It is said that the sick were made well, and the well made better, in Jim Gillis’s cabin on the hilltop, where the air was nectar and the stillness like enchantment.  One could mine there if he wished to do so; Jim would always furnish him a promising claim, and teach him the art of following the little fan-like drift of gold specks to the nested deposit of nuggets somewhere up the hillside.  He regularly shared his cabin with one Dick Stoker (Dick Baker, of ’Roughing It’), another genial soul who long ago had retired from the world to this forgotten land, also with Dick’s cat, Tom Quartz; but there was always room for guests.

In ‘Roughing It’, and in a later story, “The Californian’s Tale,” Mark Twain has made us acquainted with the verdant solitude of the Tuolumne hills, that dreamy, delicious paradise where once a vast population had gathered when placer-mining had been in its bloom, a dozen years before.  The human swarm had scattered when the washings failed to pay, leaving only a quiet emptiness and the few pocket-miners along the Stanislaus and among the hills.  Vast areas of that section present a strange appearance to-day.  Long stretches there are, crowded and jammed and drifted with ghostly white stones that stand up like fossils of a prehistoric life —­the earth deposit which once covered them entirely washed away, every particle of it removed by the greedy hordes, leaving only this vast bleaching drift, literally the “picked bones of the land.”  At one place stands Columbia, regarded once as a rival to Sacramento, a possible State capital—­a few tumbling shanties now—­and a ruined church.

It was the 4th of December, 1864, when Mark Twain arrived at Jim Gillis’s cabin.  He found it a humble habitation made of logs and slabs, partly sheltered by a great live-oak tree, surrounded by a stretch of grass.  It had not much in the way of pretentious furniture, but there was a large fireplace, and a library which included the standard authors.  A younger Gillis boy, William, was there at this time, so that the family numbered five in all, including Tom Quartz, the cat.  On rainy days they would gather about the big, open fire and Jim Gillis, with his back to the warmth, would relate diverting yarns, creations of his own, turned out hot from the anvil, forged as he went along.  He had a startling imagination, and he had fostered it in that secluded place.  His stories usually consisted of wonderful adventures of his companion, Dick Stoker, portrayed with humor and that serene and vagrant fancy which builds as it goes, careless as to whither it is proceeding and whether the story shall end well or ill, soon or late, if ever.  He always pretended that these extravagant tales of Stoker were strictly true; and Stoker—­“forty-six and gray as a rat”—­earnest, thoughtful, and tranquilly serene, would smoke and look into the fire and listen to those astonishing things of himself, smiling a little now and then but saying never a word.