"O Pimos! O my children! hearken well unto the words which I speak. When the evil days come upon you, ye shall certainly look for my coming in the chariot of the rising Sun, and set a watchman to watch for every village. Let the doors of your wigwams look toward the morning, and let them never be closed, for sad will it be with that one who shall not be ready at my coming."

When he finished speaking, the Sun was setting, as you see yonder now; and the Pimos heard a strong rushing, as at the first, and when they looked up, they beheld a swift and shadowy figure, which winged its way toward the setting Sun.*

*

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*

As old Miliano concluded, in his broken Spanish, the story, of which the above is a somewhat embellished translation, the sun was setting. While we sat beneath the mesquite bush, the sky had clouded over, and just then there fell a little shower between us and the sun. The falling luminary looked through a chink in the clouds, and, shining through the wonderful tropic atmosphere of Arizona, turned all that rain into dropping blood. Then the river Gila, with its long and winding thread of green, and those immeasurable, deadened plains, so strangely dotted with the gorgeous emerald shafts of the pitahaya, and all the encompassing mountains, were, for the space of two or three minutes, red-lighted with an imposing and

* I care not to argue whether the Pimos are, or are not, of Aztec descent. It is sufficient for my purposes that they believe they are, and are looking for the second coming of Montezuma, and invariably make their doors open to the east, as I have abundantly seen for myself. Torquemada asserted they were Aztec; Coronado believed it; Pedro Font believed it; but Mr. Bartlett rejects the theory on linguistic grounds. I do not know how thorough was his examination; but he does not appear to have learned that they look for the second coming of Montezuma, nor to have noticed the singular fact respecting their doors.

lurid grandeur, as if an angel, great and glorious with the radiance of Paradise, swung already in the heavens the flaming firebrand of doom.

For several minutes we sat beneath the mesquite, contemplating in silence a scene which seemed to me like a prelude to the ushering in of eternity. I looked at old Miliano. Could it be, perhaps, that the soul of the old man, weary and sick with watching for the coming of Montezuma, was exulting in the belief that to-morrow's sun would bring him sweet release? Alas, I trow not; for presently he wreathed his skinny face into a most exquisitely hideous smile, held out his hand, and asked for a piece of tobacco. For once in my life, I sincerely regretted that I did not use the insane weed, for I should have given him all I possessed.

You

Then I arose, musing, and walked on alone down my long way westward. O too credulous and superstitious Pimo! by your constancy you rebuke the Paleface. But sad would be the face of Montezuma, if he came. once were happy. Who brought you this your ceaseless dull pain, and your unrest and vague groping, and your despair? In the very presence of the Paleface, though you welcome him, you can see nothing but a monitor of swifthastening annihilation.

As I passed through the last village, the inhabitants were sitting beneath their rude bush-arbors to take the breeze of the evening. Many of them had painted streaks of red ochre beneath their eyes, so that they seemed to weep incessantly tears of blood. Never can I forget the dull and stolid sorrow with which those big black faces-descended from a once mighty race, ancient, perhaps, already when the Old World was young, but touched now by the thickening miseries and the melancholy of their impending and relentless doom with yet

sadder and darker lineaments-looked out upon a restless wanderer, sprung from a race which the wind blew yesterday over the sea; straying from the far-off East to molest with questions their ancient solitary customs and their immutability.

Not far distant, on the desert of Gila Bend, I passed within sight of Montezuma's Face. On the summit of a naked and wind-swept sierra, sculptured by Nature in the red granitic porphyry, that reclining face of the Great Father, unchangeable through wind, and tempest, and burning heat, and earthquake, sleeps on with the same sad, earnest, and tranquil mien, year after year, through these centuries of oppression and wrong, unmoved by the dying shriek of Pimo, or Apache, or Paleface, as they fall on the burning plain beneath him, because the fullness of time is not yet come when he shall awaken for the delivery of his waiting children.

TOM AND HIS WIFE.

TOM

EARLY DOMESTIC LIFE IN CALIFORNIA.

As through the land at eve we went,

And plucked the ripened ears,

We fell out, my wife and I,

We fell out, I know not why,

And kissed again with tears.

TENNYSON.

‘OM CULVER married simply because he was desperate. He had loved a fisherman's daughter in Maine, but his mother was one of those inscrutably absurd women who believe their children marry, not for themselves, but for them; and she decreed that Mary Milman was "beneath her son," and surreptitiously intercepted their letters until they became estranged, and one night the heart-broken girl threw herself from a cliff into the ocean. But at length Tom discovered the perfidy of his mother, and, with despair and bitterness rankling in his soul, he left her without a word of farewell, and sought that congenial refuge of broken hopes and embittered lives, the sunny, the wild, the all-forgetting California.

There, after long and aimless wanderings among the placers, he found, in Sacramento, Annie Donovan, a proud, willful, petted servant-girl. She was not beautiful, but she was vivacious in repartee, and to Tom Culver, in the blind and maddened bitterness of his despair, there was something unaccountably fascinating in the scorn which flashed in the black eyes and kindled the bloodless cheeks of this haughty little brunette, when she repelled

his most careless advances. What! a little Irish servantgirl in California repulse him in that manner! Tom had wellnigh lost faith in the virtue of womankind, and here was a phenomenon. He set his heart recklessly on the conquest of that woman who dared repel him, especially as his rival was a State Senator, being determined, as he said, to "go him one better."

And he did.

Tom and Annie were married and took a little house, and the State Senator went home to his constituents.

But, now that Tom had triumphed through the mere recklessness of momentary devotion inspired, as it were, by his despair, the old bitterness of his early and only true love, forever blighted, gradually returned, supplanting this new and factitious sentiment. With it also returned the old restlessness of a brooding and bitter-hearted melancholy. His little wife was of that description of women with whom "love is love for evermore;" she loved her Tom with a passionateness he could not feel; and she was sorely puzzled at his moodiness and his incurable discontent. She had married him without even knowing his occupation, much less his early history. And, knowing it partially, the reader will, in the sad business through which we must conduct poor Tom, judge him more charitably than Annie could.

She could not discover that he had any occupation whatever. He would peruse the morning newspaper until Annie announced breakfast, when he would carelessly sit by, absently conning a paragraph, then absently sipping his tea, and speaking only in monosyllables. Then he would saunter forth into the city, with his hands pensively inserted into his pockets; return at dinner-time; then go silently and vacantly out again, and return late in the evening.