 VICE FLORISHED luxuriously during the heyday of our flush times. The saloons were overburdened with custom. So were the police-courts, the gambling-dens, the brothels, and the jails. Unfailing signs of high prosperity in a mining-region, in any region for that matter, is it not so? A crowded police-court docket is the surest of all signs that trade is brisk and money plenty. Still, there is one other sign. It comes last. But when it does come it establishes beyond cavill that the flush times are at the flood. This is the birth of the literary paper. The weekly Occidental devoted to literature made its appearance in Virginia. All the literary people were engaged to write for it. Mr. F. was to edit it. He was a felicitous skirmisher with a pen, and a man who could say happy things in a crisp, neat way. Once, while editor of the Union, he had disposed of a labored incoherent two-column attack made upon him by a contemporary with a single line, which at first glance seemed to contain a solemn and tremendous compliment. These, the logic of our adversary, resembles the peace of God, and left it to the reader's memory and afterthought to invest the remark with another and more different meaning by supplying for himself and at his own leisure the rest of the scripture, in that it passeth understanding. He once said of a little half-starved wayside community that had no subsistence except what they could get by praying upon chance passengers who stopped over with them a day when travelling by the overland stage, that in their church service they had altered the Lord's Prayer to read, Give us this day our daily stranger. We expected great things of the Occidental. Of course it would not get along without an original novel, and so we made arrangements to hurl into the work the full strength of the company. Mrs. F. was an able romanticist of the ineffable school—I know no other word to apply to a school whose heroes are all dainty and all perfect. She wrote the opening chapter and introduced a lovely blonde simpleton who talked nothing but pearls and poetry and who was virtuous to the verge of eccentricity. She also introduced a young French duke of aggravated refinement in love with a blonde. Mr. F. followed next week with a brilliant lawyer who set about getting the duke's estates into trouble and a sparkling young lady of high society who fell to fascinating the duke and impairing the appetite of the blonde. Mr. D., a dark and bloody editor of one of the dailies, followed Mr. F., the third week, introducing a mysterious Rosicrucian who transmuted metals, held consultations with the devil in a cave at dead of night, and cast the horoscope of the several heroes and heroines in such a way as to provide plenty of trouble for their future careers and breed a solemn and awful public interest in the novel. He also introduced a cloaked and masked melodramatic miscreant, put him on a salary, and set him on the midnight track of the duke with a poisoned dagger. He also created an Irish coachman with a rich brogue and placed him in the service of the society-young lady with an ulterior mission to carry the billet-duke to the duke. About this time there arrived in Virginia a dissolute stranger with a literary turn of mind. Rather seedy he was, but very quiet and unassuming, almost diffident indeed. He was so gentle and his manners were so pleasing and kindly, whether he was sober or intoxicated, that he made sprens of all who came in contact with him. He applied for literary work, offered conclusive evidence that he wielded an easy and practiced pen, and so Mr. F. engaged him at once to help write the novel. His chapter was to follow Mr. D's, and mine was to come next. Now what does this fellow do but go off and get drunk and then proceed to his quarters and set to work with his imagination in a state of chaos, and that chaos in a condition of extravagant activity. The result may be guessed. He scanned the chapters of his predecessors, found plenty of heroes and heroines already created, and was satisfied with them. He decided to introduce no more. With all the confidence that whiskey inspires and all the easy complacency it gives to its servant, he then launched himself lovingly into his work. He married the coachman to the society young lady for the sake of the scandal, married the Duke to the blonde stepmother for the sake of the sensation, stopped the desperado's salary, created a misunderstanding between the devil and the Rosicrucian, threw the Duke's property into the wicked lawyer's hands, made the lawyer's upbraiding conscience drive him to drink, thence to delirium tremens, thence to suicide, broke the coachman's neck, let his widows succumb to contumely neglect, poverty, and consumption, caused the blonde to drown herself, leaving her clothes on the bank with the customary note pinned to them for giving the Duke and hoping he would be happy, revealed to the Duke by means of the usual strawberry mark on left arm that he had married his own long-lost mother and destroyed his long-lost sister, instituted the proper and necessary suicide of the Duke and the Duchess in order to compass poetical justice, opened the earth and let the Rosicrucian through, accompanied with the accustomed smoke and thunder and smell of brimstone, and finished with the promise that in the next chapter, after holding a general inquest, he would take up the surviving character of the novel and tell what became of the devil. It read with singular smoothness, and with a dead earnestness that was funny enough to suffocate a body, but there was war when it came in. The other novelists were furious. The mild stranger, not yet more than half-sober, stood there, under a scathing fire of extubation, meek and bewildered, looking from one to another of his assailants, and wondering what he could have done to invoke such a storm. When a lull came at last he said his say gently and appealingly, said he did not rightly remember what he had written, but was sure he had tried to do the best he could, and knew his object had been to make the novel not only pleasant and plausible, but instructive, and the bombardment began again. The novelists assailed his ill-chosen adjectives and demolished them with a storm of denunciation and ridicule, and so the siege went on. Every time the stranger tried to appease the enemy he only made matters worse. Finally he offered to rewrite the chapter. This arrested hostilities. The indignation gradually quieted down, peace reigned again, and the sufferer retired in safety, and got him to his own citadel. But on the way thither the evil angel tempted him and he got drunk again, and again his imagination went mad. He led the heroes and heroines a wilder dance than before, and yet all through it ran the same convincing air of honesty and earnestness that had marked his first work. He got the characters into the most extraordinary situations, put them through the most surprising performances, and made them talk the strangest talk. But the chapter cannot be described. It was symmetrically crazy. It was artistically absurd, and it had explanatory footnotes that were fully as curious as the text. I remember one of the situations, and will offer it as an example of the whole. He altered the character of the brilliant lawyer, and made him a great-hearted, splendid fellow, gave him fame and riches, and set his age at thirty-three years. Then he made the blonde discover through the help of the Rosicrucian and the melodramatic miscreant that while the Duke loved her money ardently and wanted it, he secretly felt a sort of leaning toward the society young lady. Stung to the quick, she tore her affections from him and bestowed them with tenfold power upon the lawyer, who responded with consuming zeal. But the parents would none of it. What they wanted in the family was a Duke, and a Duke they were determined to have, though they confessed that next to the Duke the lawyer had their preference. Necessarily the blonde now went into a decline. The parents were alarmed. They pleaded with her to marry the Duke, but she steadfastly refused and pined on. Then they laid a plan. They told her to wait a year and a day, and if at the end of that time she still felt that she could not marry the Duke, she might marry the lawyer with their full consent. The result was, as they had foreseen, gladness came again and the flush of returning health. Then the parents took the next step in their scheme. They had the family physician recommend a long sea voyage and much land travel for the thorough restoration of the blonde's strength, and they invited the Duke to be of the party. They judged that the Duke's constant presence and the lawyer's protracted absence would do the rest, for they did not invite the lawyer. So they set sail in a steamer for America, and the third day out, when their seasickness called truce and permitted them to take their first meal at the public table, behold, there sat the lawyer. The Duke and party made the best of an awkward situation. The voyage progressed, and the vessel neared America. But by and by, two hundred miles off New Bedford, the ship took fire. She burned to the water's edge. Of all her crew and passengers only thirty were saved. They floated about the sea half an afternoon and all night long. Among them were our friends. The lawyer, by superhuman exertions, had saved the blonde and her parents, swimming back and forth two hundred yards and bringing one each time, the girl first. The Duke had saved himself. In the morning two whale ships arrived on the scene and sent their boats. The weather was stormy, and the embarkation was attended with much confusion and excitement. The lawyer did his duty like a man. Helped his exhausted and insensible blonde, her parents, and some others into a boat, the Duke helped himself in. Then the child fell overboard at the other end of the raft, and the lawyer rushed thither and helped half a dozen people fish it out under the stimulus of its mother's screams. Then he ran back a few seconds too late. The blonde's boat was under way. So he had to take the other boat and go to the other ship. The storm increased and drove the vessels out of sight of each other, drove them wither it would. When it calmed at the end of three days, the blonde's ship was seven hundred miles north of Boston, and the other about seven hundred south of that port. The blonde's captain was bound on a wailing cruise in the North Atlantic and could not go back such a distance or make a port without orders, such being nautical law. The lawyer's captain was to cruise in the North Pacific, and he could not go back or make port without orders. All the lawyer's money and baggage were in the blonde's boat and went to the blonde's ship, so his captain made him work his passage as a common sailor. When both ships had been cruising nearly a year, the one was off the coast of Greenland and the other in Bering Strait. The blonde had long ago been well nigh persuaded that her lawyer had been washed overboard and lost just before the whale's ships reached the raft, and now under the pleadings of her parents and the duke, she was at last beginning to nerve herself for the doom of the covenant and prepare for the hated marriage. But she would not yield a day before the date set. The weeks dragged on, the time narrowed, orders were given to deck the ship for the wedding, a wedding at sea among icebergs and walruses, five days more and all would be over. So the blonde reflected with a sigh and a tear. Oh, where was her true love, and why, why did he not come and save her? At that moment he was lifting his harpoon to strike a whale in Bering Strait five thousand miles away by the way of the Arctic Ocean, or twenty thousand by the way of the horn, that was the reason. He struck, but not with perfect aim. His foot slipped, and he fell in the whale's mouth and went down his throat. He was insensible five days, then he came to himself and heard voices. Daylight was streaming through a whole cut in the whale's roof. He climbed out and astonished the sailors who were hoisting blubber up the ship's side. He recognized the vessel, flew aboard, surprised the wedding-party at the altar and exclaimed, Stop the proceedings! I'm here! Come to my arms, my own! There were footnotes to this extravagant piece of literature wherein the author endeavored to show that the whole thing was within the possibilities. He said he got the incident of the whale traveling from Bering Strait to the coast of Greenland, five thousand miles in five days, through the Arctic Ocean, from Charles Reed's Love Me, Little Love Me Long, and considered that that established the fact that the thing could be done, and he instanced Jonah's adventure as proof that a man could live in a whale's belly, and added that if a preacher could stand at three days a lawyer could surely stand at five. There was a fiercer storm than ever in the editorial sanctum now, and the stranger was peremptorily discharged, and his manuscript flung at his head. But he had already delayed things so much that there was not time for someone else to rewrite the chapter, and so the paper came out without any novel in it. It was but a feeble, struggling stupid journal, and the absence of the novel probably shook public confidence. At any rate, before the first side of the next issue went to press, the weekly Occidental died as peacefully as an infant. An effort was made to resurrect it, with the proposed advantage of telling a new title, and Mr. F. said that the Phoenix would be just the name for it, because it would give the idea of a resurrection from its dead ashes in a new and undreamed of condition of splendor. But some low-priced smarty on one of the dailies suggested that we call it the Lazarus, and in as much as the people were not profound in scriptural matters, but thought the resurrected Lazarus and the dilapidated mendicant that begged in the rich man's gateway were one and the same person, the name became the laughing stock of the town, and killed the paper for good and all. I was sorry enough, or I was very proud of being connected with a literary paper, prouder than I have ever been of anything since, perhaps. I had written some rhymes for it, poetry I considered it, and it was a great grief to me that the production was on the first side of the issue that was not completed, and hence did not see the light. But time brings its revenges. I can put it in here. It will answer in place of a tear dropped to the memory of the lost Occidental. The idea, not the chief idea, but the vehicle that bears it, was probably suggested by the old song called The Raging Canal, but I cannot remember now. I do remember, though, that at that time I thought my dongle was one of the ablest poems of the age. The aged pilot man. On the eerie canal it was, all on a summer's day, I sailed forth with my parents, far away to Albany. From out the clouds at noon that day there came a dreadful storm that piled the billows high about and filled us with alarm. A man came rushing from a house, saying, Snub up your boat, I pray, the customary canal-technicality for tie-up. Snub up your boat, snub up alas, snub up, while yet you may. Our captain cast one glance astern, then forward glanced he, and said, My wife and little ones I never more shall see. Said Dollinger, the pilot man, in noble words but few, fear not, but lean on Dollinger, and he will fetch you through. The boat drove on, the frightened mules tore through the rain and wind, and bravely still in dangers post the whip-boy strode behind. Come board, come board, the captain cried, nor tempts so wild a storm, but still the raging mules advanced, and still the boy strode on. Then said the captain to us all, alas, to his plane to me the greater danger is not there, but here upon the sea. So let us strive while life remains to save all souls on board, and then if die at last we must let— I cannot speak the word. Said Dollinger, the pilot man, towering above the crew, fear not, but trust in Dollinger, and he will fetch you through. LOW BRIDGE, LOW BRIDGE! All heads went down, the laboring bark sped on. A mill we passed, we passed a church, hamlets and fields of corn, and all the world came out to sea and chased along the shore, crying, alas, alas, the sheeted rain, the wind, the tempest roar, alas the gallant ship and crew can nothing help them more. And from our deck sad eyes looked out across the stormy scene, the tossing wake of billows aft the bending forest green, the chickens sheltered under carts in lee of barn the cows, the scurrying swine with straw in mouth, the wild spray from our bows. She balances, she wavers, now let her go about. If she misses stays and broaches too, we're all, then with a shout, hooray, hooray, vast, belay, take in more sail, Lord what a gale! Ho, boy, all taut on the hind mule's tail! Ho, lightened ship, ho, man the pump! Ho, hostler, heave the lead! A quarter three, to shoaling fast, three feet large, three feet! Three feet scant, I cried in fright. Oh, is there no retreat? said Dollinger, the pilot man, as on the vessel flew. Fear not, but trust in Dollinger, and he will fetch you through. A panic struck the bravest hearts, the boldest cheek turned pale, for plain to all this shoaling said a leak had burst the ditch's bed. And straight as bolt from crossbow's sped, our ship swept on with shoaling lead before the fearful gale. Sever the tow-lines, cripple the mule's! Too late, there comes a shock, another length, and the fated craft would have swum in the saving lock. Then gathered together the ship wrecked crew, and took one last embrace, while sorrowful tears from despairing eyes ran down each hopeless face, and some did think of their little ones, whom they never more might see, and others of waiting wives at home, and mothers that grieved would be. But of all the children of misery there, on that poor sinking frame, but one's spake words of hope and faith, and I worshipped as they came, said Dollinger the pilot-man, O brave, heart-strong, and true. Fear not, but trust in Dollinger, for he will fetch you through. Lo, scarce the words have passed his lips the dauntless prophet saith, when every soul about him seeeth a wonder crown his faith. And count ye all, both great and small, as numbered with the dead, for Mariner, for forty year on eerie boy and man I never yet saw such a storm, or want with it began. So overboard a keg of nails, and anvils three we threw, likewise four bales of guinea sacks, two hundred pounds of glue, two sacks of corn, four ditto wheat, a box of books, a cow, a violin, Lord Byron's work, a ripsaw, and a sow. A curve, a curve, the dangers grow, labored, starboard, steady sew, hard-aport, doll, halla-malee, haul the head mule, the aft one gee, luff bring her to the wind. For straight a farmer brought a plank, mysteriously inspired, and laying it unto the ship in silent awe retired. Then every sufferer stood amazed, that pilot-man before, a moment stood, then wondering turned, and speechless walked ashore. End of Chapter 51 This is Chapter 52 of Roughing It. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, visit LibriVox.org. Roughing It by Mark Twain, Chapter 52 Since I desire, in this chapter, to say an instructive word or two about the silver mines, the reader may take this fair warning and skip if he chooses. The year 1863 was perhaps the very top blossom and culmination of the flush times. Virginia swarmed with men and vehicles, to that degree that the place looked like a very hive, that is, when one's vision could pierce through the thick fog of alkali dust that was generally blowing in summer. I will say, concerning this dust, that if you drove ten miles through it, you and your horses would be coated with it a sixteenth of an inch thick, and present an outside appearance that was a uniform pale yellow color, and your buggy would have three inches of dust in it thrown there by the wheels. The delicate scales used by the assayers were enclosed in glass cases, intended to be airtight, and yet some of this dust was so impalpable and so invisibly fine that it would get in, somehow, and impair the accuracy of those scales. Speculation ran riot, and yet there was a world of substantial business going on, too. All freight were brought over the mountains from California, one hundred and fifty miles, by pack-train partly, and partly in huge wagons drawn by such long mule teams, that each team amounted to a procession, and it did seem, sometimes, that the grand combined procession of animals stretched unbroken from Virginia to California. Its long route was traceable clear across the deserts of the territory by the writhing serpent of dust it lifted up. By these wagons, freight over that hundred and fifty miles were two hundred dollars a ton for small lots, same price for all express matter brought by stage, and one hundred dollars a ton for full loads. One Virginia firm received one hundred tons of freight a month and paid ten thousand dollars a month freightage. In the winter the freight's were much higher. All the bullion was shipped in bars by stage to San Francisco. A bar was usually about twice the size of a pig of lead and contained from fifteen hundred to three thousand dollars according to the amount of gold mixed with the silver, and the freight on it, when the shipment was large, was one and a quarter percent of its intrinsic value. So the freight on these bars probably averaged something more than twenty-five dollars each. Small shippers paid two percent. There were three stages a day each way, and I have seen the outgoing stages carry away a third of a ton of bullion each, and more than once I saw them divide a two ton lot and take it off. However, these were extraordinary events. Mr. Valentine, Wells Fargo's agent, has handled all the bullion shipped through the Virginia office for many a month. To his memory, which is excellent, we are indebted for the following exhibit of the company's business in the Virginia office since the first of January 1862. From January 1st to April 1st, about two hundred and seventy thousand dollars worth of bullion passed through that office. During the next quarter, five hundred and seventy thousand dollars. Next quarter, eight hundred thousand dollars. Next quarter, nine hundred and fifty-six thousand dollars. Next quarter, one million two hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars, and for the quarter ending on the thirtieth of last June, about one million six hundred thousand dollars. Thus in a year and a half, the Virginia office only shipped five million three hundred and thirty thousand dollars in bullion. During the year 1862, they shipped two million six hundred and fifteen thousand dollars, so we perceive the average shipments have more than doubled in the last six months. This gives us room to promise for the Virginia office five hundred thousand dollars a month for the year 1863, though perhaps judging by the steady increase in the business, we are underestimating somewhat. This gives us six million dollars for the year. Gold Hill and Silver City together can beat us. We will give them ten million dollars. To Dayton, Empire City, Ofer, and Carson City, we will allow an aggregate of eight million dollars, which is not over the mark, perhaps, and may possibly be a little under it. To Esmeralda, we give four million dollars. To Reese, River, and Humboldt, two million dollars, which is liberal now, but may not be before the year is out. So we prognosticate that the yield of bullion this year will be about thirty million dollars. Placing the number of mills in the territory at one hundred, this gives to each the labor of producing three hundred thousand dollars in bullion during the twelve months, allowing them to run three hundred days in the year, which none of them more than do. This makes their work average one thousand dollars a day. Say, the mills average twenty tons of rock a day, and this rock worth fifty dollars as a general thing, and you have the actual work of our one hundred mills figured down to a spot one thousand dollars a day each, and thirty million dollars a year in the aggregate. Enterprise. A considerable overestimate. M.T. Two tons of silver bullion would be in the neighborhood of forty bars, and the freight on it over one thousand dollars. Each coach always carried a deal of ordinary express matter beside, and also from fifteen to twenty passengers at from twenty five dollars to thirty dollars ahead. With six stages going all the time, Wells Fargo and Company's Virginia City business was important and lucrative. All along under the center of Virginia and Gold Hill, for a couple of miles, ran the great Comstock Silver Load, a vein of ore from fifty to eighty feet thick between its solid walls of rock, a vein as wide as some of New York's streets. I will remind the reader that in Pennsylvania, a coal vein only eight feet wide is considered ample. Virginia was a busy city of streets and houses above ground. Under it was another busy city. Down in the bowels of the earth, where a great population of men thronged in and out among the intricate maze of tunnels and drifts, flitting hither and thither under a winking sparkle of lights, and over their heads towered a vast web of interlocking timbers that held the walls of the gutted Comstock apart. These timbers were as large as a man's body, and the framework stretched upward so far that no eye could pierce to its top through the closing gloom. It was like peering up through the clean-picked ribs and bones of some colossal skeleton. Imagine such a framework two miles long, sixty feet wide, and higher than any church spire in America. Imagine this stately lattice work stretching down Broadway from St. Nicholas to Wall Street, and a fourth of July procession reduced to pygmies, parading on top of it and flaunting their flags high above the pinnacle of Trinity Steeple. One can imagine that, but he cannot well imagine what that forest of timbers cost from the time they were felled in the pineries beyond Washoo Lake hauled up and around Mount Davidson at atrocious rates of freightage, then squared, let down into the deep maw of the mine, and built up there. Twenty ample fortunes would not timber one of the greatest of those silver mines. The Spanish proverb says it requires a gold mine to run a silver one, and it is true. A beggar with a silver mine is a pitiable pauper indeed if he cannot sell. I spoke of the underground Virginia as a city. The Gould and Currie is only one single mine under there, among a great many others. Yet the Gould and Currie's streets of dismal drifts and tunnels were five miles in extent altogether, and its population five hundred miners. Taken as a whole, the underground city had some thirty miles of streets and a population of five or six thousand. In this present day some of those populations are at work from twelve to sixteen hundred feet under Virginia and Gold Hill, and the signal bells that tell them what the superintendent above ground desires them to do are struck by telegraph as we strike a fire alarm. Sometimes men fall down a shaft there a thousand feet deep. In such cases the usual plan is to hold an inquest. If you wish to visit one of those mines you may walk through a tunnel about half a mile long if you prefer, or you may take the quicker plan of shooting like a dart down a shaft on a small platform. It is like tumbling down through an empty steeple feet first. When you reach the bottom you take a candle and tramp through drifts and tunnels where throngs of men are digging and blasting. You watch them send up tubs full of great lumps of stone, silver ore. You select choice specimens from the mass as souvenirs. You admire the world of skeleton timbering. You reflect frequently that you are buried under a mountain a thousand feet below daylight. Being in the bottom of the mine you climb from gallery to gallery up endless ladders that stand straight up and down. When your legs fail you at last you lie down in a small boxcar in a cramped incline like a half upended sewer and are dragged up to daylight feeling as if you are crawling through a coffin that has no end to it. Arrived at the top you find a busy crowd of men receiving the ascending cars and tubs and dumping the ore from an elevation into long rows of bins capable of holding half a dozen tons each. Under the bins are rows of wagons loading from chutes and trapdoors in the bins and down the long street is a procession of these wagons wending toward the silver mills with their rich freight. It is all done now and there you are. You need never go down again for you have seen it all. If you have forgotten the process of reducing the ore in the mill and making the silver bars you can go back and find it again in my Esmeralda chapters if so disposed. Of course these mines cave in in places occasionally and then it is worth one's while to take the risk of descending into them and observing the crushing power exerted by the pressing weight of a settling mountain. I published such an experience in the Enterprise once and from it I will take an extract. An Hour in the Caved Mines We journeyed down into the Ophir Mine yesterday to see the earthquake. We could not go down the deep incline because it still has a propensity to cave in places. Therefore we traveled through the long tunnel which enters the hill above the Ophir office and then by means of a series of long ladders climbed away down from the first to the fourth gallery. Traversing adrift we came to the Spanish line. Past five sets of timbers still uninjured and found the earthquake. Here was as complete a chaos as ever was seen. Vast masses of earth and splintered and broken timbers piled confusedly together with scarcely an aperture left large enough for a cat to creep through. Rubbish was still falling at intervals from above, and one timber which had braced others earlier in the day was now crushed down out of its former position, showing that the caving and settling of the tremendous mass was still going on. We were in that portion of the Ophir known as the North Mines. Returning to the surface we entered a tunnel leading into the central for the purpose of getting into the main Ophir. Descending a long incline in this tunnel we traversed adrift or so and then went down a deep shaft from whence we proceeded into the fifth gallery of the Ophir. From a side drift we crawled through a small hole and got into the midst of the earthquake again. Earth and broken timbers mingled together without regard to grace or symmetry. A large portion of the second, third, and fourth galleries had caved in and gone to destruction. The two latter at seven o'clock on the previous evening. At the turntable near the northern extremity of the fifth gallery two big piles of rubbish had forced their way through from the fifth gallery and from the looks of the timbers more was about to come. These beams are solid, eighteen inches square. First a great beam is laid on the floor, then upright ones, five feet high, stand on it, supporting another horizontal beam, and so on, square above square, like the framework of a window. The super incumbent weight was sufficient to mash the ends of those great upright beams fairly into solid wood of the horizontal ones three inches, compressing and bending the upright beam till it curved like a bow. Before the Spanish caved in some of their twelve inch horizontal timbers were compressed in this way until they were only five inches thick. Imagine the power it must take to squeeze a solid log together in that way. Here also was a range of timbers for a distance of twenty feet tilted six inches out of the perpendicular by the weight resting upon them from the caved galleries above. You could hear things cracking and giving way, and it was not pleasant to know that the world overhead was slowly and silently sinking down upon you. The men down in the mine do not mind it, however. Returning along the fifth gallery we struck the safe part of the oafer incline and went down into the sixth, but we found ten inches of water there and had to come back. In repairing the damage done to the incline the pump had to be stopped for two hours and in the meantime the water gained about a foot. However the pump was at work again and the flood water was decreasing. We climbed up to the fifth gallery again and sought a deep shaft whereby we might descend to another part of the sixth out of reach of the water, but suffered disappointment as the men had gone to dinner and there was no one to man the windlass. So having seen the earthquake we climbed out at the union incline and tunnel and adjourned all dripping with candle grease and perspiration to lunch at the oafer office. During the great flush year of 1863 Nevada claims to have produced twenty-five million dollars in bullion, almost if not quite, a round million to each thousand inhabitants, which is very well considering that she was without agriculture and manufacturers, silver mining was her sole productive industry. Since the above was in type I learned from an official source that the above figure is too high and that the yield for 1863 did not exceed twenty million dollars. However the day for large figures is approaching. The Sutro tunnel is to plow through the Comstock load from end to end at a depth of two thousand feet and then mining will be easy and comparatively inexpensive and the momentous matters of drainage and hoisting and hauling of ore will cease to be burdensome. This vast work will absorb many years and millions of dollars in its completion, but it will early yield money. For that desirable epoch will begin as soon as it strikes the first end of the vein. The tunnel will be some eight miles long and will develop astonishing riches. Cars will carry the ore through the tunnel and dump it in the mills and thus do away with the present costly system of double handling and transportation by mule teams. The water from the tunnel will furnish the motive power for the mills. Mr. Sutro, the originator of this prodigious enterprise, is one of the few men in the world who is gifted with the pluck and perseverance necessary to follow up and hound such an undertaking to its completion. He has converted several obstinate congresses to a deserved friendliness toward his important work, and has gone up and down and to and fro in Europe until he has enlisted a great-moneyed interest in it there. Every now and then in these days the boys used to tell me I ought to get one Jim Blaine to tell me the stirring story of his grandfather's old ram, but they always added that I must not mention the matter unless Jim was drunk at the time, but just comfortably and sociably drunk. They kept this up until my curiosity was on the rack to hear the story. I got to haunting Blaine, but it was of no use. The boys always found fault with his condition. He was often moderately but never satisfactorily drunk. I never watched a man's condition with such absorbing interest, such anxious solicitude. I never so pine to see a man uncompromisingly drunk before. At last one evening I hurried to his cabin, for I learned that this time his situation was such that even the most fastidious could find no fault with it. He was tranquilly serenely symmetrically drunk, not a hiccup to mar his voice, not a cloud upon his brain thick enough to obscure his memory. As I entered, he was sitting upon an empty powder keg with a clay pipe in one hand and the other raised to command silence. His face was round, red, and very serious. His throat was bare and his hair tumbled. In general appearance and costume he was a stalwart miner of the period. On the pine table stood a candle, and its dim light revealed the boys sitting here and there on bunks, candle boxes, powder kegs, etc. They said, Sh, don't speak. He's going to commence. The story of the old ram. I found a seat at once, and Blaine said, I don't reckon them times will ever come again. There never was a more bully or old ram than what he was. Grandfather fetched him from Ilaroi, and got him of a man by the name of Yates, Bill Yates. Maybe you might have heard of him. His father was a deacon, Baptist, and he was a rustler too. A man had to get up rather early to get the start of old thankful Yates. It was him that put the greens up to jine in teams with my grandfather when he moved west. Seth Green was probably the pick of the flock. He married a Wilkerson, Sarah Wilkerson, good creator. She was one of the likeliest heifers that was ever raised in old Starter. Everybody said that note her. She could have to barrel a flower as easy as I could flirt a flapjack. And spin? Don't mention it. Independent? When Sile Hawkins come to browsing around her, she let him know that for all his tin he couldn't trot in harness alongside of her. You see, Sile Hawkins was—no, it weren't Sile Hawkins after all—it was a glute by the name of Filkins. I just remember his first name, but he was a stump coming to prior meetin' drunk one night, arraign for Nixon, because he thought it was a primary. And old Deacon Ferguson up and scooted him through the window, and he lit on old Miss Jefferson's head, poor old Philly. She was a good soul, had a glass eye, and used to lend it to old Miss Wagner that hadn't any to receive company in. It weren't big enough, and Miss Wagner weren't noticing. It would get twisted round in the socket, and look up maybe, or out to one side, and every which way, while the other one was looking as straight ahead as a spy-glass. Grown people didn't mind it, but at most all was made the children cry. It was so sort of scary. She tried packing it in a raw cotton, but it wouldn't work somehow. Cotton would get loose and stick out and look so kind of awful that the children couldn't stand it no way. She was always dropping it out, and turning it up her old dead light on the company empty, and making them uncomfortable, because she never could tell when it hopped out, being blind on that side, you see. So somebody would have to hunch her and say, Your game eye has fetched loose, Miss Wagner dear, and then all of them would have to sit and wait till she jammed it in again. Wrong side before, as a general thing, and green as a bird's egg, being a bashful creature and easy sought back before company. But being wrong side before, weren't much difference anyway, because her own eye was sky blue, and the glass one was yowler on the front side, so whichever way she turned it, didn't match know-how. Old Miss Wagner was considerable on the borrow, she was. When she had a quilting, or dork-assiety, at her house, she generally borrowed Miss Higgins wooden leg to stump round on. It was considerable shorter than her other pin. But much she minded that. She said she couldn't buy crutches when she had company, because they were so slow. Said when she had company, and things had to be done, she wanted to get up and hum herself. She was as bald as a jug, and so she used to borrow Miss Jacobs' wig. Miss Jacobs was the coffin peddler's wife. A ratty old buzzard he was, that used to go roosting round where people were sick, waiting for him. And there that old rip would sit all day in the shade on a coffin that he judged would fit the candidate. And if it was a slow customer and kind of uncertain, he'd fetch his rations in a blanket long and sleep in the coffin nights. He was anchored out that way in frosty weather for about three weeks once, before old Robbins' place, waiting for him. And after that, for as much as two years, Jacobs was not on speaking terms with the old man on account of his dispanning him. He got one of his feet froze and lost money to, because old Robbins took a favorable turn and got well. The next time Robbins got sick, Jacobs tried to make up with him, and varnished up the same old coffin and fetched it along. But old Robbins was too many for him. He had him in and appeared to be powerful weak. He bought the coffin for ten dollars, and Jacobs was to pay it back, and twenty-five more besides if Robbins didn't like the coffin after he'd tried it. And then Robbins died. And at the funeral he burst it off the lid and risen up in his shroud and told the parson to let up on performances, because he could not stand such a coffin as that. You see, he had been in a trance once before when he was young, and he took the chances on another. Count latent that if he made the trip it was money in his pocket, and if he missed fire he couldn't lose a cent. And by George he sued Jacobs for the rhino and got judgment. And he set up the coffin in his back parlor and said he allowed to take his time now. It was always an aggravation to Jacobs, the way that miserable old thing acted. He moved back to Indiana pretty soon, went to Wellsville. Wellsville was the place the Hoggadorns was from. Mighty fine family. Old Maryland stock. Old Squire Hoggadorn could carry around more mixed liquor and cuss better than most any man I ever see. His second wife was the Witter Billings, she that was Becky Martin. Her dam was Deacon Dunlap's first wife. Her oldest child, Maria, married a missionary and died in grace, hit up by the savages. They had him too, per fellor. Biled him. They weren't the customs, so they say, but they explained to friends of his and that went down there to bring away his things. But they tried missionaries every other way and never could get any good out of them. And so he had annoyed all his relations to find out that that man's life was fooled away just out of a darned experiment, so to speak. But mind you, there ain't anything ever really lost. Everything that people can't understand and don't see the reason though does good if you only hold on and give it a fair shake. Providence don't fire no blank cartridges, boys. That their missionary substance, unbeknownst to himself, actually converted every last one of them heathens that took a chance at the barbecue. Nothing ever fetched them but that. Don't tell me it was an accident that he was biled. There ain't no such thing as an accident. When my uncle Lem was leaning up again a scaffolding once, sick or drunk or something, an Irishman with a hod full of bricks fell on him out of the third story and broke the old man's back in two places. People said it was an accident. Much accident there was about that. He didn't know what he was there for, but he was there for a good object. If he hadn't been there, the Irishman would have been killed. Nobody can ever make me believe anything different from that. Uncle Lem's dog was there. Why didn't the Irishman fall on the dog? Because the dog would—a scene in the common and stood from under. That's the reason the dog weren't appointed. A dog can't be depended on to carry out a special providence. Mark my words, it was a put-up thing. Accidents don't happen, boys. Uncle Lem's dog—I wish you could seen that dog—he was a regular shepherd. Or rather, he was part bull and part shepherd. Splendid animal. Belonged to Parson Hagar before Uncle Lem got him. Parson Hagar belonged to the western reserve Hagar's prime family. His mother was a Watson. One of his sisters married a wheeler. They settled in Morgan County and he got nipped by the machinery in a carpet factory and went through in less than a quarter of a minute. His widow bought the piece of carpet that had his remains woven in it. And people come a hundred miles to tend the funeral. There was fourteen yards in the piece. She wouldn't let him roll him up and planted him just so, full length. The church was midland small where they preached the funeral, and they had to let one end of the coffin stick out the window. They didn't bury him. They planted one end and let him stand up same as a monument. And they nailed a sign on it and put—put on—put on it sacred to the memory of fourteen yards of three-ply carpet containing all that was mortal of William Wee. Jim Blaine had been growing gradually drowsy and drowsier. His head nodded once, twice, three times, dropped peacefully upon his breast, and he fell tranquilly asleep. The tears were running down the boy's cheeks. They were suffocating with suppressed laughter and had been from the start, though I had never noticed it. I perceived that I was sold. I learned then that Jim Blaine's peculiarity was that, whenever he reached a certain stage of intoxication, no human power could keep him from setting out with impressive unction to tell about a wonderful adventure which he had once had with his grandfather's old ram. And the mention of the ram in the first sentence was as far as any man had ever heard him get concerning it. He always maundered off, interminably, from one thing to another, till his whiskey got the best of him and he fell asleep. What the thing was that happened to him and his grandfather's old ram is a dark mystery to this day for nobody has ever yet found out. End of Chapter 53 This is Chapter 54 of Roughing It. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer visit LibriVox.org. Roughing It by Mark Twain Chapter 54 Of course there was a large Chinese population in Virginia. It is the case with every town and city on the Pacific Coast. They are a harmless race when white men either let them alone or treat them no worse than dogs. In fact they are almost entirely harmless anyhow, for they seldom think of resenting the vilest insults or the cruelest injuries. They are quiet, peaceable, tractable, free from drunkenness, and they are as industrious as the day is long. A disorderly Chinaman is rare and a lazy one does not exist. So long as a Chinaman has strength to use his hands he needs no support from anybody. White men often complain of want of work, but a Chinaman offers no such complaint. He always manages to find something to do. He is a great convenience to everybody, even to the worst class of white men, for he bears the most of their sins, suffering fines for their petty thefts, imprisonment for their robberies, and death for their murders. Any white man can swear a Chinaman's life away in the courts, but no Chinaman can testify against a white man. Ours is the land of the free, nobody denies that. Nobody challenges it. Maybe it is because we won't let other people testify. As I write, news comes that in broad daylight in San Francisco some boys have stoned an inoffensive Chinaman to death, and that although a large crowd witnessed the shameful deed no one interfered. There are seventy thousand and possibly one hundred thousand Chinaman on the Pacific Coast. There were about a thousand in Virginia. They were penned into a Chinese quarter, a thing which they do not particularly object to as they are fond of herding together. Their buildings were of wood, usually only one story high, and set thickly together along streets scarcely wide enough for a wagon to pass through. Their quarter was a little removed from the rest of the town. The chief employment of Chinaman in towns is to wash clothing. They always send a bill, like this below, pinned to the clothes. It is mere ceremony, for it does not enlighten the customer much. Their price for washing was two dollars and fifty cents per dozen. Rather cheaper than white people could afford to wash for at that time. A very common sign on the Chinese houses was Xi Yup, washer and ironer. Hong Wo, washer. Sam Sing and Ah Hop, washing. The house servants, cooks, etc., in California, Nevada were chiefly Chinaman. There were few white servants, and no China women so employed. Chinaman make good house servants, being quick, obedient, patient, quick to learn, and tirelessly industrious. They do not need to be taught a thing twice, as a general thing. They are imitative. If a Chinaman were to see his master break up a center table in a passion and kindle a fire with it, that Chinaman would be likely to resort to the furniture for fuel forever afterward. All Chinaman can read, write, and cipher with easy facility. Pity but all our petted voters could. In California, they rent little patches of ground and do a deal of gardening. They will raise surprising crops of vegetables on a sandpile. They waste nothing. What is rubbish to a Christian, a Chinaman carefully preserves and makes useful in one way or another. He gathers up all the old oyster and sardine cans that white people throw away, and procures marketable tin and solder from them by melting. He gathers up old bones and turns them into manure. In California, he gets a living out of old mining claims that white men have abandoned as exhausted and worthless, and then the officers come down on him once a month with an exorbitant swindle to which the legislature has given the broad general name of foreign mining tax, but it is usually inflicted on no foreigners but Chinaman. This swindle has in some cases been repeated once or twice on the same victim in the course of the same month, but the public treasury was not additionally enriched by it, probably. Chinaman hold their dead in great reverence. They worship their departed ancestors, in fact. Hence, in China, a man's front yard, backyard, or any other part of his premises, is made his family burying ground in order that he may visit the graves at any and all times. Therefore that huge empire is one mighty cemetery. It is ridged and wringled from its center to its circumference with graves, and in as much as every foot of ground must be made to do its utmost in China, lest the swarming population suffer for food, the very graves are cultivated and yield a harvest, custom holding this to be no dishonor to the dead. Since the departed are held in such worshipful reverence, a Chinaman cannot bear that any indignity be offered the places where they sleep. Mr. Berlingame said that herein lay China's bitter opposition to railroads. A road could not be built anywhere in the empire without disturbing the graves of their ancestors or friends. A Chinaman hardly believes he could enjoy the hereafter except his body lay in his beloved China. Also he desires to receive, himself, after death, that worship with which he has honored his dead that preceded him. Therefore if he visits a foreign country, he makes arrangements to have his bones return to China in case he dies. If he hires to go to a foreign country on a labor contract, there is always a stipulation that his body shall be taken back to China if he dies. If the government sells a gang of Coolies to a foreigner for the usual five-year term, it is specified in the contract that their body shall be restored to China in case of death. On the Pacific coast, the Chinaman all belong to one or another of several great companies or organizations, and these companies keep track of their members, register their names, and ship their bodies home when they die. The C. Yup Company is held to be the largest of these. The Ning Yong Company is next, and numbers 18,000 members on the coast. Its headquarters are at San Francisco, where it has a costly temple, several great officers, one of whom keeps regal state and seclusion and cannot be approached by common humanity, and a numerous priesthood. In it I was shown a register of its members, with the dead and the date of their shipment to China duly marked. Every ship that sails from San Francisco carries away a heavy freight of Chinese corpses, or did at least until the legislature, with an ingenious refinement of Christian cruelty, forbade the shipments as a neat underhanded way of deterring Chinese immigration. The bill was offered, whether it passed or not. It is my impression that it passed. There was another bill, it became a law, compelling every incoming Chinaman to be vaccinated on the wharf and pay a duly appointed quack. No decent doctor would defile himself with such legalized robbery. Ten dollars for it. As few importers of Chinese would want to go to an expense like that, the lawmakers thought this would be another heavy blow to Chinese immigration. What the Chinese Quarter of Virginia was like, or indeed what the Chinese Quarter of any Pacific coast town was, and is like, may be gathered from this item, which I printed in the Enterprise while reporting for that paper. Chinatown. Accompanied by a fellow reporter, we made a trip through our Chinese Quarter the other night. The Chinese have built their portion of the city to suit themselves, and as they keep neither carriages nor wagons, their streets are not wide enough, as a general thing, to admit the passage of vehicles. At ten o'clock at night the Chinaman may be seen in all his glory, in every little cooped up, dingy cavern of a hut, faint with the odor of burning Josh lights, and with nothing to see the gloom by save the sickly, guttering tallow candle, were two or three yellow, long-tailed vagabonds coiled up on a sort of short treacle-bed, smoking opium, motionless, and with their lusterless eyes turned inward from excess of satisfaction, or rather the recent smoker looks thus immediately after having passed the pipe to his neighbor. For opium smoking is a comfortless operation, and requires constant attention. A lamp sits on the bed, the length of the long pipe stem from the smoker's mouth, he puts a pallet of opium on the end of a wire, sets it on fire, and plasters it into the pipe much as a Christian would fill a hole with putty. Then he applies the bowl to the lamp and proceeds to smoke, and the stewing and frying of the drug and the gurgling of the juices in the stem would well now turn the stomach of a statue. John likes it, though. It sews him. He takes about two dozen whiffs, and then rolls over to dream. Heaven knows what, for we could not imagine by looking at the soggy creature. Possibly in his visions he travels far away from the gross world and his regular washing, and feast on succulent rats and birds' nests in paradise. Mr. A Sing keeps a general grocery and provision store at No. 13 Wong Street. He lavished his hospitality upon our party in the friendliest way. He had various kinds of coloured and colourless wines and brandies, with unpronounceable names, imported from China in little crockery jugs, and which he offered to us in dainty little miniature wash basins of porcelain. He offered us a mess of birds' nests, also small, neat sausages, of which we could have swallowed several yards if we had chosen to try, but we suspected that each link contained the corpse of a mouse, and therefore reframed. Mr. Sing had in his store a thousand articles of merchandise, curious to behold, impossible to imagine the uses of, and beyond our ability to describe. His ducks, however, and his eggs we could understand. The former were split open and flattened out like codfish, and came from China in that shape, and the latter were plastered over with some kind of paste, which kept them fresh and palatable through the long voyage. We found Mr. Hong Wo, No. 37 Chao Chao Street, making up a lottery scheme. In fact, we found a dozen others occupied in the same way in various parts of the quarter. For about every third Chinaman runs a lottery, and the balance of the tribe buck at it. Tom, who speaks faultless English and used to be chief, and only cooked to the territorial enterprise, when the establishment kept bachelor's halls two years ago, said that some time Chinaman, by ticket one dollar-hap, catch him two, three hundred, some time no catch him to anything. Lottery like one man fight him seventy. Maybe he whip, maybe he get whip. He self. Welly good. However, the percentage being sixty-nine against him, the chances are, as a general thing, that he get whip he self. He could not see that these lotteries differed in any respect from our own, save that the figures being Chinese, no ignorant white man might ever hope to succeed in telling tether from which. The manner of drawing is similar to ours. Mr. C. Yup keeps a fancy store on Live Fox Street. He sold us fans of white feathers, gorgeously ornamented, perfumery that smelled like Limburger cheese, Chinese pens, and watch charms made of a stone unscratchable with steel instruments, yet polished and tinted like the inner coat of a seashell. As tokens of his esteem, C. Yup presented the party with gaudy plumes, made of gold tinsel, and trimmed with peacock's feathers. We ate chow-chow with chopsticks in the celestial restaurants. Our comrade chided the moon-eyed damsels in front of the houses for their want of feminine reserve. We received protecting josh lights from our hosts and dickered for a pagan god or two. Finally we were impressed with the genius of a Chinese bookkeeper. He figured up his accounts on a machine like a gridiron with buttons strung on its bars. The different rows represented units, tens, hundreds, and thousands. He fingered them with incredible rapidity. In fact, he pushed them from place to place as fast as a musical professor's fingers travel over the keys of a piano. They are a kindly disposed, well-meaning race, and are respected and well-treated by the upper classes all over the Pacific Coast. No Californian gentleman or lady ever abuses or oppresses a Chinaman, under any circumstances, an explanation that seems to be much needed in the East. Only the scum of the population do it. They and their children. They and, naturally and consistently, the policemen and politicians, likewise, for these are the dust-licking pimps and slaves of the scum, there as well as elsewhere in America. I began to get tired of staying in one place so long. There was no longer satisfying variety in going down to Carson to report the proceedings of the legislature once a year, and horse races and pumpkin shows once in three months. They had to go raising pumpkins and potatoes in Washoo Valley, and, of course, one of the first achievements of the legislature was to institute a ten thousand dollar agricultural fair to show off forty dollars' worth of those pumpkins in. However, the territorial legislature was usually spoken of as the asylum. I wanted to see San Francisco. I wanted to go somewhere. I wanted—I did not know what I wanted. I had the spring fever, and wanted a change principally, no doubt. Besides, a convention had framed a state constitution. Nine men out of every ten wanted an office. I believed that these gentlemen would treat the moneyless and the irresponsible among the population into adopting the constitution, and thus well-nigh killing the country. It could not well carry such a load as a state government, since it had nothing to tax that could stand a tax, for undeveloped minds could not, and there were not fifty developed ones in the land. There was, but little realty to tax, and it did seem as if nobody was ever going to think of the simple salvation of inflicting a money penalty on murder. I believed that a state government would destroy the flush times, and I wanted to get away. I believed that the mining stocks I had on hand would soon be worth one hundred thousand dollars, and thought if they reached that before the constitution was adopted, I would sell out and make myself secure from the crash the change of government was going to bring. I considered one hundred thousand dollars sufficient to go home with decently, though it was but a small amount compared to what I had been expecting to return with. I felt rather downhearted about it, but I tried to comfort myself with a reflection that with such a sum I could not fall into want. About this time a schoolmate of mine, whom I had not seen since boyhood, came tramping in on foot from the Reese River, a very allegory of poverty. The son of wealthy parents, here he was in a strange land, hungry, bootless, mantled in an ancient horse blanket, roofed with a brimless hat, and so generally and so extravagantly dilapidated, that he could have taken the shine out of the prodigal son himself, as he pleasantly remarked. He wanted to borrow forty-six dollars, twenty-six to take him to San Francisco, and twenty for something else, to buy some soap with, maybe, for he needed it. I found I had but little more than the amount wanted in my pocket, so I stepped in and borrowed forty-six dollars of a banker, on twenty days' time, without the formality of a note, and gave it him, rather than walk half a block to the office, where I had some specie laid up. If anybody had told me that it would take me two years to pay back that forty-six dollars to the banker, for I did not expect it of the prodigal, and was not disappointed, I would have felt injured, and so would the banker. I wanted a change. I wanted variety of some kind. It came. Mr. Goodman went away for a week, and left me the post of chief editor. It destroyed me. The first day I wrote my leader in the forenoon. The second day I had no subject, and put it off till the afternoon. The third day I put it off till evening, and then copied an elaborate editorial out of the American Cyclopedia, that steadfast friend of the editor, all over this land. The fourth day I fooled around till midnight, and then fell back on the Cyclopedia again. The fifth day I cudgled my brain till midnight, and then kept the press waiting, while I penned some bitter personalities on six different people. The sixth day I labored in anguish till far into the night, and brought forth nothing. The paper went to press without an editorial. The seventh day I resigned. On the eighth, Mr. Goodman returned, and found six duels on his hands. My personalities had borne fruit. Nobody, except he has tried it, knows what it is to be an editor. It is easy to scribble local rubbish. With the facts all before you, it is easy to clip selections from other papers. It is easy to string out a correspondence from any locality. But it is unspeakable hardship to write editorials. Subjects are the trouble. The dreary lack of them, I mean. Every day it is drag, drag, drag. Think, and worry, and suffer. All the world is a dull blank, and yet the editorial columns must be filled. Only give the editor a subject, and his work is done. It is no trouble to write it up. But fancy how you would feel if you had to pump your brains dry every day in the week, fifty-two weeks in the year. It makes one low-spirited simply to think of it. The matter that each editor of a daily paper in America writes in the course of a year would fill from four to eight bulky volumes like this book. Fancy what a librarian editor's work would make after twenty or thirty years' service. Yet people often marvel that Dickens, Scott, Bulwer, Dumas, etc., have been able to produce so many books. If these authors had wrought as voluminously as newspapers editors do, the result would be something to marvel at indeed. How editors can continue this tremendous labor, this exhausting consumption of brain fiber, for their work is creative and not a mere mechanical laying up of facts like reporting, day after day and year after year is incomprehensible. Preachers take two months' holiday in mid-summer for they find that to produce two sermons a week is wearing in the long run. In truth it must be so and is so. And therefore how an editor can take from ten to twenty texts and build upon them from ten to twenty painstaking editorials a week and keep it up all the year round is farther beyond comprehension than ever. Ever since I survived my week as editor I have found at least one pleasure in any newspaper that comes to my hand. It is in admiring the long columns of editorial and wondering to myself how in the mischief he did it. Mr. Goodman's return relieved me of employment, unless I chose to become a reporter again. I could not do that. I could not serve in the ranks after being general of the army, so I thought I would depart and go abroad into the world somewhere. Just at this juncture Dan, my associate in the Repertorial Department, told me, casually, that two citizens had been trying to persuade him to go with them to New York and aid in selling a rich silver mine which they had discovered and secured in a new mining district in our neighborhood. He said they offered to pay his expenses and give him one-third of the proceeds of the sale. He had refused to go. It was the very opportunity I wanted. I abused him for keeping so quiet about it and not mentioning it sooner. He said it had not occurred to him that I would like to go, and so he had recommended them to apply to Marshall, the reporter of the other paper. I asked Dan if it was a good honest mine and no swindle. He said the men had shown him nine tons of the rock which they had got out to take to New York, and he could cheerfully say that he had seen but little rock in Nevada that was richer, and, moreover, he said that they had secured a tract of valuable timber and a mill site near the mine. My first idea was to kill Dan, but I changed my mind, not withstanding I was so angry, for I thought maybe the chance was not yet lost. Dan said it was by no means lost, that the men were absent at the mine again and would not be in Virginia to leave for the East for some ten days, that they had requested him to do the talking to Marshall, and he had promised that he would either secure Marshall or somebody else for them by the time they got back. He would now say nothing to anybody till they returned, and then fulfill his promise by furnishing me to them. It was splendid. I went to bed all on fire with excitement, for nobody had yet gone east to sell a Nevada silver mine, and the field was white for the sickle. I felt that such a mine as the one described by Dan would bring a princely sum in New York and sell without delay or difficulty. I could not sleep my fancy so rioted through its castles in the air. It was the blind lead come again. Next day I got away on the coach with the usual eclatending departures of old citizens, for if you have only half a dozen friends out there they will make noise for a hundred rather than let you seem to go away neglected and unrecreated, and Dan promised to keep strict watch for the men that had the mine to sell. The trip was signalized, but by one little incident, and that occurred just as we were about to start. A very seedy looking vagabond passenger got out of the stage a moment to wait till the usual ballast of silver bricks was thrown in. He was standing on the pavement, when an awkward express employee carrying a brick weighing a hundred pounds stumbled and let it fall on the bummer's foot. He instantly dropped on the ground and began to howl in the most heartbreaking way. A sympathizing crowd gathered around, and were going to pull his boot off, but he screamed louder than ever, and they desisted. Then he fell to gasping, and between the gasps ejaculated Brandy, for heaven sakes, Brandy! They poured half a pint down him, and it wonderfully restored and comforted him. Then he begged the people to assist him to the stage, which was done. The express people urged him to have a doctor at their expense, but he declined, and said that if he only had a little Brandy to take along with him to soothe his paroxysms of pain, when they came on, he would be grateful and content. He was quickly supplied with two bottles, and we drove off. He was so smiling and happy after that that I could not refrain from asking him how he could possibly be so comfortable with a crushed foot. Well, he said, I hadn't had a drink for twelve hours, and hadn't a scent to my name. I was most perishing, and so when that duffer dropped that hundred pounder on my foot, I see my chance. Got a cork leg, you know, and he pulled up his pantaloons and proved it. He was as drunk as a lord all day long, and full of chucklings over his timely ingenuity. One drunken man necessarily reminds one of another. I once heard a gentleman tell about an incident which he witnessed in a Californian bar room. He entitled it, Ye Modest Man Taketh a Drink. It was nothing but a bit of acting, but it seemed to me a perfect rendering and worthy of Toodles himself. The Modest Man, tolerably far gone with beer and other matters, enters a saloon. Twenty-five cents is the price for anything and everything, and specie the only money used, and lays down half a dollar. Calls for a whiskey and drinks it. The barkeeper makes change and lays the quarter in a wet place on the counter. The Modest Man fumbles at it with nervous fingers, but it slips, and the water holds it. He contemplates it, and tries again. Same result. Observes that people are interested in what he is at, and blushes. Fumbles at the quarter again, blushes, puts his forefinger carefully, slowly down, to make sure of his aim, pushes the coin toward the barkeeper, and says with a sigh, Give me a cigar! Naturally another gentleman present told about another drunken man. He said he reeled toward home late at night, made a mistake, and entered the wrong gate. Thought he saw a dog on the stoop, and it was an iron one. He stopped and considered, wondered if it was a dangerous dog, ventured to say, Be, be gone! No effect. Then he approached warily, and adopted conciliation. First up his lips, and tried to whistle, but failed, still approached, saying, Poor dog, doggie, doggie, doggie, poor doggie, dog! Got up on the stoop, still petting with fond names, till master of the advantages then exclaimed, Leave you thief! planted a vindictive kick in his ribs, and went head over heels overboard, of course. A pause, a sigh or two of pain, and then a remark in a reflective voice. Awful, solid dog! What could he been eating? Rocks, perhaps. Such animals is dangerous. That's what I say. They're dangerous. If a man, if a man wants to feed a dog on rocks, let him feed him on rocks. It's all right, but let him keep him at home, not have him laying round promiscuous, where, where people's liable to stumble over him when they ain't noticing. It was not without regret that I took a last look at the tiny flag. It was thirty-five feet long and ten feet wide, fluttering like a lady's handkerchief from the topmost peak of Mount Davidson, two thousand feet above Virginia's roofs, and felt that doubtless I was bidding a permanent farewell to a city which had afforded me the most vigorous enjoyment of life I had ever experienced. And this reminds me of an incident which the dullest memory Virginia could boast at the time it happened must vividly recall, at times, till its possessor dies, late one summer afternoon we had a rain-shower. That was astonishing enough in itself to set the whole town buzzing, for it only rains during a week or two weeks in the winter in Nevada, and even then not enough at a time to make it worthwhile for any merchant to keep umbrellas for sale. But the rain was not the chief wonder, it only lasted five or ten minutes, while the people were still talking about it, all the heavens gathered to themselves a dense blackness as of midnight. All the vast eastern front of Mount Davidson overlooking the city put on such a funereal gloom that only the nearness and solidity of the mountain made its outlines even faintly distinguishable from the dead blackness of the heavens they rested against. This unaccustomed sight turned all eyes toward the mountain, and as they looked a little tongue of rich golden flame was seen waving and quivering in the heart of the midnight way up on the extreme summit. In a few minutes the streets were packed with people gazing with hardly an uttered word at the one brilliant moat in the brooding world of darkness. It flicked like a candle flame, and looked no larger, but with such a background it was wonderfully bright, small as it was. It was the flag. Though no one suspected it first, it seemed so like a supernatural visitor of some kind, a mysterious messenger of good tidings some were feigned to believe. It was the nation's emblem transfigured by the departing rays of a sun that was entirely pawled from view, and on no other object did the glory fall in all the broad panorama of mountain ranges and deserts, not even upon the staff of the flag. For that, a needle in the distance at any time, was now untouched by the light and undistinguishable in the gloom. For a whole hour the weird visitor winked and burned in its lofty solitude, and still the thousands of uplifted eyes watched it with fascinated interest. How the people were wrought up. The superstition grew apace that this was a mystic courier come with great news from the war, the poetry of the idea excusing and commending it, and on it spread from heart to heart, from lip to lip and from street to street, till there was a general impulse to have out the military and welcome the bright wave with a salvo of artillery. And all that time one sorely tried man, the telegraph operator, sworn to official secrecy, had to lock his lips and chain his tongue with a silence that was like to rend them. For he and he only of all the speculating multitude knew the great things this sinking sun had seen that day in the east, Vicksburg fallen, and the Union arms victorious at Gettysburg. But for the journalistic monopoly that forbade the slightest revealment of eastern news till a day after its publication in the California papers, the glorified flag on Mount Davidson would have been saluted and resoluted that memorable evening as long as there was a charge of powder to thunder with. The city would have been illuminated, and every man that had any respect for himself would have got drunk, as was the custom of the country on all occasions of public moment. Even at this distant day, I cannot think of this needlessly marred supreme opportunity without regret. What a time we might have had. End of Chapter 55 This is Chapter 56 of Roughing It. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, visit LibriVox.org. Roughing It by Mark Twain Chapter 56 We rumbled over the plains and valleys, climbed the sierras to the clouds, and looked down upon summer clad California. I will remark here in passing that all scenery in California requires distance to give it its highest charm. The mountains are imposing in their sublimity and their majesty of form and altitude from any point of view, but one must have distance to soften their ruggedness and enrich their tintings. A Californian forest is best at a little distance, for there is a sad poverty of variety in species, the trees being chiefly of one monotonous family, redwood, pine, spruce, fir. And so, at a nearer view, there is a weary some sameness of attitude in their rigid arms, stretched downward and outward in one continued and reiterated appeal to all men to, shh, don't say a word, you might disturb somebody. Close at hand, too, there is a reliefless and relentless smell of pitch and turpentine. There is a ceaseless melancholy in their sighing and complaining foliage. One walks over a soundless carpet of beaten yellow bark and dead spines of the foliage till he feels like a wandering spirit bereft of a footfall. He tires of the endless tufts of needles and yearns for substantial shapely leaves. He looks for moss and grass to lull upon and finds none. For where there is no bark, there is naked clay and dirt, enemies, depensive musing and clean apparel. Often a grassy plain in California is what it should be, but often, too, it is best contemplated at a distance, because although its grass blades are tall, they stand up vindictively straight and self-sufficient and are unsociably wide apart with uncommonly spots of barren sand between. One of the queerest things I know of is to hear tourists from the States go into ecstasies over the loveliness of ever-blooming California, and they always do go into that sort of ecstasies, but perhaps they would modify them if they knew how old Californians, with the memory full upon them of the dust-covered and questionable summer greens of Californian verdeur, stand astonished and filled with worshiping admiration in the presence of the lavish richness, the brilliant green, the infinite freshness, the spendthrift variety of form and species and foliage that make an eastern landscape a vision of paradise itself. The idea of a man falling into raptures over grave and somber California, when that man has seen New England's meadow expanses and her maples, oaks, and cathedral-windowed elms decked in summer attire, or the opal and splendors of autumn descending upon her forests, comes very near being funny. Would be, in fact, but that it is so pathetic. No land with an unvarying climate can be very beautiful. The tropics are not, for all the sentiment that is wasted on them. They seem beautiful at first, but sameness impairs the charm by and by. Change is the handmaiden nature requires to do her miracles with. The land that has four well-defined seasons cannot lack beauty, or pawl with monotony. Each season brings a world of enjoyment, an interest in the watching of its unfolding, its gradual harmonious development, its culminating graces, and just as one begins to tire of it, it passes away, and a radical change comes with new witcheries and new glories in its train, and, I think, to one in sympathy with nature, each season in its turn seems the loveliest. San Francisco, a truly fascinating city to live in, is stately and handsome at a fair distance, but close at hand one notes that the architecture is mostly old-fashioned. Many streets are made up of decaying, smoke-grimed wooden houses, and the barren sand-hills toward the outskirts obtrude themselves too prominently. Even the kindly climate is sometimes pleasanter when read about, and personally experienced, for a lovely cloudless sky wears out its welcome by and by, and then, when the longed-for rain does come, it stays. Even the playful earthquake is better contemplated at a dist— however, there are varying opinions about that. The climate of San Francisco is mild and singularly equitable. The thermometer stands at about 70 degrees the year round. It hardly changes at all. You sleep under one or two light blankets summer and winter, and never use a mosquito-bar. Nobody ever wears summer clothing. You wear black broadcloth, if you have it, in August and January just the same. It is no colder and no warmer in the one month than the other. You do not use overcoats, and you do not use fans. It is as pleasant a climate as could well be contrived, take it all around, and is doubtless the most unvarying in the whole world. The wind blows there a good deal in the summer months, but then you can go over to Oakland, if you choose, three or four miles away. It does not blow there. It has only snowed twice in San Francisco in nineteen years, and then it only remained on the ground long enough to astonish the children and set them to wondering what the feathery stuff was. During eight months of the year, straight along, the skies are bright and cloudless, and never a drop of rain falls. But when the other four months come along, you will need to go and steal an umbrella, because you will require it. Not just one day, but one hundred and twenty days in hardly varying succession. When you want to go visiting, or attend church, or the theater, you never look up at the clouds to see whether it is likely to rain or not. You look at the almanac. If it is winter, it will rain. And if it is summer, it won't rain, and you cannot help it. You never need a lightning rod, because it never thunders, and it never lightens. And after you have listened for six or eight weeks every night to the dismal monotony of those quiet rains, you will wish in your heart the thunder would leap and crash and roar along those drowsy skies once and make everything alive. You will wish the prisoned lightnings would cleave the dull firmament of thunder and light it with a blinding glare for one little instant. You would give anything to hear the old familiar thunder again and see the lightning strike somebody. And along in the summer, when you have suffered about four months of lustrous pitiless sunshine, you are ready to go down on your knees and plead for rain, hail, snow, thunder and lightning, anything to break the monotony. You will take an earthquake if you cannot do any better, and the chances are that you'll get it too. San Francisco is built on sand hills, but they are prolific sand hills. They yield a generous vegetation. All the rare flowers which people in the States rear with such patient care in parlor flower pots and greenhouses flourish luxuriously in the open air there all the year round. Kaya lilies, all sorts of geraniums, passion flowers, moss roses. I do not know the names of a tenth part of them. I only know that while New Yorkers are burdened with banks and drifts of snow, Californians are burdened with banks and drifts of flowers. If they only keep their hands off and let them grow, and I have heard that they have also that rarest and most curious of all the flowers, the beautiful Espirito Santo, as the Spaniards call it, or flower of the Holy Spirit, though I thought it grew only in Central America, down on the Ismus. In its cup is the daintiest little facsimile of a dove as pure as snow. The Spaniards have a superstitious reverence for it. The blossom has been conveyed to the States, submerged in ether, and the bulb has been taken thither also, but every attempt to make it bloom after it arrived has failed. I have elsewhere spoken of the endless winter of Mono, California, and but this moment of the eternal spring of San Francisco. Now if we travel a hundred miles in a straight line, we come to the eternal summer of Sacramento. One never sees summer clothing or mosquitoes in San Francisco, but they can be found in Sacramento. Not always and unvaryingly, but about 143 months out of 12 years, perhaps. Flowers bloom there, always, the reader can easily believe. People suffer and sweat and swear morning, noon, and night, and wear out their staunchest energies fanning themselves. It gets hot there, but if you go down to Fort Yuma, you will find it hotter. Fort Yuma is probably the hottest place on earth. The thermometer stays at 120 in the shade there all the time, except when it varies and goes higher. It is a U.S. military post, and its occupants get so used to the terrific heat that they suffer without it. There is a tradition attributed to John Phoenix. It has been purloined by 50 different scribblers who were too poor to invent a fancy but not ashamed to steal one. M.T. That a very, very wicked soldier died there once, and, of course, went straight to the hottest corner of perdition. In the next day he telegraphed back for his blankets. There is no doubt about the truth of this statement. There can be no doubt about it. I have seen the place where that soldier used to board. In Sacramento it is fiery summer always, and you can gather roses and eat strawberries and ice cream and wear white linen clothes and pantons perspire at 8 or 9 o'clock in the morning, and then take the cars and at noon put on your furs and your skates, and go skimming over frozen Donner Lake, 7,000 feet above the valley, among snow banks 15 feet deep, and in the shadow of grand mountain peaks that lift their frosty crags 10,000 feet above the level of the sea. There is a transition for you. Where will you find another like it in the western hemisphere? And some of us have swept around snow-walled curves of the Pacific Railroad in that vicinity 6,000 feet above the sea, and looked down, as the birds do, upon the deathless summer of the Sacramento Valley, with its fruitful fields, its feathery foliage, its silver streams, all slumbering in the mellow haze of its enchanted atmosphere, and all infinitely softened and spiritualized by distance. A dreamy, exquisite glimpse of fairyland, made all the more charming and striking that it was caught through a forbidden gateway of ice and snow, and savage crags and precipices. It was in this Sacramento Valley, just referred to, that a deal of the most lucrative of the early gold mining was done, and you may still see, in places, its grassy slopes and levels torn and guttered, and disfigured by the avaricious spoilers of fifteen and twenty years ago. You may see such disfigurements far and wide over California, and in some such places where only meadows and forests are visible, not a living creature, not a house, no stick or stone or remnant of a ruin, and not a sound, not even a whisper, to disturb the Sabbath stillness. You will find it hard to believe that there stood at one time a fiercely flourishing little city of two thousand or three thousand souls, with its newspaper, fire company, brass band, volunteer militia, bank, hotels, noisy Fourth of July processions and speeches, gambling hells crammed with tobacco smoke, profanity, and rough-bearded men of all nations and colors, with tables heaped with gold dust sufficient for the revenues of a German principality, streets crowded and rife with business, town lots worth four hundred dollars a front foot, labor, laughter, music, dancing, swearing, fighting, shooting, stabbing, a bloody inquest and a man for breakfast every morning, everything that delights and adorns existence, all the appointments and appurtenances of a thriving and prosperous and promising young and now nothing is left of it all but a lifeless, homeless solitude. The men are gone, the houses have vanished, even the name of the place is forgotten. In no other land, in modern times, have towns so absolutely died and disappeared as in the old mining regions of California. It was a driving, vigorous, restless population in those days, it was a curious population, it was the only population of the kind that the world has ever seen gathered together, and it is not likely that the world will ever see its like again. For, observe, it was an assemblage of two hundred thousand young men, not simpering, dainty, kid-gloved weaklings, but stalwart, muscular, dauntless young braves, brimful of push and energy, and royally endowed with every attribute that goes to make up a peerless and magnificent manhood, the very pick and choice of the world's glorious ones, no women, no children, no gray and stooping veterans, none but erect, bright-eyed, quick-moving, strong-handed young giants, the strangest population, the finest population, the most gallant host that ever trooped down the startled solitudes of an unpeopled land, and where are they now? Scattered to the ends of the earth, or prematurely aged and decrepit, or shot or stabbed in street-a-phrase, or dead of disappointed hopes and broken hearts, all gone, or nearly all, victims devoted upon the altar of the golden calf, the noblest holocaust that ever wafted its sacrificial incense heavenward, it is pitiful to think upon. It was a splendid population, for all the slow, sleepy, sluggish-brained sloths stayed at home. You never find that sort of people among pioneers. You cannot build pioneers out of that sort of material. It was that population that gave to California a name for getting up astounding enterprises and rushing them through with a magnificent dash and daring and a recklessness of cost or consequences, which she bears unto this day. And when she projects a new surprise, the grave world smiles as usual and says, well, that is, California all over. But they were rough in those times. They fairly reveled in gold, whiskey, fights, and fandangos, and were unspeakably happy. The honest miner raked from a hundred to a thousand dollars out of his claim a day, and what with the gambling dens and the other entertainments, he hadn't assent the next morning if he had any sort of lock. They cooked their own bacon and beans, sewed on their own buttons, washed their own shirts, blew woollen ones, and if a man wanted a fight on his hands without any annoying delay, all he had to do was to appear in public in a white shirt or a stove-pipe hat, and he would be accommodated. For those people hated aristocrats. They had a particular and lignant animosity toward what they called a bileed shirt. It was a wild, free, disorderly grotesque society. Men, only swarming hosts of stalwart men, nothing juvenile, nothing feminine, visible anywhere. In those days miners would flock in crowds to catch a glimpse of that rare and blessed spectacle, a woman. Old inhabitants tell how in a certain camp the news went abroad early in the morning that a woman was come. They had seen a calico dress hanging out of a wagon down at the camping-ground, sign of emigrants from over the Great Plains. Everybody went down there, and a shout went up when an actual bona fide dress was discovered fluttering in the wind. The male emigrant was visible. The miners said, Fetch her out! He said, It is my wife, gentlemen. She is sick. We have been robbed of money, provisions, everything by the Indians. We want to rest. Fetch her out! We've got to see her. But, gentlemen, the poor thing, she Fetch her out! He fetched her out, and they swung their hats and sent up three rousing cheers and a tiger, and they crowded around and gazed at her and touched her dress and listened to her voice with the look of men who listened to a memory rather than a present reality, and then they collected twenty five hundred dollars in gold and gave it to the man, and swung their hats again and gave three more cheers and went home satisfied. Once I dined in San Francisco with the family of a pioneer and talked with his daughter, a young lady whose first experience in San Francisco was an adventure, though she herself did not remember it, as she was only two or three years old at the time. Her father said that after landing from the ship they were walking up the street, a servant leading the party with a little girl in her arms, and presently a huge minor, bearded, belted, spurred, and bristling with deadly weapons just down from a long campaign in the mountains, evidently barred the way, stopped the servant, and stood gazing with a face all alive with gratification and astonishment, and then he said reverently, Well, if it ain't a child, and then he snatched a little leather sack out of his pocket and said to the servant, There's a hundred and fifty dollars in dust there, and I'll give it to you to let me kiss the child. That anecdote is true, but see how things change. Sitting at that dinner table listening to that anecdote, if I had offered double the money for the privilege of kissing the same child I would have been refused. Seventeen added years have far more than doubled the price. And while upon this subject I will remark that once in Star City, in the Humboldt Mountains, I took my place in a sort of long post office single file of minors to patiently await my chance to peep through a crack in the cabin and get a sight of the splendid new sensation, a genuine live woman. And at the end of half an hour my turn came, and I put my eye to the crack, and there she was, with one arm a Kimbo, and tossing flapjacks in a frying pan with the other, and she was one hundred and sixty-five, being in calmer mood now I voluntarily knock off a hundred from that—M.T., years old, and hadn't a tooth in her head. For a few months I enjoyed what, to me, was an entirely new phase of existence, a butterfly idleness, nothing to do, nobody to be responsible to, and untroubled with financial uneasiness. I fell in love with the most cordial and sociable city in the Union. After the sagebrush and alkali deserts of Washoo, San Francisco was paradise to me. I lived at the best hotel, exhibited my clothes in the most conspicuous places, infested the opera, and learned to seem enraptured with music which oftener afflicted my ignorant ear than enchanted it, if I had had the vulgar honesty to confess it. However, I suppose I was not greatly worse than the most of my countrymen in that. I had longed to be a butterfly, and I was one at last. I attended private parties in sumptuous evening-dress, simpered and aired my graces like a borne bowl, and polkered and shottished with a steppe peculiar to myself and the kangaroo. In a word I kept the due state of a man worth a hundred thousand dollars, prospectively, and likely to reach absolute affluence when that silver-mind sale should be ultimately achieved in the East. I spent money with a free hand, and meantime watched the stock sales with an interested eye, and looked to see what might happen in Nevada. Something very important happened. The property holders of Nevada voted against the state constitution, but the folks who had nothing to lose were in the majority, and carried the measure over their heads. But after all, it did not immediately look like a disaster, though unquestionably it was one. I hesitated, calculated the chances, and then concluded not to sell. Stocks went on rising, speculation went mad. Bankers, merchants, lawyers, doctors, mechanics, laborers, even the very washer women and servant girls were putting up their earnings on silver stocks, and every son that rose in the morning went down on paupers enriched and rich men beggared. What a gambling carnival it was. Gould and Curry soared to six thousand three hundred dollars a foot, and then, all of a sudden, out went the bottom and everything and everybody went to ruin and destruction. The wreck was complete. The bubbles scarcely left a microscopic moisture behind it. I was an early beggar and a thorough one. My hoarded stocks were not worth the paper they were printed on. I threw them all away. I, the cheerful idiot that had been squandering money like water, and thought myself beyond the reach of misfortune, had not now, as much as fifty dollars, when I gathered together my various debts and paid them. I removed from the hotel to a very private boarding-house. I took a reporter's birth and went to work. I was not entirely broken in spirit, for I was building confidently on the sale of the silver mine in the east, but I could not hear from Dan. My letters miscarried or were not answered. One day I did not feel vigorous and remained away from the office. The next day I went down toward noon as usual and found a note on my desk, which had been there twenty-four hours. It was signed, Marshall, the Virginia reporter, and contained a request that I should call at the hotel and see him and a friend or two that night, as they would sail for the east in the morning. A post-script added that their errand was a big mining speculation. I was hardly ever so sick in my life. I abused myself for leaving Virginia and entrusting to another man a matter I ought to have attended to myself. I abused myself for remaining away from the office on the one day of all the year that I should have been there, and thus, berating myself, I trotted a mile to the steamer-warf and arrived just in time to be late. The ship was in the stream and under way. I comforted myself with the thought that maybe the speculation would amount to nothing, poor comfort at best, and then went back to my slavery, resolved to put up with my thirty-five dollars a week, and forget all about it. A month afterward I enjoyed my first earthquake. It was one which was long called the Great Earthquake, and is doubtless, so distinguished till this day. It was just afternoon, on a bright October day, I was coming down Third Street. The only objects in motion anywhere in sight in that thickly built and populous quarter were a man in a buggy behind me, and a streetcar wending slowly up the cross-street. Otherwise all was solitude and a Sabbath stillness. As I turned the corner around a frame-house there was a great rattle and jar, and it occurred to me that here was an item. No doubt a fight in that house. Before I could turn and seek the door there came a really terrific shock. The ground seemed to roll under me in waves, interrupted by a violent juggling up and down, and there was a heavy grinding noise, as of brick houses rubbing together. I fell up against the frame-house and hurt my elbow. I knew what it was now, and from mere repertorial instinct, nothing else, I took out my watch and noted the time of day. At that moment a third and still severe shock came, and as I reeled about on the pavement trying to keep my footing I saw a sight. The entire front of a tall four-story brick building in Third Street sprung outward like a door and fell sprawling across the street, raising a dust like a great volume of smoke. And here came the buggy. Overboard went the man, and in less time than I can tell it the vehicle was distributed in small fragments along three hundred yards of the street. One could have fancied that somebody had fired a charge of chair-rounds and rags down the thoroughfare. The street car had stopped, the horses were rearing and plunging, the passengers were pouring out at both ends, and one fat man had crashed halfway through a glass window on one side of the car, got wedged fast, and was squirming and screaming like an impaled madman. Every door of every house, as far as the eye could reach, was vomiting a stream of human beings, and almost before one could execute a wink and begin another there was a massed multitude of people stretching in endless procession down every street my position commanded. Never was solemn solitude turned into teeming life quicker. Of the wonders wrought by the great earthquake these were all that came under my eye, but the tricks it did elsewhere, and far and wide over the town, made toothsome gossip for nine days. The destruction of property was trifling, the injury to it was widespread and somewhat serious. The curiosities of the earthquake were simply endless. Gentlemen and ladies who were sick or were taking a siesta or had dissipated till a late hour, and were making up lost sleep, thronged into the public streets in all sorts of queer apparel, and some without any at all. One woman, who had been washing a naked child, ran down the street holding it by the ankles as if it were a dressed turkey. Prominent citizens who were supposed to keep the Sabbath strictly rushed out of saloons in their shirt sleeves with billiard cues in their hands. Dozens of men with necks swathed in napkins rushed from barber shops, lathered to the eyes, or with one cheek clean shaved, and the other still bearing a hairy stubble. Horses broke from stables, and a frightened dog rushed up a short attic ladder and out onto a roof, and when his scare was over, had not the nerve to go down again the same way he had gone up. A prominent editor flew downstairs in the principal hotel with nothing on but one brief undergarment, met a chambermaid, and exclaimed, Oh, what shall I do? Where shall I go? she responded with naive serenity. If you have no choice, you might try a clothing store. A certain foreign consul's lady was the acknowledged leader of fashion, and every time she appeared in anything new or extraordinary the ladies in the vicinity made a raid on their husband's purses and arrayed themselves similarly. One man who had suffered considerably and growled accordingly was standing at the window when the shocks came, and the next instant the consul's wife, just out of the bath, fled by with no other apology for clothing than a bath-towel. The sufferer rose superior to the terrors of the earthquake and said to his wife, Now, that is something like. Get out your towel, my dear. The plastering that fell from ceilings in San Francisco that day would have covered several acres of ground. For some days afterward groups of eyeing and pointing men stood about many a building, looking at long zigzag cracks that extended from the eaves to the ground. Four feet of the tops of three chimneys on one house were broken square off and turned around in such a way as to completely stop the draft. A crack a hundred feet long gaped open six inches wide in the middle of one street, and then shut together again with such force as to ridge up the meeting earth like a slender grave. A lady sitting in her rocking and quaking parlor saw the wall part at the ceiling, open and shut twice, like a mouth, and then dropped the end of a brick on the floor like a tooth. She was a woman easily disgusted with foolishness, and she rose and went out of there. One lady who was coming downstairs was astonished to see a bronze hercules lean forward on its pedestal as if to strike her with its club. They both reached the bottom of the flight at the same time, the woman insensible from the fright. Her child, born some little time afterward, was clubfooted. However, on second thought, if the reader sees any coincidence in this, he must do it at his own risk. The first shock brought down two or three huge organ pipes in one of the churches. The minister, with uplifted hands, was just closing the services. He glanced up, hesitated, and said, However, we will omit the benediction. In the next instant there was a vacancy in the atmosphere where he had stood. After the first shock an Oakland minister said, Keep your seats, there is no better place to die than this, and added, after the third, But outside is good enough, and then he skipped out the back door. Such another destruction of mantle ornaments and toilet bottles as the earthquake created San Francisco never saw before. There was hardly a girl or a matron in the city but suffered losses of this kind. Suspended pictures were thrown down, but often or still, by a curious freak of the earthquake's humor, they were whirled completely around with their faces to the wall. There was great difference of opinion at first as to the course or direction the earthquake traveled, but water that splashed out of various tanks and buckets settled that. Thousands of people were made so seasick by the rolling and pitching of floors and streets that they were weak in bedridden for hours and some few for even days afterward. Hardly an individual escaped nausea entirely. The queer earthquake, episodes that formed the staple of San Francisco gossip for the next week would fill a much larger book than this, and so I will diverge from the subject. Buy and buy in the due course of things, I picked up a copy of the Enterprise one day and fell under this cruel blow. Nevada Mines in New York, G. M. Marshall, Sheba Hoors, and Amos H. Rose, who left San Francisco last July for New York City with oars from mines in Pinewood District, Humboldt County, and on the Reese River Range, have disposed of a mine containing 6,000 feet and called the Pine Mountains Consolidated for the sum of three million dollars. The stamps on the deed, which is now on its way to Humboldt County from New York for record, amounted to three thousand dollars, which is said to be the largest amount of stamps ever placed on one document. A working capital of one million dollars has been paid into the Treasury and machinery has already been purchased for a large quartz mill, which will be put up as soon as possible. The stock in this company is all full-paid and entirely unassessable. The oars of the mines in this district somewhat resemble those of the Sheba mine in Humboldt. Sheba Hurst, the discoverer of the mines, with his friends corralled all the best leads and all the land and timber they desired before making public their whereabouts. Oars from there, assayed in this city, showed them to be exceedingly rich in silver and gold, silver predominating. There is an abundance of wood and water in the district. We are glad to know that New York capital has been enlisted in the development of the mines of this region. Having seen the oars and assays, we are satisfied that the mines of the district are very valuable—anything but wildcat. Once more, native imbecility had carried the day, and I had lost a million. It was the blind lead over again. Let us not dwell on this miserable matter. If I were inventing these things, I could be wonderfully humorous over them. But they are too true to be talked of with hearty levity, even at this distant day. True, and yet not exactly as given in the above figures, possibly. I saw Marshall months afterward, and although he had plenty of money he did not claim to have captured an entire million. In fact, I gathered that he had not then received fifty thousand dollars. Beyond that figure his fortune appeared to consist of uncertain vast expectations rather than prodigious certainties. However, when the above item appeared in print, I put full faith in it, and incontinently wilted and went to seed under it. Suffice it that I so lost heart, and so yielded myself up to re-pinings and sighings and foolish regrets, that I neglected my duties and became about worthless as a reporter for a brisk newspaper. And at last one of the proprietors took me aside with a charity I still remember with considerable respect, and gave me an opportunity to resign my birth, and so save myself the disgrace of a dismissal.