Its name accords well with the character of the "early times" in California, and may perhaps have been suggested by the predominant color of the metamorphic slates in which it is in great part eroded; or more probably by blood-stains made by the unfortunate animals which were compelled to slip and shuffle awkwardly over its rough, cutting rocks.

Its general course is oblique to the plane of the mountain-face, and the metamorphic slates of which the mountain is built are cut by cleavage planes in such a way that they weather off in angular blocks, giving rise to irregular steps that greatly facilitate climbing on the sheer places.

They wrote on gold slates with diamond pencils.

"Of course they must," answered Maxton, who, with both elbows on the desk, was blowing subdued railway whistles through his hands; "every new fellow has to write his name on that little slate on Mr. Watford's table, and he enters them from there into his mark-book.

What d'you want to put your names down on my punishment slate for?

Therefore, the slates to me are as a parable, on which I will not enlarge, but will leave each reader to interpret it for himself.

Sylvia crossed the parvis of Notre Dame, glistening wet, and passed over the gray Seine, slate under the gray mist of the rain.

Billy often thought, as he dumped a carload into the slide, and saw a huge lump of coal that glistened brightly, or glowed with iridescent tints, or was veined with fossil-marked or twisted slate, that perhaps, down below in the screen-room, Ralph's eyes would see the brightness of the broken lump, or Ralph's fingers pick the curious bits of slate from out the moving mass.

"Never," replied Charlie, "except on my slate at school.

"Well, you've wiped the reckonin' off the slate by what you've done for me.

[1101] 'One of the young ladies had her slate before her, on which I wrote a question consisting of three figures to be multiplied by two figures.

I do not ask him to imitate the boy who, cliff-bred from his youth, used to spend stolen hours on the house-top, with his back against a chimney-stalk, transfiguring in his imagination the roof-slopes into mountain-sides, the slates into sheets of rock, the cats into lions, and the sparrows into eagles.

For a few minutes all went wellthen he stepped on a green-tinted slope of slate over which a very shallow dribble of water was running.

Mr. Sellers here resumed and completed the reading of his minutes, as follows: The experiment attempted on the second day, of causing a slate pencil to jump from a slate without any disturbance of the slate, was here repeated.

Mr. Sellers, being requested to write a question on the back of the slate near him, wrote the following, 'What is the time?'

"Why don't he come in?" questioned Abe, waving back a greeting as well as he could with the treasured cup in one of his hands and the saucer in the other; whereupon Sarah Jane, that ugly duckling, explained that the fellow, being a confirmed woman-hater, cooked all his own meals in the smokehouse, and insisted upon all his orders being left on a slate outside the tool-house door.

The disorder continues while the teacher goes round examining slate after slate, his whole attention being engrossed by each individual, as the pupils come to him successively, while the rest are left to themselves, interrupted only by an occasional harsh, or even angry, but utterly useless rebuke from him.