[Prentice Mulford, A Prospector's Story, The Overland Monthly, April, 1869]

 

336      A PROSPECTOR'S STORY.                [APRIL,

 

A PROSPECTOR'S STORY.

            YOU remember the copper excitement a few years ago. The Union vein at Copperopolis was turning out a fortune per day. Other ledges were found far and near. Every green-tinged rock was considered a sure indication of the existence of great glittering deposits of sulphuret, in the bowels beneath. Men came from San Francisco, and even from the East, to buy feet. They were but too happy to purchase. They deemed it a favor to sell. We were rich in subterranean but unseen wealth. The placers, rockers, and sluices were forsaken for the long, dark drift and gloomy shaft. There was a renewed tinkling of drills and booming of blasts from Mariposa to Siskiyou. About the camp groceries and saloons were scattered indication rocks. Everybody carried in his pocket a choice specimen from his own pet ledge. Our conversation was a metallurgical jargon, resounding in oxides, sulphurets, carbonates, gosson, and sulphates. We sent to San Francisco for works on mineralogy, copper having the preference. Every mountain about was invested with new value. Our clairvoyant imaginations pierced their interiors, and dwelt lovingly over the great inert masses of ore they concealed. From out-of-the-way cabins was heard the pounding of mortars and pestles. We were testing " indication rock." Vials of vicious sulphuric acid were set recklessly among the miner's table furniture. There was a yellowing of fingers, and a great preponderance of garments stained and eaten by this liquid fire. We heeded little these accidents so that a knife blade stained with copper was produced from the Great Hope ledge. The formation of companies was a matter of daily occurrence. Some of us belonged to two or three. They were elaborately organized, with Presidents, Secretaries, Treasurers, and Boards of Trustees. Their meetings for a few months were frequent. They never failed levying fresh assessments. For a time we met the shock sturdily. The Great Hope ledge had taken out a mass of pure ore weighing fifty pounds. Gibbs, the leading authority on the subject, who had worked in the Lake Superior copper mines, who looked upon our copper libraries with contempt, who sneered at Professor Lyell's theory of mineral formations, said the " ore was forming." Great Hope stock went up ten dollars per foot. We had a sure thing here, and could well afford to risk a few dollars more on the outside claims.

            One day a grand mining scheme came into my brain. The whole country seemed traversed by copper ledges. Why not take up and hold on to as many as possible. Soon, other claims than the Great Hope would develop their richness. Then the rest in the immediate neighborhood must increase in value. I would form a company, whose sole object it should be to take up and hold on to "extensions." Let the miners perform the prospecting. Let them delve for weeks, months, and years in those long, damp drifts, expend the scanty income resulting from the sale, or working, of some placer claim, in drills, fuse, and powder, live on pork, beans, and Spanish beef, adorn their bodies in dungaree, and gray flannel, and crook their backs with hard labor, and seam, and blacken their faces through prematurely exploding blasts. My company was merely to lie by, and wait until the existence of ore on their claims was proven. Then ours, being

1869.]  A PROSPECTOR'S STORY.             337

the first or second extension, should immediately gain a market value.

            I drew up a prospectus. To this I appended a constitution and by-laws. To gain members I tramped from camp to camp. I attacked lawyers, doctors, bankers, and capitalists with the prospectus. I read it to opulent saloonkeepers. Landlords took stock and paid in board. Store-keepers ventured to subscribe, and paid in staples. Many became members of my company and paid nothing. Bill, the Dutch blacksmith, thought he 'd try it for a month. He scanned attentively the prospectus, the constitution, and by-laws. He looked as though he deemed it a reasonable enterprise, then made his mark among the other signatures. After which he went into Old Stake's and drew for himself a glass three parts full of whiskey, from the cornermost barrel on the east side of the store. He drank success to the enterprise. He knew only that it was a hunt after copper, and copper then was in good odor.

            According to the provisions of the constitution and the by-laws of my own framing, a meeting of the entire company was necessary once a month. But the members were scattered over such a wide area of country, it was quite impossible to assemble them together.

            At length, one afternoon, I succeeded in getting about a third in Stake's store. It cost me near two days' travel from camp to camp, calling at offices, stores, saloons, and private residences, to effect this gathering. When assembled, they did not manifest the vital interest in the undertaking I could have desired. I re-read the prospectus, constitution, and by-laws. I explained the admirable system of checks and balances by which any fraud in the expenditure of the company's funds would be prevented. Necessity compelled me to act as Secretary and Treasurer. The object of one-third of my by-laws was to prevent any rascality on my own part. While framing them, I seemed to have in view for myself some future uncontrollable attack of dishonesty. These precautions proved worse than useless. For there was never in the history of the company sufficient money in the treasury to be dishonest with.

            It was the first grand mistake. Had I but impressed my members with the idea that I was keen, sharp, and up to anything, they would shave regularly paid me their monthly pro rata. As it was, the year of the company's existence was to me a year of distressing impecuniosity, and consequent starvation.

            My constitution and by-laws provided for the election of five trustees. We elected them that afternoon. The five trustees constituted (myself excepted) the entire bulk of the assemblage. The remaining members had all promised to come, but did not. Afterwards they acted much after the same fashion in the payment of assessments. The election over, there was interpolated in the proceedings a game of " seven up," for the whiskey. I did not like this. But whiskey was a sort of honorary member of all these copper meetings. The game finished, I read to the trustees their duties according to my constitution and bylaws. These were, among other matters, to keep a record of all the meetings, to make the necessary arrangements for the working or sale of the company's grounds, and to use every available means to drag our mines, and all other possessions, which I bound myself to accumulate, to the notice of the world. Had my scheme only worked, we might, by this time, have held much of the Pacific coast. The trustees, and an unsolicited audience of lounging miners, and two broken-down negroes, camp pensioners, listened with attention, and, I suspect now, with some amusement, to the, copiousness and oddity of my scheme. It was about all these official gentry ever did regarding the enterprise.

338      A PROSPECTOR'S STORY.                 [APRIL,

The meeting over, the company was ready to commence operations. There were fifteen dollars in the treasury. There were neither provisions, blankets, nor tools. My stockholders had un limited confidence in my ability to furnish these things without money.  At the very outset I scarcely dared ask any one for this necessary article, fearing he might withdraw his name. I always prefaced such requests with a small volume of excuses.

            An enthusiastic, talkative, good-hearted, but according to his own showing, very desperate fellow, loaned me an old bay bald-faced mare, in consideration of being enrolled a member. I walked forty miles to take the animal from a ranch on which she was rusticating.  The ranch owner presented a bill for her keeping. I made him a member of my universal prospecting company, and quelled that demand. One supply, however, created another want. The forty miles of return riding, bare-backed, intimated the lack of a saddle. More stock was sacrificed to procure one.  Blankets also were necessary. Another member was added ; a clothing dealer.

            The company, through my exertions, held six copper ledges, in Tuolumne County, and one coal claim. To retain possession of these, one day's labor on each claim was required by the mining laws of that period. We turned over a few shovelfuls of dirt, or battered a rotten rock to pieces. Who was to say this was not a day's labor ? Often it first required half a day to reach the locality.  So I had plenty of time to spare. Now the enthusiastic owner of the bald-faced mare drew me a mystical and fascinating picture of a region rich in mineral, on the head-waters of the Walker River. Copper ? He even sneered at the barren deposits of that mineral in our foot-hills, compared to out-crops he had seen in a certain strange, lonesome, and not easily found valley. And he showed, also, a piece of "float quartz," rich in gold, picked up by him on the old Walker's Pass trail.          

            The locality was one hundred and twenty miles distant. Alone, I plunged into the silent pine forests of the Sierras. The first night's camping out was full of mishaps. I slept cold. A Newfoundland pup, given me by a friend, to become the "faithful canine companion," usual in such cases, finding my bag of meat lying carelessly at the foot of a tree, by which I had camped, concluded it must be for his supper, and treated it accordingly. In addition, he seemed as much disturbed as myself at the loneliness of the forest, and growled and barked all night at real or imaginary wild beasts. On the second day it rained. Near nightfall I caught up with Dave H. and his pack-train, camped in the bush. Starting with his party the next day we were all kept busy in endeavoring to repair the evil deeds, or thwart the evil intentions of an obstinate yellow mule. This one was skilled to detect such overhanging rocks and projecting stumps as would rub off his pack. He chose to consider the Niagara Creek bridge dangerous, and successfully resisted the efforts of nine men to carry him over. The struggling nine—a district judge among the rest—fastened themselves on his fore and hind legs. He settled back, and was as immovable as the Rock of Ages. We beat him combinedly and individually. He was carefully belabored, in sections, from the head to the tail. He was beat for his obstinacy, and afterwards for the stolidity with which he received punishment. The crevices of corporal punishment, and futile endeavors to carry him over, were filled up by swearing. When all human patience was for the time exhausted, and the Nine stood by in helpless idleness, he walked reflectively over of his own accord.          

            A welcome retreat at nightfall from the steady rain and dripping pine leaves was Hayes's newly-built cabin in Eureka

1869.]  A PROSPECTOR'S STORY.                 339

Valley. Without, the insurrectionary yellow munched his barley, and silently to himself chuckled over the human thought, anxiety, and labor he had caused that day. Within, twelve damp and hungry men crowded about a heap of blazing logs, flung into a great artificial den of stone, called a fire-place, concentrating their ravenous gaze upon the frying meat and baking biscuit— while Hayes, acting as landlord, muleteer, and cook, with bared arms edged perpetually in and out of the moist throng about the fire, never hinting at the interruption thus caused his culinary duties. We started early next morning for the summit. Ours was the first party which that spring would go over the pass, for six months left to the storms of that lofty desolation. So, up we travelled the great ridge dividing California and Nevada. The air grew cooler, and we felt that peculiar dampness of melting snows. The pine and tamarack became more gnarled and stunted. Dead and fallen trunks showed how severe was their struggle for life. Up, and a patch of snow appeared relieving the dark pine trunks.  Our dogs thrusting their noses in it rooted it up, and throwing it over their heads capered about, delighted with this newly-found element. The snow patches became more frequent, and soon merged into an expanse of white. Our eyes commenced smarting and running profusely. Snow-blindness was upon us. The rays of a May sun at noon, thrown upward from the whitened plain, stung the eye as with millions of atoms of light. For relief we blackened our faces from charred stumps. One man was led, being rendered for the time totally blind. Deep gullies were encountered smoothly bridged with snow, the rushing water hoarsely gurgling underneath, but we had brought shovels, and they were dug through. At noon we stood in Summit Valley, its gullies pouring water into the Great Basin, through the Walker River and into the Pacific by the Stanislaus and San Joaquin. Here in the drifts we dined, our coffee warmed by a sickly fire, coaxed into a transient and smoky existence by the consecutively hard-worked lungs of the entire party. Ere we had finished, a great white wall blocked up one end of the valley. It was one of the Sierra snow squalls, which had revelled to and fro for months in this solitude. For half an hour we were shut from sight, even of the steep valley crags, by a blinding whirl of whiteness. The gaze upward pierced but a few feet. A lull—and once more we set on. The trail was lost. The animals floundered in the snow, or broke through into gullies filled with rushing water. Matters for a short time seemed getting serious, when there was a luminous glimmer overhead, a bright break of the gray clouds, the wind abated, the sun brightened fairly out, and the flurry was seen chasing along the sombre range and enveloping a mountain ten miles distant. Down the steep eastern slope at dusk our wet, weary, and hungry huddle of men, mules, and horses slipped, stuck, and slid in the yielding mountain soil, eager to gain the green meadow below, through which for miles the Walker was seen hurrying toward its companion lake. At night we crowded into the Walker River House—a shingle shanty, twelve feet square, bounded on three sides by bunks, the usual rough stone fire-place almost filling the fourth, the corners occupied by detachments of pots and kettles, a table in the middle, guns and rifles lying carelessly about with a disagreeably " go-off" air about them, wet dogs intriguing for a place by the fire, saddles and bridles flung where it was easy to tumble over them, a constant bringing in of wood and water, and an eternal preparation of fried steak, a kneading and baking of bread, and a stewing of dried apples for

340      A PROSPECTOR'S STORY.                 [APRIL,

famished men "just over the summit."

            Next day I went forth alone. There in the distance were the mountains which held the mysterious valley, signified by the enthusiastic and desperate owner of the bay bald-faced mare. The rugged, granite, snow-clad peaks seemed but little nearer at nightfall. I camped by one of the beautifully clear streams which course through all these upper valleys. What meant these relics intimating the presence of men at some former period ? —green wagon sides, feeding-troughs of "prairie schooners," rusty, bent gun-barrels, broken boxes, iron-work, kettles, and broken bottles. On the green cotton-wood bark were scarred carvings of initials and dates of 1850. And a walk little further on disclosed a sunken grave, a broken headboard, and near by a sort of broad wooden paddle ?—no ; that was not a paddle. Then it came to me : These were marks of the party who, missing their way, tried late in the fall of '50 to force the summit by a blind valley—a pass which from the distance seemed to promise an easy route over the dreaded Sierras, and led only to inaccessible mountains and brinks of smooth walls a thousand feet down the granite sides of the head gorges of the Tuolumne. This was a mark of the party who straggled into " Lost Cañon," as they called it. After the months of journeying across the Plains, they brought up against this wall seamed with valleys, clefts, and canons. The path to the right seemed inaccessible. It was so only in appearance. Thither should they have gone. That to the left looked open and inviting, but it was a dreadful deceit. And here the terrible snows overtook them, and though they ascended the highest peaks around, they could see naught but treeless white mountain-tops, right and left, ahead, and behind. And in some way it was suspected, or some one of the party, who had in advance made his way down the eastern slope to the green and pleasant country about Sonora, intimated what was likely to have befallen his companions in the mountains. And men, wild with the richness of their newly-found gold lands, heard that a little band of men, women, and children, might be freezing and starving somewhere among those strange, unknown, serrated, and pinnacled peaks, which stood out so clearly miles and miles away against the clear evening and morning sky. They formed a party—a party composed of the "sport" from Texas, and the calculating but adventurous man from Connecticut. They dashed into the snow and cold and dark pine valleys of that wild and unknown region. They did find the party. A day or two more and some future wanderer like myself but for the rescue would have sometime walked unawares into a still and hideous camp of skeletons. But the woman died. And this was the wooden shovel with which they had dug her grave. I had the night before listened to the whole story, as I lay on the floor, and the narrator doled it out from an upper bunk of the Walker River Hotel. This night I did think much of that lonesome grave but a few feet distant. So many years in these grand solitudes and no mourner ever to sit by it ! My fire flickered on the split head-board. The brook murmured, but not monotonously. There seemed to come from it strange whisperings. The cotton-wood foliage all about was a wall of blackness, the inside gilded by the blaze. The wolves were howling, and my Newfoundland pup crept nearer me in fright. That was a lonesome sepulchre. Few the tears over it, since fifteen years before the shivering, dejected band of emigrants stood on its brink. No one to come even once in two or three years and replace the fallen head-board, or so much as throw a flower on the sinking, uneven mound,

1869.]  A PROSPECTOR'S STORY.                 341

whose perfume like the altar's incense should rise heavenward an offering to her who lay beneath. I gazed warily around. Night will bring what we term superstitious dreads, though the day chases them afar.

            Three weeks of lonely exploration gave me no rich veins. I discovered numbers of quiet lakes—some on the very summits of long mountain ranges—some, half way up, nestled in vales and plateaus, their beaches cumbered with dead and decaying trunks, their waters clear, but no finny life visible.  There was grandeur in their surroundings of crag and precipice, but no cheerfulness. I wandered up long, narrow defiles, with walls fifteen hundred or two thousand feet in height—and their apparently abrupt rocky terminations when reached, opening by passages hitherto unseen, disclosing, a little beyond, beautiful little parks covered with the pine and the willow. They were vases in a setting of cloud-capped granite.

            I dislodged, in sport, the great bowlders, loosely and strangely scattered about on cliff and mountain side, and watched them as they tore down the steeps, clearing hundreds of feet in great curved bounds, cutting the young pines in two like brittle reeds, and finally splitting asunder like bomb shells—while the grating and concussions of their descent grew fainter, then ceased, until at last the fragments of the rolling stone were seen like insects creeping into the rivulet's bed below.  I was so charmed with these mountain retreats, combining in so small a compass lakes, brooks, rich pasturage, and grand scenery, that I preempted them by written notice in the name of my company. As to climate, for eight months in the year they would compare with Nova Zembla. The winter snows drifted from the tops above buried them twenty, aye, forty feet.

            But the time came for "renewing" my Tuolumne County claims. The company—its bay bald-faced and laziest of mares, its beef-stealing dog, and its sanguine but now impecunious and ragged leader—left this grand and useless country, and made its way back onehundred and twenty miles to the land of its shareholders. As I advanced into civilization, expenses necessarily increased. Living in the wilderness is cheaper than in the settlements. Some charges had to be incurred at a few roadside houses. These were mainly defrayed by adding the tavern-keepers to my swelling list of stockholders.

            By the constitution the number was limited to thirty. But I was obliged to violate the provisions of my own constitution, usurp its powers, and become sole dictator. My own stomach and the mare's stomach knew no law. The company's stock having thus commenced expanding, kept on expanding till fall—then it burst. The usual show of work was made on our extensions, but most of the time I roamed after stockholders and assessments. Those found wished immediately to know if I "had struck anything." Their minds dwelt too much on " strikes." They seemed not to realize the coming value of the "extensions" we already held. I dilated on the grandeur and value of the high mountain landscapes preempted for the company. They listened to me with a trying, negative sort of interest. Away down in the depths; they seemed disappointed that I had not found another Comstock lead. And the mills of the gods—wherever they are—never ground so slowly as these men ground out that paltry three dollars per month. In almost every case I was obliged to hint and hint, and finally ask directly for money. The shareholder's face would settle into a stony lengthiness, and there would ensue a dreadful pause, and his hands would slowly grope into his pockets, or he would move toward the money drawer as if forcing his way through a

342      A PROSPECTOR'S STORY.                 [APRIL,

brier swamp, and I would stand by, feeling guilty that I had caused him so much annoyance. The truth was, copper assessments had commenced to bear heavily on the people. The Great Hope had shown nothing since that fifty pound lump. The Superintendent, however, was certain the ore would "come in" richer than ever a few feet lower down. He 'd rather the vein would act in this manner than have it so rich nearer the surface. But already there were some who looked solemn when copper was mentioned. I heard a knell. Copper stock was doomed. In the midst of this gathering gloom the bay bald-faced mare wandered off one night and was lost. The scarcity and irregularity of assessments rendered her meals other than those picked from the bosom of the earth very infrequent. She was evidently dissatisfied. But this step on her part plunged the affairs of the company in a most desperate situation. Operations were stopped. For her I ransacked the county. Day after day, hill, dale, gulch, cañon, flat, and valley were explored ; Mexicans, Chinamen, Diggers, and men, women, and children of my own race were met, examined, cross-questioned, and catechized concerning a certain old bay bald-faced mare of deliberate gait and moderate condition. Three weeks I sought her in vain. And then, too, reflection hourly summoned up before me the bearded and grizzled face of her owner, who, of course, was to become frantic and desperate when I, like a culprit, stammered out to him her loss. Three weeks did the camp equipage lie in one place. Three weeks did a man, wretched at the thoughts of the neglected and exposed property of a company, great in design and expectation, wander over the parched and brown hills of Tuolumne. And three weeks did a lazy old mare browse from green ditch sides to river banks, and from one fence-broken barley field to another, perfectly indifferent to the misery she caused a man and the derangement of a great scheme. One dark night I was about to share the friendly bed of a miner in Banktown, an overdone dot of a place with one street, one hotel, two stores, three churches, and nine saloons when a familiar outline loomed along the gloom. It was the mare ! She must have been seeking me. The company next day was placed on a travelling footing.

            Late in August, with about seventeen dollars in the treasury, the company's agent, the mare, and the dog, departed from the settlements and headed for the Walker River country. This time it was "do or die." Copper was on the decline. The signs were unmistakable. Buying feet had ceased. Selling them for delinquent assessments was of every-day occurrence. Men regarded you with contempt at offers of valuable mines. I vowed never again to risk myself trying to collect assessments. People were cross because they had not sold in the spring when buyers were plenty. I felt that a very rich mine must be discovered this time or that the company must never see its head again.

            For the months of November, December, January, and February, I write a blank. One evening, about the first of March, as the setting sun cast its cold, brassy rays over an expanse of snow-covered mountains and snow-burdened pines, a solitary young man might have been seen tumbling, gliding, sliding, sometimes in a sitting posture, sometimes in a well-defined sprawl, down, down, down, a steep declivity of hard frozen snow at the rate of a mile a minute. Rocks, trees, stumps, and branches grazed and brushed him as he flew past. A few hundred feet ahead sped two long Norwegian snow-shoes and a balancing pole. He made abortive snatches at brittle twigs and clawed desperately in the snow with scratched and bleeding fingers. In that swift and

1869.]  A PROSPECTOR'S STORY.                 343

brief trip of ten seconds, a thousand pictures of events, important and unimportant, in the history of the Great Extension Prospecting Company, flew, a lightning panorama, through his brain. He saw millions of copper prospectors at work ; he saw the prospectus, constitution, and by-laws, the preliminary meeting at Stake's store, the trampings to gain stockholders, the timid propositions to tavern-keepers in the matter of stock for board, the illy concealed dissatisfaction of shareholders at the first report of the company's operations, the yellow mule, the Eastern home, the loss of the lazy bald-faced mare, the Lost Cañon woman's grave, the chilly nights on mountain sides, the last demand of the desperate owner of the mare, that she be given up, the unhorsing and consequent final cessation of the company's operations, and the dreary three months of winter imprisonment with two companions in Eureka Valley. I was that man. I brought up, less one of my two pairs of pantaloons, in a bank of soft snow. This was one of the last movements of the company.

            I had left Eureka Valley that morning tired of a bear's life in winter, tired of the inside of our smoky, snow-buried cabin, tired of reading through and through the same books and papers, tired of snow, snow sifting by night and day through a thousand cracks in our cabin ; of snow caking against the windows ; of snow-flakes twisting hurrying down and criss-crossing as we peered by night from our door, and the candle's ray straggled a few feet into the gloom of the valley ; of snow in the morning similarly hurrying, twisting, and falling, and so all day and the next night, and the next, and the next, and for weeks, until the accumulation arose to the window sills, then to the tops, then to the eaves, and the roof bent and cracked wearily under the burden until we shovelled it off. We had told each other all our stories, all our individual hopes and plans, our ideas of life, love, women, mining, death, religion, and matrimony. We talked these things over and over at our after-supper sittings, with the cold roar of the pines sounding in our ears, occasionally interrupted by mischievous blasts dropping straight down the low, wide-mouthed chimney and scattering live coals and ashes from end to end of our long, gloomy domicile. In the absence of my companions, all my former offences of omission and commission clustered about me. Melancholy flapped her black wings over me. It might have been the diet though. We boiled the bones and cartilage of cattle lost in the snows of these upland valleys, and sustaining for a time a wretched existence on snowbound plateaus from oak bark or red berries until we sought them out, shot them, skinned and quartered them, dragged them home on sleds, eat them, and then, I suspect, endured dyspeptic horrors. But I was wretched in this solitude and monotonous existence. Out of this silence into some part of the world I must go. I started on snowshoes, with twenty-five pounds of provisions on my back, a hatchet and coffeepot slung to my waist, and a bag of well-dried kindling stuff in my bosom. In rounding that steep, slippery mountain curve I expected to slip. These expectations were realized. All that was left of the Great Extension Prospecting Company did slip. As it slid it made up its mind, without sanction of the constitution or by-laws, that wherever it brought up, if it brought up alive, it would stop for the night. And it did stop. At the base of one great tree the snow had melted. In this hollow, enlarged a little by the aid of the hatchet, I built my fire. You wonder from what quarter I procured fuel ? I chipped into the blaze the thick, dry bark of the tree itself. And there I passed, you may imagine, an uncomfortable night ? No, not entirely ; I sung and laughed,

344      CHINESE WOMEN IN CALIFORNIA.           [APRIL,

ate, and drank warm, nourishing coffee, repeated all my school-boy pieces and scraps of poetry, idealized myself into a prominent politician, made a speech to a crowd of imaginary constituents, passed in review my acquaintances, good, bad, and indifferent, and saw with anxious eye the sky cover with drifting clouds, the signs of another storm which, should it break ere the morning, might render it an impossibility for me ever to regain that grade a thousand feet above. Premonitory blasts swept through the trees. Then came lulls, and from the murmuring of the river far below me there seemed to straggle up hoarse, uncouth tongues and wild, weird cries, while the stiffened, frost-bound tree trunks around creaked and snapped, and hard frozen lumps of snow falling from their tops rushed with a cracking, rustling noise through the branches. The morning came at last, gray and gloomy, with straggling flakes of snow. I spent it in literally dragging myself up the slippery steep, and at times recoiling with dread from hollow-sounding surfaces, which, pierced by my pole, proved the deep, empty hollows of mountain ravines beneath.

            Three days afterward the only animated relic of the Great Extension Prospecting Company appeared, with sundry frozen toes, in the settlements. He sought out no shareholders ; he demanded no assessments. He was aware without being told that copper was quite dead. Even the Great Hope mine was abandoned. A monument to its memory stood out weekly in the county paper—a long column of delinquent assessments.  I have seen, from time to time, various members of the Great Extension Prospecting Company. Even when we do not speak, we smile on passing each other.

            But I have still, carefully preserved the yellowed, finger-worn and soiled company prospectus, constitution, and by-laws.