True Tales of the Old West: XI, Uncle Roche's Will [pp. 369-374]

TRUE TALES OF THE OLD WEST.
word-goguenard. Popular among Bohemians, he lives an easy life, happy in the
present and caring little for the future.
He has the uncommon faculty of being
equally good at almost any line of the
painters' art, his portraits are as well
done as his landscapes. He is especially
happy, perhaps, in catching the effect
of California's golden sunshine and pur
ple shadows. Some of his paintings
breathe the very essence of life and the
creeping things of earth, the vibrating
exhalations of plowed fields, the sentient
softness of still landscapes, when buggy
wheels have the Sunday squeak and
the gray smoke curls lazily from the
chimneys and loses itself in the blue sky
above.
Pierre N. Boeringer.
TRUE TALES OF THE OLD WEST. Xl.
UNCLE ROCHE'S WILL.
e T WAS at Coulterville, Mariposa
a"?"i]. County, California, one
evening in the month of
-a'il?ow/,//]! May, i859, that I first saw
Uncle Roche. No great ef! fort of memory is required
in reproducing his picture.
~~' r, /A tall, gaunt, but sinewy
,-.( / ~old man reclined in an arm
,i' f:- chair on the porch of the
!',,/"'//\ City Hotel. The rich tints
/i.,.' of sunlight illuminated his
, ql 5 strongly marked features
and classical head, and
toyed with his long straggling locks of
iron gray hair. " There was the look
of heaven upon his face that limners
give to the beloved disciple." It bore a
mingled expression of benevolence, sin cerity, simplicity, and the entire cata logue of Christian virtues.
There is a picture, by Angelico, which
formerly hung in the Convent San Marco
in Florence. The subject is " The Cor onation." At the foot of the dais, in a
semicircle, are the figures of six holy
men, kneeling in a devotional attitude.
The heads are exceptionally fine and the
features expressive of the artist's ideal
of Christian faith and purity. The most
saintly face in the group would suffer by
VOL. xxvii.-27.
comparison with that grand old piece of
living statuary embodied in Uncle Roche.
A man who could look at him without
thinking of the martyrs, saints, and patriarchs, that figure in the history of
Christian progress, has a hole in his
head where the organ of reverence is
located. I involuntarily raised my hat
and he gracefully responded. This was
our introduction.
Later in the season business again led
me to visit the Sierra foothills. It was a
midsummer month, and the temperature
from early morn till near sunset, at
points along the trail between Coulterville and Bear Valley, is a red-hot memory. There is a steep mountain to climb
after crossing the Merced, and westerly
is a rugged cahon known as "Hell's
Hollow." Any man who strikes this
locality during the summer months, between ten A. M. and five P. M. will see at
once that the name is faintly suggestive
of the temperature. Hence it was that
my start homeward was made before
daylight. There was no moon. The
trail down White Gulch to Split Rock
Ferry is rough and ugly, distance, seven
miles. About half way to the river it
crosses the mouth of a precipitous canion
where the abrupt, naked ledges on each
369