No work on the claim to-day. It rains too hard. It is the winter rain of California--a warm, steady, continuous drizzle. The red earth is soft and soppy. It mires to the ankles. The dark green of the chaparral on the hill sides seems to-day almost black. The hue of the river by my cabin door is yellower than ever. The water-mark is three feet higher than last night and it creeps upward every hour. Over the mountain crags yonder white sheets of foam are tumbling where none has been seen before for many months. This is an enforced day of rest. I have finished my breakfast and sit down for a few minutes in a keen enjoyment of idleness. There is a ceaseless patter of raindrops on the cabin roof. The river roars louder than ever over the riffle close by. That roar is the first sound I hear in the morning and the last at night. It has roared thus for me these three years. In one sense of times’ duration they seem as three hundred years; in another, they seem not much over three months. It is three months when I think only of the date of my arrival on Frazier’s flat. It is three hundred years as I attempt to recall the daily round of experience and thought since I came here. Outwardly it has been what many would consider a monotonous experience. Weeks have been so much alike that they leave no distinguishing marks in my memory. A big freshet or two, a mining lawsuit, an election, a few weeks when the claim “came down rich,” a fight at the bar store, a bigger spree than usual, a visit from county candidates travelling for votes, a giving out of ditch water, a break in the reservoir, a man drowned in the river--these are the great events on Frazier’s flat.