CHAPTER XVI.
AMONG THE MINEHS. Mensura juris vis erat.
-Lucan.
The miners of the flush times, their characteristics and quaUty, their idiosyncrasies and temper, are as far beyond description as the wind and weather of Cahfornia, 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 heaped- up 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 oflice 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 cluster- ing 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
(38i;
