unless like the Apache-unappreciative native of such a land and clime-one has a soul only "fit for treason, stratagem, and spoils." For you cannot possess a soul impressionable to the charms that (with the above exception) have power to soothe the savage breast, and not find yourself in the love of nature rapturously awakened to hold communion with her visible forms here; forms that in their height, and length, and breadth, in their tones, suffusions, and blendings, in the near softness of their atmospheric effect, and in the far enchantment of their sublime and azure masses, captivate not only the eye but the soul itself.

But it is at mid-day and at sundown that nature here revels in its wealth of contrasted and commingled colors. At noon, hues from the softest pink to the deepest purple mantle the ridges and veil the cañons of the ranges, which, wherever you may be, surround you on every side, and if you ascend one of them, extend away in interminable succession, as if they were "mountains. rolled in mighty billows"-being by the imagination easily invested with motion, a sea of mountainous breakers rolling in upon you; while, as the day departs, their colors change through neutral tints to the cobalt blue of distant sierras against "the gold of awful sunsets." Here only have I ever witnessed nature's confirmation of that fiery red in the baleful splendor of which, as if it were a crimson curse, the sun goes down on Turner's "Slave Ship."

But even here in this sun-kissed clime these displays are not frequent. Only twice during the past summer have I seen such sunsets. One of them I must more particularly note. A mass of rose-colored clouds, covering the western sky almost to the zenith. Near the horizon, rifts, whose bars were transformed to molten gold, and through which the declining sun shot, and flushed the serried, horizontal edges of the manycurtained vault and its ragged shreds above

with a deep, rusty red. Here and there, thin wracks of smoke-blue cirrus, and for a back ground chasms of dark ruby. The evening star already shining, and a silvery half-moon on the left, fixed features in the scene, completed the glory of the lurid phantasms.

These master-pieces upon the heavens are occasionally alternated with terrestrial pictures different in conception, but of equally mighty genius-the sleeping waters and dreamlike shores of the mirage.

But these excesses of splendor and magnificence are not without their contraries and compensating extremes: long dreary reaches of gray desert; cañons whose rocky cliffs seem crumbling away under the perpetual semitropic suns of countless ages, the glare of which has literally burned out their native color. They want only trees (of which they were not altogether destitute before the necessities of the camp stripped them of their growth) to make the wanderer upon these borders feel as if he were in Dante's "gloomy wood astray."

The pioneers of this mining district, when, seven years ago, they came hither in quest of the rich deposits they were destined to discover, penetrated the very heart of the natural domain of the hostile Apache; the stronghold of the tribe under Cochise, its chief (for whom the county of which Tombstone is the seat is named), being in open sight through this distilled atmosphere, fifteen miles away across the plain, or mesa. They took their lives in their hands; and their tentative campaign among these hills was in every movement a march by stealth. They did not dare to fire a gun nor kindle a camp-fire. As soon as a sufficient number could be attracted hither by the report of the discovery of mines, to form the nucleus of a camp and about the mineral carcass the swift sons of the American eagle gather as by magic-there was no danger of attack from the aborigines. For the Apache is as cowardly as he is treacherous, and has an

hundred and fifty years at least, probably for centuries, he has been the terror and Scourge of the peaceful Mexican. I have seen but two individuals of this race face to face, and I must confess to an admiration for them outwardly. They were scouts, of about twenty-five years of age, to whose sparkling eye and rich oil-of-olive complexion the photographer does no justice whatever-straight as one of their own arrows, with a suggestion of the antelope in their limbs; their hair long, parted in the middle and falling, black as jet, like the mane of a mettlesome steed, down their shoulders; their forms arrayed in neat buckskin toggery, ornamented with feathers and prismatic beads.

In is

The area of this camp covers forty squares, together with its outskirts. The streets from west to east number from First to Eleventh, the thoroughfares being Toughnut, Allen, Fremont, Safford, and Bruce. architecture, the town, for one so new, not behind its peers in size; the most approved instances being the court house, the public school, St. Paul's Episcopal Church, the city hall and Schreffehio Hall. The last was named for the brothers who built it, and who located the first claim in the camp. It is constructed of adobe, as is

the Episcopal Church.

Nothing among men, as so many of the readers of the OVERLAND know, can exceed in bustle and excitement, the scenes of a

mining community when it is in the flush of its first success, that is, when it is "booming." The fever of speculation enters into all undertakings. Legitimate business becomes a game of chance and the gamester's art legitimate business; and even a lodginghouse a grand financial scheme. Every miner's cabin is a castle in the air. For the poor prospector whose word of honor is to-day in pawn for a "grub-stake" may to-morrow be coquetting with rival kings of capital outbidding each other for the coveted possession of another newly discovered kingdom under ground. Money flows like water; and such a camp is the beggar's paradise-though owing to its mushroom rise and fall, and its general difficulty of cheap and immediate access, few there be of these that find it. To become deadbroke is to become the center of a popular sympathy, and to awaken from sudden and extreme destitution as from a dream into an ephemeral opulence whose reality must seem as fantastical as the magic of Aladdin's lamp.

The sentiment of justice accompanies that of mercy; and in a booming camp the jewel of fair play shines with a brilliance and constancy nowhere else surpassed. Without the constituted machinery of law and order, nevertheless the spirit of its equity and authority is justly and swiftly put into practice, the vigilance committee being the effective form in which it spontaneously embodies itself. One of the proofs of this is given in the following transcript from a court record, Judge Lynch presiding:

The subject of this summary justice was one of six desparadoes, known in Western phraseology as "cowboys," who raided a neighboring camp, so late as the spring of '84. By some technicality in the legal process, he escaped the judgment that consigned his comrades to the gallows. Early on the morning of the day of the execution, a committee of the "sovereign people" took him from the jail and hanged him from a telegraph pole near the corner of First and

Toughnut Streets.

Another instance was that of a miner who had become indebted to a saloon-keeper for commodities furnished, to the amount of thirty dollars, and who was suddenly thrown out of work. The pigmy Shylock, thereupon refusing longer credit, sued his debtor in a justice's court, and it so happened that the jury was empanelled largely of those of the whiskey seller's vocation. The defendant. pleaded guilty; and the jury, in the face of the instructions of the court, after a short deliberation, returned the following verdict: "We find, your honor, that the defendant is a liar and don't owe the plaintiff a cent."

Miners, like sailors, have, as we all have more or less, their superstitions; and one of them is that churches kill a camp. I do not mean that they are believed to do this by making their influence disastrously felt in the suppression of saloons and the closing of the gambler's exchange, but by the actual spiriting away of the mineral resources, and the consequent ruin of the prospects of the camp; as if the argentiferous deposits were the strong box of Pluto himself, who upon the advent of the messengers of his Almighty Adversary, as if they were spies, decamps, taking his treasures with him. I was talking lately with a man of education and large mineralogical experience, who told me that since the church was built in the camp where he then was (there is as yet but one church there) the yield of ore had fallen off fifteen per cent., and that one more would ruin the mine. believing what he said.

He spoke sincerely, He spoke sincerely,

The three mines that thus far have chiefly developed the wealth of the Tombstone district are the Contention, the Grand Central, and the Toughnut. The Grand Central has sunk its main shaft to the depth of about seven hundred and fifty feet. This and the Contention had paid in dividends up to the end of last year, the one $800,000, and the other $4,000,000. Supposing these

amounts to represent forty per cent. of the total production, the yield of bullion from each then aggregated $2,000,000 and $10,000,000 respectively. During the past year, however, this has fallen off, and the working of the three mines has nearly ceased.

Operations in these reservoirs of silver, whose irregular and mysterious formation presents one of the most interesting studies in geological science, were during the years '84 and '85 much interrupted by encounter with the water-level, to obviate which, immense pumping machines were placed; that in the Grand Central at a cost of $200,ooo, a sum comparatively insignificant to risk in an enterprise that had already proved so enormously profitable-exactly how profitable, it is impossible for an outside party to ascertain, as the company is a close corporation. Such outlays however, are made in sheer faith, the formation of silver furnishing no indication by which the unknown quantity in advance of the miner's pick can be predicted with any certainty. The region surrounding the shaft must be drained of not only the rain-fall of one season, but of the infusions of years; the radius of the funnelshaped environment thus dessicated extending finally for miles from the shaft-center. The slow, rhythmic strokes of the gigantic engine surpass in the force and beauty of their action any suggestion of the cosmic harmony of the spheres that I have ever seen or felt in the artificial works of man, being the ideal of the music and poetry of motion, so far as it is possible for the pulse and power of machinery to express them. Similar works have been erected in the neighboring Contention mine, and should deposits again be found at all commensurate in quantity and quality with those of the past, the future of Tombstone as a camp would once more be assured.

Otherwise the place has nothing to hope for. For without copious irrigation, the agricultural resources of this Territory will never be realized to any further extent than

now obtains on the banks of streams and rivers. This town is chiefly supplied with vegetables from the local river, San Pedro, where to the Chinese and Mormons is due even the present limited and inferior supply. The rain-fall of this meteorological region is confined to the months of July and August, and those of January and February, and is sufficient for only a meager growth of the scattered grasses indigenous to the mesas, infused as they are with cactus, mesquite, and other thorny and worthless shrubs.

The stock-raising industry is increasing; but the desert-like character of the country renders this, the least difficult of human enterprises in Arizona, hazardous on a large scale. For a year of excessive drought may occur at any period, and the remoteness of fertile pasture lands is too great to save a famishing herd by transportation.

A plan of irrigation has been proposed which contemplates the building by the Government of immense reservoirs in the mountains. This could easily be done by damming a certain number of cañons in each range. The rain-fall thus saved could be distributed to the surrounding plains and make the desert mesas blossom and bring forth abundantly. The water-works that in this same way furnish Tombstone with an unlimited supply of the best water, prove the project feasible.

One of the most interesting, I may say picturesque, objects which the eye gladly

encounters across the monotonous waste of these terrestrial spaces, is the mule team. These wains of the commerce of the mine, bearing to and fro the ore, and the fuel that is to resolve it, are usually formed of nine teams and a train of three huge wagons. Visible to a great distance, their slow, patient movement, accompanied by a shining cloud of dust, transmutes the industry of these far solitudes into the wealth of the public treasury.

The mule for burden, the horse for message, and the donkey for conveniences too numerous to mention, across plains, through defiles, and over mountains. These are the three dumb allies of man, indispensable in his attempted conquest of this wide, wild realm of still chaotic nature. A caravansary of these toilers of the land near my dwelling breaks with the sound of grinding jaws the intense stillness of the Arizona night, whose quiet is equaled by its transparent, star-lit depths, forcibly reminding one of the description of Homer so perfectly rendered by Tennyson:

And when in heaven the stars about the moon
Look beautiful, and all the winds are laid,
And every height comes out, and jutting peak,
And valley, and the immeasurable heavens
Break open to the highest, and all the stars
Shine, and the shepherd gladdens in his heart:

CHAPTER I.

A low valley, almost circular, and around about it bare hills, crouching like uncouth, stealthy animals in the falling dusk. Down through its center a glancing mountain river, singing to the rocks of the sea-shore; and to the south, where the stream cuts the mountain chain, a glint of the sun upon the sea, and the cloudy outlines of the Santa Barbara Islands. Skirting the river bank, the county road from San Buenaventura to the Ojai valley; and on either hand smart-looking cottages, with here and there a crumbling adobe digged from the hills and set apart by playful Titans, standing back amid blossoming orchards of pear and peach and apricot and apple.

It is a dream of beauty, a symphony in dusk and daylight, this happy valley, with its cordon of crouching hills; and over it all, to the north, the hoary front of Pine Mountain towers, a grim guardian.

Even the small boy, shock-headed and shoeless, driving before him upon the road a dozen well kept cattle, seems not amiss in the still-life of the scene. The bell upon the foremost brindled cow mingles musically with the summer gloaming; and the donkey bestridden by the boy shakes his long ears, placidly ruminant.

He was a character, this donkey, a neighborhood institution, wont to roam about and linger in shady places by the river side-his back the undisputed possession of any and all children that could find possible accommodation thereupon. It mattered little to Billy how many bestrode him at the same time. Literally he did not know how to kick-and if his load became too heavy, he could always lie down and let the littte ones tumble unhurt upon the soft grass.

The boy upon the donkey was an original, too, in his way, but not nearly so characteristic as the jack. Boy and donkey-the former as son and heir, the latter as personal property were counted among the worldly possessions of Mr. James Newman, owner of the finest farm in the Sleepy Hollow Country. Jim Newman had other worldly possessions, also, but the ownership of that boy and that jack was the main distinction between himself and the forty or fifty other farmers in the valley.

type.

Yet Newman was not altogether like the others. He was not a type, nor one of a He had a fine farm-as the others had; yet he kept a dozen dogs, worthless to the point of sublimity. His out-buildings, barn and fruit-dryer, were neat, substantial, and kept in good repair; yet his house was large, and roomy, and comfortable-so far, at least, as a California farm-house is ever comfortable. He was a good farmer, as the others were; yet found a month every summer to devote to his favorite sport of deerhunting upon the wooded slopes of the Coast Range.

His wife—well, Mrs. Newman was one of a type. An early-faded Western woman -the very antithesis of her youthful-looking, fresh-colored husband -to whom existence was a burden and the very act of breathing laborious. She lived hard." "" All her household work was done with an effort, yet she seemed to accomplish nothing. Her house was always a scene of slovenly disorder, her housekeeping slack, her dinners ill-cooked and worse-served. It was notorious that she had always the best of "help" in the valley, and equally notorious that the "help" always came away from her more or less demoralized. Only one room in the house was kept in order. The front parlor,