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By Root 20604 0

’s way, and tell what we want. The man is an Italian named Costa. It is delightful to hear him say the names of common vegetables. When he asks me if I want cabbage, as he says it I feel that it must be a most tempting thing. And it is so amusing to hear him reckon up the account–‘One bit carrot–two bit tomato–four bit potato–3 bit apple–2 bit blackberries.’ Lizzie is washing this morning, and the baby sits in a drygoods box on the floor as happy as possible . . . Everything will be so easy that I shall grow fat and lazy. Three times a day we hear steam whistles, and here and there are columns of smoke rising. A heavily laden wagon drawn by mules passes a distant curve of the winding road, but nothing passes us. The place is as orderly as a military post, and as quiet from our remote porch as if every day were Sunday . . . How I wish you could see this place! I have taken no walks because I have no stout shoes, and no clothes until our trunks arrive except winter garments sent last spring as freight. The evenings are so cool I can be very comfortable in a serge dress, and in the daytime I wander about in a white dressing sacque which Oliver says looks “as if the feathers had been picked off the back,” because the puffs and ruffles are strictly confined to the front. I never felt so free in my life, and strange to say it does not seem far off. I feel as if you were as near as at Milton.

A Live White Woman in the Mines, she rose on the fifth morning and drank coffee with her husband before he went off to work, and gave him for the post office in Cornish Camp a letter to her parents and the fat letter to Augusta. Later that morning the trunks arrived by dray, and she spent the rest of the day unpacking. To stack the wood-blocks for The Scarlet Letter in the corner cupboard with her sketch pads, pencils, and watercolors gave her an intense pleasurable feeling of being ready to live.

The six o’clock whistle blew while she was changing into a summer dress still warm from Lizzie’s iron. Calling to Lizzie to put the kettle on, she hurried out to the hammock and spread herself there to wait.

I can see her. From here she looks terribly unlikely. She was always careful of her clothes–“Thy dress should be a background for thy face,” I once heard her tell my Aunt Betsy, whose taste was not dependable-and she lived in a time when women wrapped themselves in yards of satin, serge, taffeta, bombazine, what not, with bustles and ruffles and leg-of-mutton sleeves, all of it over a foundation of whalebone. A modern woman in a mining camp, even if she is the wife of the Resident Engineer, lives in pants and a sweatshirt. Grandmother made not the slightest concession to the places where she lived. I have a photograph of her riding a horse in something that looks like a court costume, and another taken at the engineer’s camp on the bank of Boise Creek in the 1880s, with a home-made rowboat at her feet and a tent pitched in the background and her third baby on her shoulder, and what is she wearing? A high-necked, pinch-waisted, triple-breasted, puff-sleeved, full-length creation of dotted swiss or something of the kind. And a picnic hat. In that baldest of their bald frontiers, at the very bottom of their fortunes, she dressed as if for a garden party. I don’t suppose she had a hat on as she waited for Oliver to come back from the mine, that first real day of her housekeeping life, but she probably had everything else.

Shortly she saw him coming through the trees. Stranger lumbered up and went to meet him. Susan waved. In his mine clothes stained with red ore, his boots muddy, his face full of the light the sight of her turned on in him, he ran up the high steps and leaned against the post with his hands behind him and his face stuck out. She kissed it, and still with his hands behind him he fainted against the porch post. “Is this where the Resident Engineer lives?” he said. “You look beautiful. What happened?”

“Does something have to happen before I can look beautiful? The trunks came, so now I can be a wife greeting her husband as he returns from work.