On horseback, over roads impassable to wheels, through snow and storm, he hurried back to Monticello to recover in the quiet of home the peace of mind he had lost in the disappointments of his statesmanship. He arrived at Monticello March 15, and never again passed beyond the bounds of a few adjacent counties.
Born in 1839, died in 1902; removed to California in 1854, where in 1868 he founded _The Overland Monthly_; professor in the University of California in 1870; removed to New York in 1871; consul at Crefeld, Germany, in 1878-80, and at Glasgow in 1880-85; published "The Luck of Roaring Camp" in 1868, "The Outcasts of Poker Flat" in 1869, "Poems" in 1871, "Stories of the Sierras" in 1872, "Tales of the Argonauts" in 1875, "Gabriel Conroy" in 1876, "Two Men of Sandy Bar" (a play) in 1877, "A Phyllis of the Sierras" in 1888.
The first intimation given of the eccentricity of the testator was, I think, in the spring of 1854. He was at that time in possession of a considerable property, heavily mortgaged to one friend, and a wife of some attraction, on whose affections another friend held an encumbering lien. One day it was found that he had secretly dug, or caused to be dug, a deep trap before the front door of his dwelling, into which a few friends in the course of the evening casually and familiarly dropt. This circumstance, slight in itself, seemed to point to the existence of a certain humor in the man, which might eventually get into literature; altho his wife's lover--a man of quick discernment, whose leg was broken by the fall--took other views. It was some weeks later that while dining with certain other friends of his wife, he excused himself from the table, to quietly reappear at the front window with a three-quarter-inch hydraulic pipe, and a stream of water projected at the assembled company. An attempt was made to take public cognizance of this; but a majority of the citizens of Red Dog who were not at dinner decided that a man had a right to choose his own methods of diverting his company. Nevertheless, there were some hints of his insanity: his wife recalled other acts clearly attributable to dementia; the crippled lover argued from his own experience that the integrity of her limbs could only be secured by leaving her husband's house; and the mortgagee, fearing a further damage to his property, foreclosed. But here the cause of all this anxiety took matters into his own hands and disappeared.