I spend about an hour getting in fuel. I have a woodyard on the hillside yonder. Nature has kindly felled and seasoned there a few scrub oaks for my use. I drag down a few branches. The land here is free--very free. No fences, no boundary lines, no gates, no proprietors. It’s a pretty flat when the sun shines. A dark background of mountain, in front a river, with its curving and varied outline of tule and bank up and down stream, and close about the oaks are so scattered as to give one the impression of a park and an old mansion hidden somewhere in the background. What a luxury would be this spot to thousands in crowded cities who haven’t even the range of a back yard nor the shadow of a tree! Yet I am discontented and would get away to these crowded cities. The early darkness has come. I light my candle. My candelabra is of glass--dark olive-green--a bottle. I did use a big potato with a hole therein scooped. But the esthetic nature requires constant change and I adopted a bottle. I spread the evening repast. I sit down alone. From the window I see lights glimmering in the few other neighboring cabins. McSkimmins drops in after tea. I know all that McSkimmins will say, for I have often heard it before; but McSkimmins is better than nobody--or rather better than one’s own thoughts, unrefreshed and unrelieved by mixture with any other minds’ thought. McSkimmins goes. I take refuse in the effort to repair my best and only pair of broadcloth pantaloons. I brought these with me from the States. They show decided signs of wear. I am putting in a patch. It is a job I take hold of at intervals. There is about it a mystery and a complication I can’t fathom. I can’t get the patch to fit, or, rather, to set. There is more in the tailor’s art than I imagined. Every time I have put them on I find a difference and a seeming division of action and sentiment between the new cloth I have sewed inside and the old cloth outside. They won’t hold together. The stitches rip apart and everything goes by the run. I seem to fail in making the new cloth accommodate itself to the varying proportions of this part of the garment. And so the dreary night wears on. Rain, rain, rain; roar, roar, roar. Is this living? CHAPTER XV. THE MINER’S SUNDAY. This is the Sunday sun that streams through the cabin window and through the chinks of the cabin wall.