Produced by Taavi Kalju, Janet Blenkinship and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) THE LITTLE GOLD MINERS OF THE SIERRAS BY JOAQUIN MILLER AND OTHER STORIES _FULLY ILLUSTRATED_ [Illustration: "COLOR! TWO COLORS! THREE, FOUR, FIVE--A DOZEN!"] BOSTON D. LOTHROP & COMPANY FRANKLIN AND HAWLEY STREETS Copyright, 1886, by D. LOTHROP & COMPANY. CONTENTS. PAGE. I. THE LITTLE GOLD MINERS OF THE SIERRAS. 7 _Joaquin Miller._ II. A MODERN HERO. 23 _Marion Harland._ III. BENNY'S WIGWAM. 44 _Mary Catherine Lee._ IV. BENNY'S DISAPPEARANCE. 63 _Mary Catherine Lee._ V. HOW TWO SCHOOLBOYS KILLED A BEAR. 86 _H. F. Marsh._ VI. PETE'S PRINTING PRESS. 94 _Kate Gannett Wells._ VII. AUNT ELIZABETH'S FENCE. 119 _George H. Hebard._ VIII. THE BUTTON BOY. 138 _A. M. Griffin._ IX. DAN HARDY'S CRIPPY. 156 _James Otis._ X. HIS THREE TRIALS. 185 _Kate Gannett Wells._ XI. IN THE SECOND DORMITORY. 211 _John Preston True._ XII. THE DOUGHNUT BAIT. 232 _George Varney._ XIII. A REAL HAPPENING. 239 _Mary B. Claflin._ THE LITTLE GOLD MINERS OF THE SIERRAS. Their mother had died crossing the plains, and their father had had a leg broken by a wagon wheel passing over it as they descended the Sierras, and he was for a long time after reaching the mines miserable, lame and poor. The eldest boy, Jim Keene, as I remember him, was a bright little fellow, but wild as an Indian and full of mischief. The next eldest child, Madge, was a girl of ten, her father's favorite, and she was wild enough too. The youngest was Stumps. Poor, timid, starved Little Stumps! I never knew his real name. But he was the baby, and hardly yet out of petticoats. And he was very short in the legs, very short in the body, very short in the arms and neck; and so he was called Stumps because he looked it. In fact he seemed to have stopped growing entirely. Oh, you don't know how hard the old Plains were on everybody, when we crossed them in ox-wagons, and it took more than half a year to make the journey. The little children, those that did not die, turned brown like the Indians, in that long, dreadful journey of seven months, and stopped growing for a time.