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January 24, 1848, was the red-letter day in California's history, and the news that transpired that day electrified the world. While constructing a saw-mill at Coloma Creek, a branch of the American River, John Marshall picked up a handful of gold nuggets in the mill-race. At once the gold fever seized all far and near.
"Is this where the road is flooded?" he asked of a stout man in a whitish coat and cap who had come forward to speak to the coachman. "Aye, sir but you'll get through. In an hour's time, mebbe ye couldn't do it. The water fro' the mill-race is over t' road, but it's nobbut a foot deep as yet. Yo'll do it varra well but yo'd best not lose time!"
The track toward Lime Point could mean but one thing. The wind was freshening from the nor'west, the ebb tide rushing out to meet the ocean like a mill-race, at every moment the Golden Gate opened out wider, and within two minutes after the time of the last tack the "Bertha Millner" heeled to a great gust that had come booming in between the heads, straight from the open Pacific.
The bed is set in high, steep banks submerged during the rains; and the narrowness of the mouth, compared with the upper part, made it run, after the late showers, into the Ancobra like a mill-race. In fact, the paddlers were compelled to track in order to make headway.
"I c-couldn't wish to be remembered in any p-pleasanter way." "Well, good evening. I must hurry home, for it grows damp here by the mill-race. Tell Lizzy and Anna to come and see me. We are quite lonesome now." "P-p'raps Mark'll come with 'em." "Mark? Is he here? When did he come?" "H-he'll be here t-to-night." "You surprise me!" "'Tis rather s-sudden.
On the dappled boughs of the sycamore by the mill-race several bronze leaves hung limp and motionless, as if they were attached by silken threads to the stems, and the coating of moss on the revolving wheel shone like green enamel on a groundwork of ebony.
No other life was there but that of sea-birds, and of the sea itself, that here ran like a mill-race and growled about the outer reef for ever, and ever and again, in the calmest weather, roared and spouted on the rock itself.
"I know it; I know it," said Shorty, modestly; "but don't stop to talk about it now. I think I've got the lay o' the mill in mind. I'll just cut around that way. Don't shoot till you hear me." Si quietly deployed his boys to the left of the road, and worked them through the brush until they came to the crest overlooking the mill-race. They took readily to this sort of work.
The child missing from the mill two months ago the accepted theory was that it had tumbled into the mill-race and been swept away; but the mother had always declared she had heard a shriek on the hill side of the house, in the opposite direction from the water. It was unthinkable, of course, but he wished that the boy had not made that uncanny remark about child-flesh eaten two months ago.
The whole catastrophe is determined by Rosmer's inability to accept without proof Rebecca's declaration that Rosmersholm has "ennobled" her, and that she is no longer the same woman whose relentless egoism drove Beata into the mill-race. Rebecca herself puts it to him: "How can you believe me on my bare word after to-day?" There is only one proof she can give that of "going the way Beata went."
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