“Is she dying?  Can’t you bring her to,” said the anxious Peter, “if only for a moment, doctor?”

“I’m thinkin’,” said the visiting doctor, an old Scotch army surgeon, looking at the rich Mr. Atherly with cool, professional contempt, “that your mother willna do any more washing for me as in the old time, nor give up her life again to support her bairns.  And it isna my eentention to bring her back to pain for the purposes of geeneral conversation!”

Nor, indeed, did she ever come back to any purpose, but passed away with her unfinished sentence.  And her limbs were scarcely decently composed by the attendants before Peter was rummaging the trunk in her room for the paper she had spoken of.  It was in an old work-box—­a now faded yellow clipping from a newspaper, lying amidst spoils of cotton thread, buttons, and beeswax, which he even then remembered to have seen upon his mother’s lap when she superadded the sewing on of buttons to her washing of the miners’ shirts.  And his dark and hollow cheek glowed with gratified sentiment as he read the clipping.

“We hear with regret of the death of Philip Atherly, Esq., of Rough and Ready, California.  Mr. Atherly will be remembered by some of our readers as the hero of the romantic elopement of Miss Sallie Magregor, daughter of Colonel ‘Bob’ Magregor, which created such a stir in well-to-do circles some thirty years ago.  It was known vaguely that the young couple had ’gone West,’—­a then unknown region,—­but it seems that after severe trials and tribulations on the frontier with savages, they emigrated early to Oregon, and then, on the outbreak of the gold fever, to California.  But it will be a surprise to many to know that it has just transpired that Mr. Atherly was the second son of Sir Ashley Atherly, an English baronet, and by the death of his brother might have succeeded to the property and title.”

He remained for some moments looking fixedly at the paper, until the commonplace paragraph imprinted itself upon his brain as no line of sage or poet had ever done, and then he folded it up and put it in his pocket.  In his exaltation he felt that even the mother he had never loved was promoted to a certain respect as his father’s wife, although he was equally conscious of a new resentment against her for her contemptuous allusions to his father, and her evident hopeless inability to comprehend his position.  His mother, he feared, was indeed low!—­but he was his father’s son!  Nevertheless, he gave her a funeral at Atherly, long remembered for its barbaric opulence and display.  Thirty carriages, procured from Sacramento at great expense, were freely offered to his friends to join in the astounding pageant.  A wonderful casket of iron and silver, brought from San Francisco, held the remains of the ex-washerwoman of Rough and Ready.  But a more remarkable innovation was the addition of a royal crown to the other ornamentation of the casket.  Peter Atherly’s ideas of