The history of “Jules’,” however, was once destined to offer a singular interruption of this peaceful and methodical process.  The winter of 1859-60 was an exceptional one.  But little rain had fallen in the valleys, although the snow lay deep in the high Sierras.  Passes were choked, ravines filled, and glaciers found on their slopes.  And when the tardy rains came with the withheld southwesterly “trades,” the regular phenomenon recurred; Jules’ Flat silently, noiselessly, and peacefully went under water; the inhabitants moved to the higher ground, perhaps a little more expeditiously from an impatience born of the delay.  The stagecoach from Marysville made its usual detour and stopped before the temporary hotel, express offices, and general store of “Jules’,” under canvas, bark, and the limp leaves of a spreading alder.  It deposited a single passenger,—­Miles Hemmingway, of San Francisco, but originally of Boston,—­the young secretary of a mining company, dispatched to report upon the alleged auriferous value of “Jules’.”  Of this he had been by no means impressed as he looked down upon the submerged cabins from the box-seat of the coach and listened to the driver’s lazy recital of the flood, and of the singularly patient acceptance of it by the inhabitants.

It was the old story of the southwestern miner’s indolence and incompetency,—­utterly distasteful to his northern habits of thought and education.  Here was their old fatuous endurance of Nature’s wild caprices, without that struggle against them which brought others strength and success; here was the old philosophy which accepted the prairie fire and cyclone, and survived them without advancement, yet without repining.  Perhaps in different places and surroundings a submission so stoic might have impressed him; in gentlemen who tucked their dirty trousers in their muddy boots and lived only for the gold they dug, it did not seem to him heroic.  Nor was he mollified as he stood beside the rude refreshment bar—­a few planks laid on trestles—­and drank his coffee beneath the dripping canvas roof, with an odd recollection of his boyhood and an inclement Sunday-school picnic.  Yet these men had been living in this shiftless fashion for three weeks!  It exasperated him still more to think that he might have to wait there a few days longer for the water to subside sufficiently for him to make his examination and report.  As he took a proffered seat on a candle-box, which tilted under him, and another survey of the feeble makeshifts around him, his irascibility found vent.

“Why, in the name of God, didn’t you, after you had been flooded out once, build your cabins permanently on higher ground?”

Although the tone of his voice was more disturbing than his question, it pleased one of the loungers to affect to take it literally.

“Well, ez you’ve put it that way,—­’in the name of God!’”—­returned the man lazily, “it mout hev struck us that ez he was bossin’ the job, so to speak, and handlin’ things round here generally, we might leave it to Him.  It wasn’t our flood to monkey with.”