above him, and its peaceful serenity fell like a thought of God and heaven upon the tumult of his mind.

Passion and revenge, hate and despair were arrested by one thought. "Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord." A moment of some Sunday's lesson, or it might have been only the text to a sermon he had not listened to at the time ; no matter how he had learned it, he knew that it was as much to be regarded as the command, “thou shalt not kill." It was listened to then, but many. a time afterwards the struggle came up again, and the self-conquest grew harder and harder.

It was well for him that the miners did not trouble themselves to pry into each other's affairs, and that Sam knew too little of any of them, to ask or expect their advice. They thought he was a sensible little fellow to keep on at work; and called him a "queer stick," for not wasting what he made as they did. He was as industrious as ever, but grew sullen and moody. How could he help it ? he was old before his time; the very strength of will that made him without his knowing it a moral hero, in keeping the secret

of Colcord's villany, and working on when many a man would have given up discouraged, was a proof of it. It was all there, a natural trait of character, but he might have grown up without its being called out in less eventful life.

Sam toiled on at the nearly exhausted claim, for he had not the means to secure a better one, until the men began to talk of emigrating, for the rainy season, to the dry diggings. It was very discouraging to work so very, very hard, and deny himself every thing, with so little success. Many a night what he had made seemed hardly worth adding to his little stock. The disappointed men on the bar drank and gamed to throw off their troubles, and he was often tempted to do the Once he raised the glass to his very lips, --but his promise was stronger than the wish to drink it; and more than once, night after night that miserable winter, he lingered in the large gaming tent, made alluring by light, and warmth, and jovial choruses, and watched the glittering piles grow larger and higher, to be swept off by some eager looker-on. It seemed so easy to make up losses, by a single throw of the dice, or lucky turn of the cards. He would not think of those

same.

who were ruined by the same throw, then, but steal off through the dark wet night to his own tent, calling himself a fool for hesitating at the risk, and resolved to play the desperate stake when another evening came.

But even if he could have forgotten the warning of his father's example, he knew his mother never would receive the wages of sin, and it was for her, only for her, he cared to hoard.

He often looked back to that dismal and pitied winter himself. Some of the miners, from Larkin's Bar, prepared to leave for the States, not many weeks after he began the world again, contented with what they had made. By one of them Sam wrote a short desponding letter home, trying to soften the news of his father's death, and their new misfortune; and then he left that grave in the wilderness, and followed the miners to their winter encampment.

The heavy rains made the roads almost impassable before they reached it, and more than one died, as Mr. Gilman had done, from fatigue Death in many forms was no

and exposure.

longer a strange sight.

I know it is a sad thing to read of these trials

happening to one so young, and I will not dwell on the dark picture. Those who are reading it in their pleasant homes, where want, and care, and hardships are only heard of, cannot even understand all the weariness and temptation of that winter to the young exile. But they can thank our Heavenly Father that their paths are made full of pleasantness, and be more grateful for the comforts around them. There were many

days when the steady fall of rain,-coming not in showers but like a heavy column,-deluged and obscured every thing, and left not even the refuge of hard work, from home-sickness, and heart-sickness. And then prospects brightened, and hope came back with the sunshine, as the boy worked cheerfully all day long, untouched by the discontent and, worse than all, sickness around him. So the winter wore away, darkness and clouds, hope and brighter days coming and going, to many an exile beside our young miner, through the dry diggings of California.

CHAPTER XIII.

FIRE.

66 WELL, what now?" one of his neighbors called out, as Sam struck his shovel into the ground and turned over his pan face downwards, one fine April morning. The men were in high spirits, for the rains were nearly over, and every thing promised a successful season.

"I'm going to the States-that's all-off in the first boat, and want to sell out cheap.What 'll you give for every thing as it stands, tent and all-give us a bid.”

"Two ounces; they ain't much use now, the dry season's coming," said the man, concisely. He had been sharing the tent and accommodating himself with its kitchen department, for a weekly sum, since his arrival at Free Man's Diggings, a month before, and did not mind becoming proprietor instead of boarder. It did not