feet in length and width, it was half of that in depth.  Possibly because of some fault that had occurred when the knolls were flung together, and certainly helped by freakish erosion, the hole had been scooped out in the course of centuries by the wash of water.  Nowhere did the raw earth appear.  All was garmented by vegetation, from tiny maiden-hair and gold-back ferns to mighty redwood and Douglas spruces.  These great trees even sprang out from the walls of the hole.  Some leaned over at angles as great as forty-five degrees, though the majority towered straight up from the soft and almost perpendicular earth walls.

It was a perfect hiding-place.  No one ever came there, not even the village boys of Glen Ellen.  Had this hole existed in the bed of a canyon a mile long, or several miles long, it would have been well known.  But this was no canyon.  From beginning to end the length of the stream was no more than five hundred yards.  Three hundred yards above the hole the stream took its rise in a spring at the foot of a flat meadow.  A hundred yards below the hole the stream ran out into open country, joining the main stream and flowing across rolling and grass-covered land.

My companion took a turn of the rope around a tree, and with me fast on the other end lowered away.  In no time I was on the bottom.  And in but a short while he had carried all the articles from the cache and lowered them down to me.  He hauled the rope up and hid it, and before he went away called down to me a cheerful parting.

Before I go on I want to say a word for this comrade, John Carlson, a humble figure of the Revolution, one of the countless faithful ones in the ranks.  He worked for Wickson, in the stables near the hunting lodge.  In fact, it was on Wickson’s horses that we had ridden over Sonoma Mountain.  For nearly twenty years now John Carlson has been custodian of the refuge.  No thought of disloyalty, I am sure, has ever entered his mind during all that time.  To betray his trust would have been in his mind a thing undreamed.  He was phlegmatic, stolid to such a degree that one could not but wonder how the Revolution had any meaning to him at all.  And yet love of freedom glowed sombrely and steadily in his dim soul.  In ways it was indeed good that he was not flighty and imaginative.  He never lost his head.  He could obey orders, and he was neither curious nor garrulous.  Once I asked how it was that he was a revolutionist.

“When I was a young man I was a soldier,” was his answer.  “It was in Germany.  There all young men must be in the army.  So I was in the army.  There was another soldier there, a young man, too.  His father was what you call an agitator, and his father was in jail for lese majesty—­what you call speaking the truth about the Emperor.  And the young man, the son, talked with me much about people, and work, and the robbery of the people by the capitalists.  He made me see things in new ways, and I became a socialist.  His talk was