This was a high, rainy country. The frontier of the pines lay just behind and just above the town, on the first upward slopes. The desert levels were far below. Shade trees, then, can grow in Hillsboro; do grow there by Nature and by artifice, making a joyous riot of visible song--in the residential section. Industrial Hillsboro, however, held--or was held?--to the flintier hills, bleak and bare and brown, where the big smelter overhung and dominated the north. The steep narrow valley of the Percha divided Hillsboro rather equally between the good and the goats. There was also the inevitable Mexican quarter--here, as ever, Chihuahua. But if Hillsboro could claim no originality of naming, she could boast of something unique in map making. The Mexican suburb ran directly through the heart of the town. Then the Mexican town was the old town? A good guess, but not the right one. The effective cause was that the lordly white man scorned to garden--cowmen and miners holding an equally foolish tradition on this head; while the humble _paisano_ has gardened since Scipio and Hasdrubal; would garden in hell. So the narrow bottom lands of the creek were given over to truck patches and brown gardeners; tiny empires between loop and loop of twisting water; black loam, pay dirt. It is curious to consider that this pay dirt will be fruitful still, these homes will still be homes, a thousand years after the last yellow dross has been sifted from the hills. So much for the town proper. A small outlying fringe lay below the broad white wagon road twisting away between the hills in long curves or terraced zigzags to the railhead. Here a flat black level of glassy obsidian shouldered across the valley and forced the little river to an unexpected whirling plunge where the dark box of the Percha led wandering through the eastern barrier of hills; and on that black cheerless level huddled the wide, low length of The Mermaid, paintless, forbidding, shunning and shunned. Most odd to contemplate; this glassy barren, nonproducing, uncultivated and unmined, waste and sterile, was yet a better money-maker than the best placer or the richest loam land of all Hillsboro. Tellurian papers please copy. The Mermaid boasted no Jonson, and differed in other respects from The Mermaid of Broad Street. Nor might it be reproached with any insidious allure, though one of the seven deadly arts had been invoked. Facing the bar, a startled sea maid turned her head, ever about to plunge to the safety of green seas. The result was not convincing; she did not look startled enough to dive. But perhaps the artist had a model. Legend says the canvas was painted to liquidate a liquor bill, which would explain much; it is hard paying for a dead horse. It had once been signed, but some kindly hand had scraped the name away. In moments of irritation Hillsboro spoke of The Mermaid as "The Dive."