Ah, she was hurt, I fear, For, seeming ill at ease, She wrote, “To me it’s clear Thou’rt taking liberties. Such notions overthrow, Pray take to other schemes; ’Tis well that thou shouldst know I don’t believe in dreams.” Yet strange that when today I kissed her—oh, the bliss, The charm, the spell, that lay In that ecstatic kiss,— No fault she found; it seems, O maid of mysteries, That though she likes not dreams She courts realities! _Nathan M. Levy._ AN EPISODE OF NUGGET BAR. _By H. L. Wilson._ The mining camp of Nugget Bar, with its twenty or thirty tents and cabins, did not present a particularly inviting scene to the anxious gaze of Julius Anderly, as he urged his tired beast, with its conglomerate burden of camping utensils and mining implements, over the last half mile of his journey. The mountains seemed to cower down as low as possible before the blaze of the setting sun, and their rugged sides and bald tops were marked with shadows and sun pictures, quaint, curious, and fantastic. The scene was wildly picturesque, after its own primitive style, and Julius Anderly was rather disconcerted by the novelty of its rough grandeur; but he was more disconcerted by the group of some half dozen men he discerned lounging in front of what he rightly supposed was the only hotel in the camp. As he drew nearer he was quite positive that the big burly man with the bushy beard would prove anything but an agreeable companion; he was probably one of those men he had been told about who always carried a loaded pistol in a convenient pocket, and who regarded a refusal to drink whisky with him as an insult sufficiently deadly to justify said pistol’s immediate and destructive discharge upon and against the person of the audacious abstainer. And the portly gentleman, who wore a battered “plug” hat, and was seated upon an empty claret case, had a marked magisterial bearing, more autocratic than reassuring. The landlord, tall, thin and lazy, who occupied the doorway, was the least ferocious in appearance. The other members of the group seemed to Julius to be only passively dangerous—safe as long as they were let alone. The big burly man who formed one of the group in front of the “Golden Nugget,” and whom _we_ know to be Hank Purdy (designated by certain envious and despicable residents of Nugget Bar as “Windy Purdy”), paused in the narration of the details of a sanguinary combat between himself and six stalwart Apaches, alleged to have occurred in some remote section of the West at some remote period, and interjected the word, “Tenderfut!” As the term fell from his lips at the instant his eyes fell upon Julius, who had now approached quite near, we cannot do otherwise than consider the term as applied to the latter.