delver but that my turn may come next, and my life
be illuminated by the roseate tints of gold, warm
mellow metal, transcendent gold. Take for example
the tunneling operations which in 1854-5 dissected
every hill. Without capital, without means even to
buy bread, four or six or ten men form themselves
into a company and coolly begin a work requiring
years of labor and thousands of dollars to complete.
Buoyed by faith in theories of world-building you
hear them talking of ages past as other men talk of
yesterday, reasoning of the time when channels of
rivers wound round the lofty hills, when through a
silent world tenantless streams rolled into a saltless
sea.
Thus strong in faith, hope feeds and clothes the phil- osophic miner for months and years. He lives and la- bors, he scarcely knows how. Time passes ; the end approaches; the last blow is struck; the point is reached which marks success or failure. Round him who washes the first prospect-pan on reaching the end of the shaft or tunnel, a group gathers breathless with anxiety. One with furrowed brow, and silver-sprinkled hair, and features fixed and immobile from care and toil, thinks of her who with him has started down the limitless decline, whose days will soon be past brightening with gold, and whose fate for life with that of others dear to him, the next five minutes may decide. An- other, a young sire, forgotten of his children, scours into a fiery glow the hairy skin above the heart, calls back his flitting fancy from the heaven of the old home, and peers into that pan of dirt as into an oracle. Yet another, little more than boy in years, though old enough in experience, delicately featured and bearing signs of good breeding, the small hands hardened, and fingers cramped by crowbar and pickhandle, yet not so stiff but they can renew by every steamer the story of unchanged love to her whose image fills his heart, ah ! What means the product of that pan of dirt to
