192 THE GUALALA. 
children, abandoned them utterly to her husband’s care, watching the game 
until the ‘wee sma’ hours”, when it closed; and, in consequence, Hopps 
was obliged to get breakfast next morning, a task to which he seemed to be 
accustomed, and which he accepted with becoming resignation. 
While sitting near these Gualala and looking at the circle of swarthy 
faces which the staggering blazes redly lighted up, I was not a little im- 
pressed with their resemblance to those calm, grand faces of old Egypt. 
Probably the reader will smile here, and I am well aware how greatly 
inferior these poor Diggers are to the mighty race who builded Cheops and 
Karnak, and whose wisdom was a beacon even to Athenian philosophy; 
but they are not much if any lower than the modern Fellahs who toiled 
in the sand of the Suez Canal, and who are said to retain the features of 
their great ancestors. I saw here the same scanty beard; the same full, 
voluptuous lips; the same straight, strong noses, with thick walls and dilated 
nostrils; the same broad cheek-bones; the same large and prominent eyes 
in most; the same expression of restful and placid strength that I have seen 
among the Egyptian sculptures of the Berlin Museums and the British 
Museum of London. The differences are that the Indians open their eyes 
more freely except in extreme old age, when they are shriveled and nearly 
burnt out by the smoke, and have lower foreheads and more shrunken 
cheeks. 
It cannot be denied that there was a certain grave and savage strength 
of feature, perhaps due to a slight infusion of Russian blood, in that mid- 
night circle of dark faces, such as one would little expect to find in men so 
entirely empty of mental force and originality, however imitative they may 
have beens Such faces joined to such intellects go hard to demolish all 
physiognomy theories. And yet these are elevated several degrees above 
the lowest savages. They reckon their beads “by the two hundred”, as one 
explained to me, up to a thousand, the word for which is tush-op’-te (literally 
“five two-hundreds”). In marriage they observe strictly the Mosaic table 
of prohibited affinities, accounting it “poison”, as they say, for a person to 
marry a cousin or an avuncular relative. True, they occasionally practiced 
infanticide formerly by their own confession, but they appear to have sacri- 
ficed generaily only the weakest and deformed infants; and the amount of 
