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The old church was placed upon a side-hill, its rear toward the cemetery which he had just been exploring, and its front door on a level at least six feet lower. He, in his wild dash after the brown derby, had not noticed this and, rushing around the corner, had been precipitated down the bank. He was not hurt, but he was rumpled and astonished.

His quick-changing facial expressions might tell every thought and mood, but the tongue, perforce, ran hard after, repeating, like a second Boswell. The man lay down on the lip of the pool and drank long and deep of its water. "Tastes good to me," he murmured, lifting his head and gazing across the pool at the side-hill, while he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

The clash of steel-shod soles against the rocks began to be heard, and the man's voice grew louder. 'A sound of scrambling accompanied the song, and the spirit of the place fled away on the heels of the red-coated buck. The green screen was burst asunder, and a man peered out at the meadow and the pool and the sloping side-hill. He was a deliberate sort of man.

This barn is supposed to stand upon a side-hill or an inclined surface, where it is easy to have a cellar, if desired; and the cattle-room, as shown in the cut, is in the second story, or directly over the cellar, the bottom of which should be somewhat dished, or lower in the middle than around the outer sides, and carefully paved, or laid in cement.

"Kase dat ar side-hill am twenty-five acres ob de best terbacker groun' in Ho'sford County." "Yer don't say so, Nimbus?" "Dat's jes what I do say, 'Liab, an' dat's de main reason what's made me so stubborn 'bout buyin' dis berry track of lan'. Pears ter me it's jes made fer us. It's all good terbacker lan', most on't de berry best. It's easy clar'd off an' easy wukked.

I saw much of this family afterwards, and grew to love them for their honest efforts to be decent and comfortable, and for their knowledge of their own ignorance. There was with them no affectation. The mother would scold the father for being so "easy"; Josie would roundly berate the boys for carelessness; and all knew that it was a hard thing to dig a living out of a rocky side-hill.

"My!" he said, "but I've got an appetite. I could scoff iron-filings an' horseshoe nails an' thank you kindly, ma'am, for a second helpin'." He straightened up, and, while he reached for matches in the pocket of his overalls, his eyes traveled across the pool to the side-hill. His fingers had clutched the match-box, but they relaxed their hold and the hand came out empty.

The woodchuck always burrows on a side-hill. This enables him to guard against being drowned out, by making the termination of the hole higher than the entrance. He digs in slantingly for about two or three feet, then makes a sharp upward turn and keeps nearly parallel with the surface of the ground for a distance of eight or ten feet farther, according to the grade.

Gray and old, changeless it stood, looking down in silent disdain on these California buildings hastening to an early grave. Here and there, hid by pines and vines, up the dusty side-hill roads, one caught glimpses of pretty cottage homes, where dwelt the few who, when the tide had turned, were left stranded in this far-off California mining town. Yes, Gold City was of the past.

Once in the course of the day we lighted on a picturesque ragged hut, where the purveyors of this meat were soaking themselves in full side-hill sunlight, where little savages of every degree of gauntness in their limbs, ochriness on their cheeks, shockiness in their heads, and protuberance in their abdomens, were gorging themselves to still more hideous ventral embonpoint, where white men, lower than the lowest Diggers they herded with, had forgotten the little they ever knew of civilization, and stood glaring at us like half-sated Satyrs as we passed.