This appeal to the Demos of every American crowd, of course, precluded any reply from the Gentleman of La Porte, but left it to the palpable chairman—the barkeeper, Mr. William Parker.

“Young man,” he replied severely, “when ye can wear yaller kids like that man and make ’em hover in the air like summer lightnin’, and strike in four places to onct!—then ye kin talk! Then ye kin wear your shirt half-masted if ye like!” A sentiment to which the crowd assenting, the meek man paid for the drinks, and would have, in addition, taken off his mourning-band, but was courteously stopped by the Gentleman of La Porte.

And yet, I protest, there was little suggestive of this baleful prowess in his face and figure. He was loose- jointed and long-limbed, yet with a certain mechanical, slow rigidity of movement that seemed incompatible with alacrity and dexterity. His arms were unusually long, and his hands hung with their palms forward. In walking his feet “toed in,” suggesting an aboriginal ancestry. His face, as I remember it, was equally inoffensive. Thin and melancholy, the rare smile that lit it up was only a courteous reception of some attribute of humor in another which he was unable himself to appreciate. His straight black hair and high cheek-bones would have heightened his Indian resemblance; but these were offset by two most extraordinary eyes that were utterly at variance with this, or, indeed, any other, suggestion of his features. They were yellowish-blue, globular, and placidly staring. They expressed nothing that the Gentleman of La Porte thought—nothing that he did—nothing that he might reasonably be expected to do. They were at variance with his speech, his carriage, even his remarkable attire. More than one irreverent critic had suggested that he had probably lost his own eyes in some frontier difficulty, and had hurriedly replaced them with those of his antagonist.

Had this ingenious hypothesis reached the ears of the Gentleman, he would probably have contented himself with a simple denial of the fact, overlooking any humorous incongruity of statement. For, as has been already intimated, among his other privileges he enjoyed an absolute immunity from any embarrassing sense of the ludicrous. His deficient sense of humor and habitual gravity, in a community whose severest dramatic episodes were mitigated by some humorous detail, and whose customary relaxation was the playing of practical jokes, was marked with a certain frankness that was discomposing. “I think,” he remarked to a well-known citizen of La Porte, “that, in alluding to the argumentative character of Mr. William Peghammer, you said you had found him lying awake at night contradicting the ‘Katydids.’ This he himself assures me is not true, and I may add that I passed the night with him in the woods without any such thing occurring. You seem to have lied.” The severity of this reception checked further humorous exhibitions in his presence. Indeed, I am not certain but it invested him with a certain aristocratic isolation.

Thus identified with the earliest history of the Camp, Mr. Trott participated in its fortunes and shared its prosperity. As one of the original locators of the “Eagle Mine” he enjoyed a certain income which enabled him to live without labor and to freely indulge his few and inexpensive tastes. After his own personal adornment—which consisted chiefly in the daily wearing of spotless linen—he was fond of giving presents. These possessed, perhaps, a sentimental rather than intrinsic value. To an intimate friend he had once given a cane, the stick whereof was cut from a wild grapevine which grew above the spot where the famous “Eagle lead” was first discovered in La Porte; the head originally belonged to a cane presented to Mr. Trott’s father, and the ferrule was made of the last silver half-dollar which he had brought to California. “And yet, do you know,” said the indignant recipient of this touching gift, “I offered to put it down for a five-dollar ante last night over at Robinson’s, and the boys wouldn’t see it, and allowed I’d better leave the board. Thar’s no appreciation of sacred things in this yer Camp.”

It was in this lush growth and springtime of La Porte that the Gentleman was chosen Justice of the Peace by the unanimous voice of his fellow-citizens. That he should have exercised his functions with dignity was natural; that he should have shown a singular lenity in the levyings of fines and the infliction of penalties was, however, an unexpected and discomposing discovery to the settlement.

“The law requires me, sir,” he would say to some unmistakable culprit, “to give you the option of ten days’ imprisonment or the fine of ten dollars. If you have not the money with you, the clerk will doubtless