a nobler manhood, or the hope of attaining these, forever lost. Perhaps it would be well for such a one to ask himself if it were not possible to find happiness in something short of the full realization of his original plans.

Success often springs from failure; at all events, it lies in the discipline wrought by noble efforts rather than in the end of wealth and luxury. Many a heartsick wretch in San Francisco has wandered over these sand-hills, out around by the Presidio hills to the Golden Gate bluffs and the ocean, and there gazing forth on the broad waters, or watching the tumbling waves come in and break in silvery surf at his feet, thought of the dead past, of blasted hopes, and a black future; thought in self-pitying woe of home and the loved ones there; thought of the great gulf of separation here, and the dismal blank of the hereafter. Why, O God! why is it?" he would ask. "Dost thou delight in breeding men to misery?"

CHAPTER XVI.

AMONG THE MINERS.

Mensura juris vis erat.

-Lucan.

THE miners of the flush times, their characteristics and quality, their idiosyncrasies and temper, are as far beyond description as the wind and weather of California, where the twenty sides of twenty thousand hills, and the twenty turns of twenty thousand ravines have each an individual climate. Twenty life-times might be spent and twenty volumes written before the story of one mining-camp in all its ramifications could be told. The story of one mining-camp was the story of mankind; and to follow it after death was the story of the gods.

Each man of them should be enriched with heapedup grains of gold brought down by the streams of the Sierra, as Croesus was enriched by the golden sands of Pactolus.

Soon many of the camps could boast their church and schoolhouse, and temperance hotel, and express office and bank; the scattering huts and cabins, and split-board one and two-story houses, and squares of shabby shanties, with a block or two edged on one side with red brick or rough stone stores, all clustering beside swift-running streams, and the now stumpy hillsides, and taking on the dignity of town.

As out of rough stones a smooth even wall is made, so from these sometime uncouth characters, these hairy and woollen-shirted men, were formed staid

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communities, with happy homes and virtuous environ

ment.

Their reading was mostly of the English Reynolds type, and the French Faublas' Liaisons dangereuses order, "where," as Lamartine says, "vice parodied virtue, and riotous liberty, love." Their books were not always as full of charming villainy even as Rousseau's Confessions.

Alexander the Great, manslayer, was a small man; Alexander Small, miner, was a great man. Anyone with men enough could conquer any nation or kill any number; it requires no quality of greatness to do this, and surely no one but a fool would drink himself to death; but I do not know that any great man pretends to deny that he is a fool. On the other hand, he who accomplishes much with little; he who can deny himself, rule himself, is greater than he who can only rule others. Alexander the Great had ambition of which no medicine on earth could physic him; but force was greater than ambition, greater than all glory and all gods. Alexander the Great, dram-drinker, man-killer, and gambler in ordinary to his Satanic majesty, the world has known these two or three thousand years; Alexander Small, gold-digger to the gods, and the greater of the two, the world has never known at all.

Many great men have been underrated during their lives, many small men have been overrated; many small in some things and great in others have been rated small or great in everything. Ralston, as the California bank's president, sitting behind other men's millions, was great, as Croesus was great; Ralston, a week later, dead, self-drowned, out of all his troubles, was a small man indeed.

Evil results sometimes flow from good qualities; some are generous because they are weak, and some are weak because they are generous. The sweeping winds of passion palsy the heart, jaundice the eye, and dry of its freshness all the gentler qualities of

GLADDENING GOLD..

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their nature. Sometimes it became necessary for every member of the community to watch every other member, lest by some evil act the gods would be offended and send down vengeance on all.

Nevertheless, out about this wilderness, among comrades, partners as they frequently called each other, in times of sickness and death there were deeds performed such as hew mountains into statues in honor of the doers, while sea and solemn pines unite to sing their praises. And grotesque as might be the miner's burial as all knelt round the grave, old-time habit and the liberal potations drank in honor of the departed, aiding their genuflexions, there was as much heart as in brass bands or priestly palaverings.

Thousands there were who came and saw, but did not conquer. Coming for wool they went home shorn. Let the clouds write in dismal shadows on the red earth now abandoned of this swarthy society-fuimus, we have been! Complaint was of no avail; roast beef, plum pudding, and champagne were not with them in season. Verily, Verily, it seemed if ever in this bustling, breathing world times were out of joint, it was these Californian times of 1849. Wickedness prospered; virtue and merit appeared to be the enemies rather than the friends of fortune.

Many a sparkling mountain stream has proved to many a lusty digger an Acheron, a river of sorrow. His destiny had seemed to him as surely predetermined as was that of Achilles, foretold by his goddess mother. Stay at home and a long life of inglorious ease crowned by wealth and progeny awaited him; go, and a glorious death should swiftly follow a career of victory.

And now, round his bronzed visage, coarsely streaked with corroding care, hung grizzled locks wildly matted as by the heavy pressure of inexorable environment upon the brain. Under the Sierra's feet is gold enough for others but none for me. Bushels of it from all parts pile themselves up at the metropolis, and

thence is scattered to every quarter. Sent to the east, sent to the west, sent to Europe, to Asia, there to gladden thousands, why should not some of it gladden me by gladdening mine? There is gold enough for others but none for me. I have drank of Acheron, let me now drink of Lethe. My past let me consign to oblivion, and regenerate once more take my place among the honorable of the earth. Bring forth the divining-rod, the witch-hazel of the epidemic demonopathy, and let its subtleties become so clearly perceptible to the sublimated brain of the bearer, that the arch-witch gold may be found, aye, gold 1 aye, gold!

Hundreds went mad. Lunatics roamed the streets at large; indeed, it sometimes seemed as if all were lunatics. Horrible is the disordered laugh of madmen and fiends; and so is the hollow mournful mirth of rioting starvelings, making dismal with their halfghostly orgies the lonely cañon. But they were not all as insane as they seemed. Should any object dear to them be laid in their pathway, they would turn aside the evil influences of their avarice or morality, as Ulysses, who affected madness to escape the Trojan campaign, turned aside his plough when the infant Telemachus was laid in the furrow.

Prostrate in blank despair, oblivious from drink, or battling undismayed, the life struggle still continues. Walk round the arena, pass by the fortunate-they are the exceptions, and can care for themselves-but glance at some who have fallen. The old white-whiskered bell-boy who answers your summons at the hotel was once a wholesale grocer, with a business of six millions a year; that waiter in the restaurant was once colonel in the Austrian service; an aide-de-camp to Larmorcier hires himself to a paper-hanger; there is a doctor driving a dray, here a graduate of Trinity college, Dublin, tending bar, and so on.

As the development of the country increased its classical abnormities, with some of its greatest charms diminished, and with the glamour of unreality origin