Firm, eat your supper and shake yourself." This was exactly the Sawyer's way--to take things quietly when convinced that there was no chance to better them.

He would always do his best about the smallest trifle; but after that, be the matter small or great, he had a smiling face for the end of it.
The winter, with all its weight of sameness and of dreariness, went at last, and the lovely spring from the soft Pacific found its gradual way to us.

Accustomed as I was to gentler climates and more easy changes, I lost myself in admiration of this my first Californian spring.

The flowers, the leagues and leagues of flowers, that burst into color and harmony--purple, yellow, and delicate lilac, woven with bright crimson threads, and fringed with emerald-green by the banks, and blue by the course of rivers, while deepened here and there by wooded shelter and cool places, with the silver-gray of the soft Pacific waning in far distance, and silken vapor drawing toward the carding forks of the mountain range; and over all the never-wearying azure of the limpid sky: child as I was, and full of little worldly troubles on my own account, these grand and noble sights enlarged me without any thinking.
The wheat and the maize were grown apace, and beans come into full blossom, and the peaches swinging in the western breeze were almost as large as walnuts, and all things in their prime of freshness, ere the yellow dust arrived, when a sudden melting of snow in some gully sent a strong flood down our Blue River.

The saw-mill happened to be hard at work; and before the gear could be lifted, some damage was done to the floats by the heavy, impetuous rush of the torrent.