Another specimen thinker and speculator of that era was Carroll. He, too, had forever thrown aside pick and shovel, and when I met him he was a confirmed “tilter-back” under the Bella Union portico. Carroll was the theorist of Jamestown. He broached new ones daily; he talked them to everybody in Jamestown, and after making clean work of that hamlet would go up to Sonora and talk there, and lastly published them in the _Union Democrat_. Said Carroll one Monday morning to the Presbyterian domine: “Mr. H----, I heard your sermon yesterday on ‘Heaven.’ You argue, I think, that heaven is really a place. I think it ought to be a place, too. I’ve been thinking about it all night. I’m satisfied not only that it is a place, but that I’ve got at the locality, or at least have approximated to it. I’ve reasoned this out on purely scientific data, and here they are. We have an atmosphere, and they say it is from thirty-three to forty-five miles high. Angels only live in heaven, and angels have wings. If angels have wings, it’s proof that they must have an atmosphere to fly in. Now, the only atmosphere we are sure of is that around the earth. Therefore, putting all these facts and conclusions together, I’ve proved to myself that heaven must be from thirty-three to forty-five miles from the ground we stand on.” On commencing my pedagogical career, I rented a room of Carroll. He owned at that time a quantity of real estate in Jamestown, some of which, including the premises I occupied, was falling rapidly and literally on his hands. The house I lived in was propped up several feet from the ground. The neighbors’ chickens fed under this house from the crumbs swept through the cracks in the floor. It was an easy house to sweep clean. Rumor said that during my landlord’s occupancy of these rooms many chickens had strangely disappeared, and that pistol shots had been heard from the interior of the house. The floor cracks did show powder marks, and there was an unaccountable quantity of feathers blowing about the yard. In a conversation with my landlord he admitted that his boomerang could beat a six-shooter in fetching a chicken. Then he showed me his boomerang, which was of accidental construction, being the only remaining leg and round of an oaken arm-chair. Properly shied, he said, it would kill a chicken at twenty yards. French Joe, who kept the grocery next to Keefe’s saloon, and it was in Jimtown a current report that Carroll and Joe had once invited the Catholic priest, Father A----, from Sonora to dinner; that the backbone of this dinner was a duck; that at or about this time Mrs. Hale, five doors down the street, had missed one of her flock of ducks; that on the morning of the dinner in question a strong savor of parboiling duck permeated all that part of Jamestown lying between Joe’s and Mrs. Hale’s; that Mrs. Hale smelt it; that putting two and two--cause and effect and her own suspicions--together, she armed herself with her bun-tormentor fork and