I lived there when the few “boys” left used daily, after the close of an unsuccessful river season, to sit in a row on a log by the river’s edge, and there, surveying their broken dam, would chant curses on their luck. The Bar store was then still in existence. Thompson was its proprietor. The stock on hand had dwindled down to whiskey. The bar and one filled bottle alone survived. On rainy nights, when the few miners left would gather about the stove Thompson would take down his fiddle, and fiddle and sing, “What can’t be cured must be endured,” or, “The King into his garden came; the spices smelt about the same”--a quotation of unknown authorship. Of neighbors, living in their cabins strung along the banks for half a mile above the store, there was Keen Fann, an aged mercantile and mining Chinaman, with a colony about him of lesser and facially indistinguishable countrymen of varying numbers. Second, “Old Harry,” an aged negro, a skilled performer on the bugle and a singer, who offered at times to favor us with what he termed a “little ditto.” He was the Ethiopic king of a knot of Kanakas gathered about him. Third, “Bloody Bill,” so-called from his frequent use of the sanguinary adjective, and, as may be guessed, an Englishman. Fourth, an old Scotchman, one of the Bar’s oldest inhabitants, who would come to the store with the little bit of gold dust, gathered after a hard day’s “crevicing” complaining that gold was getting as scarce as “the grace of God in the Heelands of Scotland.” Fifth, McFarlane, a white-bearded old fellow, another pioneer, who after a yearly venture into some strange and distant locality to “change his luck,” was certain eventually to drift back again to the Bar, which he regarded as home. Down the river, nestled high up in a steep and picturesque gulch, stood the buckeye-embowered cabin of old Jonathan Brown, the ditch tender, a great reader of weekly “story papers,” who lived like a boy in the literature of the _Western Frontier Penny Awful_, and who, coming to the store and perching himself on the counter, would sometimes break out in remarks about how “Them thar Indians got the better of ’em at last,” to the astonishment of the “boys,” who imagined at first that he referred to Indians in the locality, suggesting possibilities of a repetition of the great Oak Flat uprising of 1850.