It
was a low, brown cottage, planted close against the hill, and
overhung by the foliage and peeling boughs of a madrona thicket.
Within it was full of dead leaves and mountain dust, and rubbish
from the mine. But we soon had a good fire brightly blazing, and
sat close about it on impromptu seats. Chuchu, the slave of sofa-
cushions, whimpered for a softer bed; but the rest of us were
greatly revived and comforted by that good creature-fire, which
gives us warmth and light and companionable sounds, and colours up
the emptiest building with better than frescoes. For a while it
was even pleasant in the forge, with the blaze in the midst, and a
look over our shoulders on the woods and mountains where the day
was dying like a dolphin.
It was between seven and eight before Hanson arrived, with a
waggonful of our effects and two of his wife's relatives to lend
him a hand. The elder showed surprising strength. He would pick
up a huge packing-case, full of books of all things, swing it on
his shoulder, and away up the two crazy ladders and the breakneck
spout of rolling mineral, familiarly termed a path, that led from
the cart-track to our house. Even for a man unburthened, the
ascent was toilsome and precarious; but Irvine sealed it with a
light foot, carrying box after box, as the hero whisks the stage
child up the practicable footway beside the waterfall of the fifth
act.
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