They pottered about the bar and the bank, working sometimes in concert and then quarrelling, and every man betaking himself to his private rocker, pick, and shovel for a few days or weeks and coming together again, as compelled by necessity. One of them commenced picking into a slim streak of gravel at the base of the red hard-pan bank left by the pot-holers. It paid to the pan first two cents and a little farther in three, and a little farther seven, and then the gold became coarser and heavier and it yielded a bit to the pan. The blue ledge “pitched in,” the gravel streak grew wider and richer, the crowd took up the whole face of the bank, 150 feet to the man, and found they had struck fortunes. And then they worked at short intervals and “went it” at long ones, and all save four drank themselves to death within four years. They have all long since gone. They are scattered for the most part you know not where. Two are living in San Francisco and are now men of might and mark. Another you have heard of far away in the Eastern States, living in a remote village, whose name is never heard of outside the county bounds. One has been reported to you as “up North somewhere;” another down in Arizona “somewhere,” and three you can locate in the county. That is but seven out of the one hundred who once dwelt here and roundabout. Now that recollection concentrates herself you do call to mind two others--one died in the county almshouse and another became insane and was sent to Stockton. That is all. Nine out of the one hundred that once resided at Dry Bar. It is mournful. The river monotonously drones, gurgles, and murmurs over the riffle. The sound is the same as in ’58. A bird on the opposite bank gives forth, at regular intervals, a loud querulous cry. It was a bird of the same species whose note so wore on the nerves of Mike McDonald as he lay dying of consumption in a big house which stood yonder, that, after anathematizing it, he would beseech his watcher to take a gun and blow the “cussed” thing’s head off. Perhaps it is the same bird. The afternoon shadows are creeping down the mountain side. The outline of the hills opposite has not at all changed, and there, down by the bank, is the enormous fragment of broken rock against which Dick Childs built his brush shelter for the summer and out of which he was chased by a sudden fall rise of the river. But it is very lonesome with all these people here so vivid in memory, yet all gone, and never, never to come back.