—­and the next day he telegraphed back for his blankets.  There is no doubt about the truth of this statement—­there can be no doubt about it.  I have seen the place where that soldier used to board.  In Sacramento it is fiery Summer always, and you can gather roses, and eat strawberries and ice-cream, and wear white linen clothes, and pant and perspire, at eight or nine o’clock in the morning, and then take the cars, and at noon put on your furs and your skates, and go skimming over frozen Donner Lake, seven thousand feet above the valley, among snow banks fifteen feet deep, and in the shadow of grand mountain peaks that lift their frosty crags ten thousand feet above the level of the sea.

There is a transition for you!  Where will you find another like it in the Western hemisphere?  And some of us have swept around snow-walled curves of the Pacific Railroad in that vicinity, six thousand feet above the sea, and looked down as the birds do, upon the deathless Summer of the Sacramento Valley, with its fruitful fields, its feathery foliage, its silver streams, all slumbering in the mellow haze of its enchanted atmosphere, and all infinitely softened and spiritualized by distance—­a dreamy, exquisite glimpse of fairyland, made all the more charming and striking that it was caught through a forbidden gateway of ice and snow, and savage crags and precipices.

CHAPTER LVII.

It was in this Sacramento Valley, just referred to, that a deal of the most lucrative of the early gold mining was done, and you may still see, in places, its grassy slopes and levels torn and guttered and disfigured by the avaricious spoilers of fifteen and twenty years ago.  You may see such disfigurements far and wide over California—­and in some such places, where only meadows and forests are visible—­not a living creature, not a house, no stick or stone or remnant of a ruin, and not a sound, not even a whisper to disturb the Sabbath stillness—­you will find it hard to believe that there stood at one time a fiercely-flourishing little city, of two thousand or three thousand souls, with its newspaper, fire company, brass band, volunteer militia, bank, hotels, noisy Fourth of July processions and speeches, gambling hells crammed with tobacco smoke, profanity, and rough-bearded men of all nations and colors, with tables heaped with gold dust sufficient for the revenues of a German principality—­streets crowded and rife with business—­town lots worth four hundred dollars a front foot—­labor, laughter, music, dancing, swearing, fighting, shooting, stabbing—­a bloody inquest and a man for breakfast every morning—­everything that delights and adorns existence —­all the appointments and appurtenances of a thriving and prosperous and promising young city,—­and now nothing is left of it all but a lifeless, homeless solitude.  The men are gone, the houses have vanished, even the name of the place is forgotten.  In no other land, in modern times, have towns so absolutely died and disappeared, as in the old mining regions of California.