A little hand brought a dipper of water to the door. A boy face lifted up timidly to the great bearded men from Missouri as they in turn drank and passed the big tin dipper from one to the other till it was drained; then the little hand took the dipper back again and disappeared, while the men, half ashamed and wholly confounded, stumbled on up the trail. The boy had been so civil, so shy, so modest, and yet, when occasion offered, so kind withal, that few could refuse to be his friends; and now he had, only by lifting his eyes, won over this knot of half-vulgar, half-ruffianly fellows wholly to his side. Once the saloon-keeper, the cinnamon-haired man of the Howling Wilderness, as the one whisky shop of this New Eden was called, met him on the trail as he was going out with a pick and shovel on his shoulder, to prospect for gold. "What is your name, my boy?" "Billie Piper." The timid brown eyes looked up through the cluster of yellow curls, as the boy stepped aside to let the big man pass; and the two, without other words, went on their ways. Oddly enough they allowed this boy to keep his name. They called him Little Billie Piper. He was an enigma to the miners. Sometimes he looked to be only fifteen. Then again he was very thoughtful. The fair brow was wrinkled sometimes; there were lines, sabre cuts of time, on the fair delicate face, and then he looked to be at least double that age. He worked, or at least he went out to work, every day with his pick and pan and shovel; but almost always they saw him standing by the running stream, looking into the water, dreaming, seeing in Nature's mirror the snowy clouds that blew in moving mosaic overhead and through and over the tops of the tossing firs. He rarely spoke to the men more than in monosyllables. Yet when he did speak to them his language was so refined, so far above their common speech, and his voice was so soft, and his manner so gentle that they saw in him, in some sort, a superior. Yet Limber Tim, the boy-man, came pretty near to this boy's life. At least he stood nearer to his heart than any one. Their lives were nearer the same level. One Sunday they stood together on the hill by the graveyard above the Forks. "Tell me," said the boy, laying his hand on the arm of his companion, and looking earnestly and sadly in his face, "Tell me, Tim, why it is that they always have the graveyard on a hill. Is it because it is a little nearer to heaven?" His companion did not understand. And yet he did understand, and was silent. They sat down together by and by and looked up out of the great canon at the drifting white clouds, and the boy said, looking into heaven, as if to himself, "O! fleets of clouds that flee before The burly winds of upper seas." Then as the sudden twilight fell and they went down the hill together, the white crooked moon, as if it had just been broken from off the snow peak that it had been hiding behind, came out with a star.