Clara and Diana! the A and B of this C, D, were Dunstan and Paulding, a pair of the best men. A noble thing is the friendship of two brothers in love. California began just as they left college together. They dashed off immediately. Being fellows who were up to anything, they got on wonderfully. They mined, drove coaches, were judges or counsel at the plentiful hangings of the day. Each of them shot a pillager or two and rescued a few Mexicans and Chinamen from pillage by escaped Australians. In the starvation winter, they headed the party that relieved the involuntary cannibals of the Sierra Nevada. They bought a ranch, and finding on its edge among the hills a ready-money boulder of gold, quite an Ajax cast in fact, they opened dry diggings there and took out neat piles before the outsiders came in. Then they took a little run to San Francisco. Everyone who has had California--and what one brave and bold of those days is there that could have it and did not?--every Californian of the early times knows what two men drawing together, not indulging in hebdomadal big drunks or diurnal little drunks, and not beguiled in any sense by the sirens of the Bella Union or other halls, what such a whole team could achieve. These two friends, living together, acting together, having common purse, common purposes for the future, when they had seen the lights and shadows of this phase of life, had gained each the other’s good qualities. When they were together in presence, you saw their marked difference of nature, marked as their differences of physique. When they were apart, each seemed the other’s counterpart. One sometimes sees this singular likeness in man and wife of some marriage of happy augury. At San Francisco, they chanced to pick up one of the Mexicans whom they had protected and befriended in the mines. Through him they became interested in a land claim, which the poor fellow had by inheritance. They carried it on in his behalf, and when he died they found themselves by his will owners of the claim. It was made good. They were selling it at the fabulous prices of that day when Paulding was recalled by his mother’s death. Dunstan remained to close the business. He was able to remit to his friend wealth for them both. Dunstan returned home across the plains by New Mexico and Texas. In the up-country of Texas, he was detained some time by an accident. After some delay, he joined his friend in New York. Several years of toil and danger entitled them to brief repose. When action again became necessary to them, they essayed to revive at home the interest they had felt in constructive politics in California, but the ripeness of times had not yet come. The line was not yet drawn upon the great national question of America, which has since made the position of man and man inevitable according to character and education. Politics were not interesting.