wear away the mound which it laves, and the marble dissolve under the touch of time, but that inscription remains.

MONDAY, NOV. 6. Vein-gold in these rocks is as uncertain and capricious as lightning; it straggles where you least expect it, and leaves only a stain where its quick volume seemed directed. It threads its way in a rock without crevice or crack, and where its continuity becomes at times too subtle for the naked eye, and then suddenly bulges out like a lank snake that has swallowed a terrapin. The great Hebrew proverbialist says there are three things about which there is no certainty, the way of an eagle in the air, the way of a serpent upon a rock, the way of a ship in the midst of the sea; and he might have added— the way of a thread of gold in a vein of California quartz; but probably California, with its treasures, had not then been discovered, though some of our wiseacres are trying to make out that this el dorado was the Ophir of the Old Testament: if so, the men of Joppa must have been pretty good seamen, especially as they had no compass. It may be, but I somewhat doubt it, that the Hottentots or Patagonians are the descendants of some shipwrecked men bound in a wherry from Tarsus to California. The adventurers, even in that case, would have been quite as sober in their calculations as some who put to sea on a gold-hunt in these days.

TUESDAY, NOV. 7. The price of provisions nere is no criterion of their market value on the seaboard, or even at the embarcadaros nearest the mines. The cost of a hundred pounds of flour at Stockton, only sixty miles distant, is twenty dollars; but here it is two hundred dollars. This vast disparity is owing to the difficulty of transportation and the absence of competition. But few can be persuaded to leave the expectations of the pick for the certainties of the pack-the promises of the cradle for the fulfilments of the freighted wagon. All live on drafts upon the future, and though disappointed a hundred times, still believe the results of to-morrow will more than redeem the broken pledges of to-day. Though all else may end in failure, hope is not bankrupt here.

The soil in the mines is evidently volcanic; it resembles in places the ashes which cover Pompeii. You can walk through it when dry, though every footstep stirs a little cloud; but when saturated with the winter rain you slump to the middle. No horse can force his way forward; every struggle but sinks him the deeper, and the miner himself retires to his cabin, as thoroughly cut off from the peopled districts of the coast, as a sailor wrecked on some rock at sea. Years must elapse before human enterprise can bridge a path to these mines, or render communication practicable in the rainy season; nor at any period can heavy machinery be transported here without an immense outlay of capital. The quartz rock

has yet some time to roll back the sunlight before it crumbles under the steam-stamper.

WEDNESDAY, Nov. 8. Some fifty thousand persons are drifting up and down these slopes of the great Sierra, of every hue, language, and clime, tumultuous and confused as a flock of wild geese taking wing at the crack of a gun, or autumnal leaves strown on the atmospheric tides by the breath of the whirlwind. All are in quest of gold; and, with eyes dilated to the circle of the moon, rush this way and that, as some new discovery, or fictitious tale of success may suggest. Some are with tents, and some without; some have provisions, and some are on their last ration; some are carrying crowbars; some pickaxes and spades; some wash-bowls and cradles; some hammers and drills, and powder enough to blow up the rock of Gibraltar-if they can but get under it, as the monkeys do, when they make their transit, through a sort of Thames tunnel, from the golden but barren sands of Africa to the green hills of Europe. Wise fellows they, notwithstanding the length of their tails -they won't stay on the Congo side of the strait, to gather gold, when, by crossing, they can gather grapes. Wisdom is justified of her children.

But I was speaking of the gold-hunters here on the slopes of the Sierra. Such a mixed and motley crowd-such a restless, roving, rummaging, ragged multitude, never before roared in the rookeries o. As for mutual aid and sympathy-Samson's

man.