If a black bottle could be produced it could be worshipped undisturbed until long past midnight. And such was always produced on the return of the old acquaintance. When the “boys” at last tumbled into their bunks and smoked a night-cap pipe abed, there was no wife in special charge of husband to molest or make them afraid or disturb their internal peace by reason of her near presence. Those were the golden seasons of masculine domestic tranquillity on the banks of the Tuolumne. Woman never disturbed the Bar proper with her presence. It was always a masculine Bar, at least on the right bank of the river. On the left, at a later date, on a flat, where I enjoyed the privilege of digging for next to nothing for two years, there did live for a time three foreign households glorified by woman’s presence. But this was after the palmy days of Swett’s Bar proper right bank. I have heard that Swett’s Bar was named after John Swett, once Superintendent of Public Instruction in California. If so, he never there left any relics or reminders of himself--not even a grammar. Swett’s lies equidistant from Hawkins’ and Indian Bars. When last I passed through it the floods had washed out every trace of man’s presence on one side of the river, leaving there an enormous heap of logs and brush-wood. The Bar proper had been smoothed down by the flood, every hole or boulder heap, or heap of “headings” or “tailings,” or the deep pits dug and laboriouly kept free of water by machinery, or heavily rock-freighted crib of logs, the work of miners in the river’s bed, had been planed away. The pebbles and boulders had all been rearranged, the sands were smooth, white, and glistening as though “fresh from the Creator’s hands;” and none save those conversant with the river’s history could have guessed that every foot of the bank adjoining the river had been turned over and over again in the search for gold.