arm’s reach so that I can gather you in. Come, Novi,

"Those brave old bricks of forty-nine! What lives they lived! What deaths they died! Their ghosts are many. Let them keep Their vast possessions. The Piute, The tawny warrior, will dispute No boundary with these . . . . . . . . .

High water on the American came, usually, when the first warm rains melted the snow on the mountains.

The placer miners toiled at furious pace all during the summer and fall. The water, then not more than a rivulet, was deflected through flumes from the river bed, so that all the sand of the bars could be put through the sluices.

The men worked till the last possible moment in the narrow river bed, only leaving in time to save their lives, and abandoning everything to the sudden rush of the water. Their sluices, logs, flumes, water-wheels, all their mining paraphernalia, sometimes even their living outfits, were swept away in the floods.

The river was known to rise from 20 to 60 feet in 24 hours, in its narrow and precipitous walls.

At flood time, then, we often went down to the river through the orchard of big old cherry trees planted by my grandfather, to watch the mass of wreckage rushing by. Great logs would go down end over end; mining machinery caught in the limbs of uprooted trees; quantities of lumber, and once a miner's bunk with sodden gray blanket and a wet and frantic squirrel upon it. I worried for days over the fate of that squirrel.

They tell the story of a Chinaman floating down upon a log.

"Hello, John, where you go?" was shouted. John shook his head, sadly.