From the Author's Foreword. ONE August day some ten or twelve years ago, I was riding over the splendid road which leads from Cripple Creek to Colorado Springs, in the stage which was at that time a three-seated mountain wagon. A woman sat with the driver, and some person of no moment to me then or now, occupied the place beside me; but the rear seat was filled by two stalwart miners-or rather, a miner and a mining engineer, who furnished the only conversation during the trip. It was all about the camp, new mines and old, shafts, upraises, faulting veins and the like, and mightily interesting to me it all was, for I, too, was prospecting, seeking a "lead" with eyes open to any piece of "float" which might indicate a vein higher up. I had in mind to write a story showing how a man of average moral sense might find his conscience quickened by the thought of approaching marriage with a good woman. I needed a situation wherein my hero (to use the old term) would be quite within the law and yet morally culpable. I had dimly foreshadowed the scene where Richard Clement felt the eyes of his bride-elect contemplating with startled surprise a certain dubious action of his business life, and the mining engineer in the seat behind me supplied the exact theme, in a story he told of a certain mine filled with mysterious, refractory ore. I began upon the story that night and called it "Witch's Gold." Later, yielding to the needs of a serial publication, I cut down the story and called it "The Spirit of Sweetwater," intending to restore it to its original form in the book edition. A combination of circumstances prevented this and the story was put into a series of novelettes in the same form and under the same name as when serialized. In this edition the tale opens precisely as it was originally written, and the reasons for restoring the original title will, I think, appear in the text. The revision of the manuscript for this present, final form has resulted in considerable new material which appears here for the first time, but the course of the love-story and the situations remain substantially the same as in the original writing.