Will you go down to Pot-Hole Bar, two miles below? The trail ran by the river. But freshet after freshet has rushed over the bank and wiped out the track made by the footprints of a few years. There is no trace of the trail. The chaparral has grown over and quite closed it up. Here and there is a faint trace, and then it brings up short against a young pine or a buckeye, the growth of the last ten years. Yet in former days this path ranked in your mind of the importance of a town street. You had no idea how quickly nature, if left alone, will restore things to what we term “primitive conditions.” If a great city was deserted in these foothills, within twenty years’ time the native growths would creep down and in upon it, start plantations of chaparral in the streets, festoon the houses with vines, while winged seeds would fill the gutters and cornices with verdure. It is a hard struggle through the undergrowth to Pot-Hole Bar. No man lives there now. No man goes there. Even the boulder piles and bare ledges of fifteen years ago, marking the scarifying work of your race on mother earth’s face, are now mounds overgrown with weeds. What solitude of ancient ruined cities equals this? Their former thousands are nothing to you as individuals; but you knew all the boys at Pot-Hole. It was a favorite after-supper trip from Dry Bar to Pot-Hole to see how the “boys” were getting on, and vice versa from Pot-Hole to Dry Bar. A cotton-tail rabbit sends a flash of white through the bushes. His family now inhabits Pot-Hole. They came back after all of your troublesome race had left, and very glad were the “cotton-tails” of the riddance. There is a broken shovel at your feet and near by in the long grass you see the fragment of a sluice’s false bottom, bored through with anger holes to catch the gold and worn quite thin by the attrition of pebble and boulder along its upper surface. This is about the only vestige of the miner’s former work. Stop! On the hillside yonder is a mound-like elevation and beyond that a long green raised line. One marks the reservoir and the other the ditch. It was the Pot-Hole Company’s reservoir, built after they had concluded to take water from the ditch and wash off a point of gravel jutting toward the river. They had washed it all off by 1856, and then the company disbanded and went their respective ways. Pot-Hole lay very quiet for a couple of years, but little doing there save rocker washing for grub and whiskey by four or five men who had concluded that “grub and whiskey” was about all in life worth living for. A “slouchy” crowd, prone to bits of rope to tie up their suspenders, unshaven faces, and not a Sunday suit among them.