The Californian's Tale

Yazar

Mark Twain

Yayınevi

Morpa Kültür Yayınları

Dil

İngilizce

Sayfa s.

79

Thirty-five years ago I was out prospecting on the Stanislaus, tramping all day long with pick and pan and horn, and washing a harful of dirt here and there, always expecting to make a rich strike, and never doing it. It was a lovely region, woodsy, balmy, delicious, and had once bee populous, long years before, but now the people had vanished and the charming paradise was a solitude. They went way when the surface diggings gave out. In one place, where a busy little city with banks and newspapers and fire companies and a mayor and aldermen had had been, was nothing but a wide expanse of emerald turf, with not even the faintest sign that human life had ever been present there. This was down toward Turrletown. In the country neighborhood there abouts, along the dusty roads, one found at intervals the pretties little cottage homes, snug and cozy, and so cobwebbed with vines snowed thick with roses that the doors and windows were wholly hidden from sight- sign that these were deserted homes, forsaken years ago by defeated and disappointed families who could neither sell them nor give them away. Now and then, half an hour apart, one came across solitary log cabins of the earliest mining days, built by the first gold-miners, the predesessors of the cottage-builders. In some few cases these cabins were still occupied; and when this was so, you could depent upon it that the occupant was the very pioneer who had built the cabin; and you could depend on another thing... (...)
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