few paces distant the owner of the equipage himself, sitting under a buckeye-tree, wiping the perspiration from his glowing face.  In answer to an inquiry, he said he had come for the body of the “diseased,” “if it was all the same to the committee.”  He didn’t wish to “hurry anything”; he could “wait.”  He was not working that day; and when the gentlemen were done with the “diseased,” he would take him.  “Ef thar is any present,” he added, in his simple, serious way, “as would care to jine in the fun’l, they kin come.”  Perhaps it was from a sense of humor, which I have already intimated was a feature of Sandy Bar,—­perhaps it was from something even better than that, but two thirds of the loungers accepted the invitation at once.

It was noon when the body of Tennessee was delivered into the hands of his partner.  As the cart drew up to the fatal tree, we noticed that it contained a rough oblong box,—­apparently made from a section of sluicing,—­and half filled with bark and the tassels of pine.  The cart was further decorated with slips of willow and made fragrant with buckeye-blossoms.  When the body was deposited in the box, Tennessee’s Partner’s drew over it a piece of tarred canvas, and gravely mounting the narrow seat in front, with his feet upon the shafts, urged the little donkey forward.  The equipage moved slowly on, at that decorous pace which was habitual with Jenny even under less solemn circumstances.  The men—­half curiously, half jestingly, but all good-humoredly—­strolled along beside the cart, some in advance, some a little in the rear of the homely catafalque.  But whether from the narrowing of the road or some present sense of decorum, as the cart passed on, the company fell to the rear in couples, keeping step, and otherwise assuming the external show of a formal procession.  Jack Folinsbee, who had at the outset played a funeral march in dumb show upon an imaginary trombone, desisted from a lack of sympathy and appreciation,—­not having, perhaps, your true humorist’s capacity to be content with the enjoyment of his own fun.

The way led through Grizzly Canon, by this time clothed in funereal drapery and shadows.  The redwoods, burying their moccasined feet in the red soil, stood in Indian file along the track, trailing an uncouth benediction from their bending boughs upon the passing bier.  A hare, surprised into helpless inactivity, sat upright and pulsating in the ferns by the roadside as the cortege went by.  Squirrels hastened to gain a secure outlook from higher boughs; and the blue-jays, spreading their wings, fluttered before them like outriders, until the outskirts of Sandy Bar were reached, and the solitary cabin of Tennessee’s Partner.

Viewed under more favorable circumstances, it would not have been a cheerful place.  The unpicturesque site, the rude and unlovely outlines, the unsavory details, which distinguish the nest-building of the California miner, were all here with the dreariness of decay superadded.  A few paces from the cabin there was a rough inclosure, which, in the brief days of Tennessee’s Partner’s matrimonial felicity, had been used as a garden, but was now overgrown with fern.  As we approached it, we were surprised to find that what we had taken for a recent attempt at cultivation was the broken soil about an open grave.