THURSDAY, NOV. 9. Our baccaro came in this morning, and startled us with the intelligence that last night, while he was on the watch—sound asleep, of course—the wild Indians came, and stole all our horses and mules, save one, little Nina, whom he had tethered close to his post. Rather an awkward predicament for us, in the California mountains, three hundred miles from home, and our horses and mules in the hands of wild Indians, driving them off into some unknown fastness, to be killed for food! But I was on the trail of a small piece of gold, and followed it up with that sort of listless equanimity with which a man will sometimes pick up a curious shell on the rocks where his vessel floats in fragments. If you would acquire those habits which no disaster can disturb, come to California. One year here will do more for your philosophy than a life elsewhere. I have seen a man sit, and quietly smoke his cigar, while his dwelling went heavenward in a column of flame. It seemed as if it were enough for him that his wife and children were safe, and that the green earth, with its bright-eyed flowers and laughing rills, remained; so let the old tenement pass off in smoke to pall some mountain peak, or throw its dusky shadow where— “The owlet builds his ivy tower.” FRIDAY, NOV. 10. The Sonoranian, who has been one of the most successful diggers in the ravine, besieged me to-day to sell him my pistols. They are an elegant pair, silver mounted and rifle bore, and good for duck or duelist—no matter which—for twenty or thirty paces. He offered me a pound of gold; so I determined to try the non-resistant principle, and let him have them. As he belted them about his waist, and strode off, you would have advised even a California bear to get out of his way. How well prepared for a last extremity is a man with a new weapon at his side, or a new patent pill in his pocket! The only difference is, that with the former he may chance to kill some one else, and with the latter he is pretty sure to kill himself. But I promised to make no more remarks; my apology must be the loss of our horses, the probable necessity of being obliged to pick our way home on foot, and the refuge which even an irrelevant thought affords from such a dismal prospect. Men have betrayed flashes of humor on the block—an evanescent ray on the verge of endless night! Then why should not my poor pill have place in the pedestrian prospect of three hundred miles, and that, too, through a region marked only by the footprints which linger dimly in the trail of the wild Indian?