of thanksgiving to the Virgin Mary and the Great Spirit, whom he would insist upon classifying together, in a most remarkable and not quite orthodox manner.

We now set to work to get up our tent. Malcolm, in the meantime, prepared coffee and very under-baked cakes, made of the flour we had brought with us. His cooking operations were greatly impeded by our eagerness to dry the sand we had scraped up—a feat in the achievement of which Bradley was clumsy enough to burn a hole in our very best saucepan. However, we managed to get the moisture absorbed, and, shutting our eyes, we commenced blowing away the sand with our mouths, and shortly after found ourselves the possessors of a few pinch's of gold. This was encouraging for a beginning. We drunk our coffee in high spirits, and then, having picketted our horses, made ourselves as snug as our accommodation would allow, and, being tired out, not only with the journey and the work, but with excitement and anxiety, slept soundly till morning.

CHAPTER IX.

• Two horses stray away
• How orders were enforced at the diggings
• Sunday work
• Nature of the soil
• Inconveniences even in gold getting
• Dinner and rest
• A strike for higher wages
• A walk through the diggings
• Sleeping and smoking
• Indians and finery
• Californians and Yankee
• Runaway sailors and stray negroes
• A native born Kentuckian
• "That's a fact"
• A chapel at the diggings
• A supper with an appetite.

The morning broke brilliantly, and the first thing we discovered on rising was, that two of the horses had broken their fastenings during the night, and strayed. As we could not afford to lose the animals, José and Horry were despatched lo look after them, and they grumbled not a little at being thus sent off from the scene of golden operations; but Bradley, producing a rifle, swore that he would shoot them both unless they obeyed orders; so, after a little altercation, away they went.

Breakfast was soon despatched, and the question as to the day's operations asked. Don Luis was the only one who, on the score of its being Sunday, would not go to the diggings. He had no objection to amuse himself on Sunday, but he would not work. To get over the difficulty, we agreed to go upon the principle of every man keeping his own findings, our bonds of unity as a party to extend merely to mutual protection and defence. Leaving Don Luis, then, smoking in the tent, we proceeded to work, and found that the great majority of the gold-finders appeared to entertain our opinions, or at all events to imitate our practice, as to labouring on the Sunday. I had now leisure more particularly to remark the nature of the soil in which the gold was found. The dust is found amid the shingle actually below water, but the most convenient way of proceeding is to take the soil from that portion of the bed which has been overflowed but is now dry. It is principally of a gravelly nature, full of small stones, composed, as far as I could make out, of a species of jasper and milky quality, mingled with fragments of slate and splinters of basalt. The general opinion is, that the gold has been washed down from the hills.

I worked hard, as indeed we all did, the whole morning. The toil is very severe, the constant stooping pressing, of course, upon the spinal column, whilst the constant immersion of the hands in water causes the skin to excoriate and become exceedingly painful. But these inconveniences are slight when compared to the great gain by which one is recompensed for them.

At twelve o'clock, our usual primitive dinner hour, we met at the tents, tolerably well tired with our exertions. No dinner, however, was prepared, both José and Horry being still absent in pursuit of the strayed horses. We had, therefore, to resort to some of our jerked beef, which, with biscuits and coffee, formed our fare. After dinner, we determined to rest until the next day. The fact is, that the human frame will not stand, and was never intended to stand, a course of incessant toil; indeed, I believe that in civilized—that is to say, in industrious—communities, the Sabbath, bringing round as it does a stated remission from labour, is an institution physically necessary.

We therefore passed some time in conversation, which was interrupted by the arrival of José and Horry with the strayed horses. Horry demanded an immediate increase of wages, threatening to leave us and set to work on his own account if we refused. Bradley tried to talk big and bully him, but in vain. José had a sort of fear of Don Luis—who in return looked on his servant as his slave—so he said nothing. We could see, however, that they had evidently been in communication with the diggers around, and so we gave in. Later in the afternoon I started with Malcolm and McPhail for a walk through the diggings. We found comparatively a small proportion of the people who had commenced work in the morning still at their pans. Numbers were lying asleep under the trees, or in the shade of their tents and wagons. Others sat smoking and chatting in circles upon the grass, mending their clothes or performing other little domestic duties at the same time. It was really a motley scene. Indians strutted by in all the pride of gaudy calico, the manners of the savage concealed beneath the dress of the civilized man. Muscular sun-burnt fellows, whose fine forms and swarthy faces pronounced that Spanish blood ran through their veins, gossiped away with sallow hatchet-faced Yankees, smart men at a bargain, and always on the lookout for squalls. Here, and there one spied out the flannel shirt and coarse canvas trousers of a seaman—a runaway, in all probability, from a South Sea whaler; while one or two stray negroes chattered with all the volubility of their race, shaking their woolly heads and showing their white teeth. I got into conversation with one tall American; he was a native-born Kentuckian, and full of the bantam sort of consequence of his race. He predicted wonderful things from the discovery of the mineral treasures of California, observing that it would make a monetary revolution all over the world, and that nothing similar, at least to so great an extent, was ever known in history. "Look around! for, stranger," said he to me, "I guess you don't realise such a scene every day, and that's a fact. There's gold to be had for the picking of it up, and by all who choose to come and work. I reckon old John Bull will scrunch up his fingers in his empty pockets when he comes to hear of it. It's a most everlasting wonderful thing, and that's a fact, that beats Joe Dunkin's goose-pie and apple sarse."

Farther on we came upon a tremendous-looking tent, formed by two or three tents being flung into one, which, on examination, we found was doing duty as a chapel. A missionary, from one of the New England States, as I hear, was holding forth to a pretty large congregation. The place was very hot and chokey, and I only stayed long enough to hear that the discourse abounded in the cloudy metaphors and vague technicalities of Calvinistic theology.

The remainder of the afternoon I have been devoting to writing my journal, which I here break off to commence a hearty good supper, in revenge for the scrambling sort of dinner one has had to-day. The beef doesn't look roasted as they would put it on the table at the Clarendon, or at Astor House even; but none of those who sit down to the Clarendon table, at any rate, have such an appetite as I now have, far away beyond care and civilisation, in the gold-gathering region of California.

CHAPTER X.

• Digging and washing, with a few reflections
• A cradle in contemplation
• Scales to sell, but none to lend
• Stack of gold weighed
• More arrivals
• Two newcomers
• Mr. Biggs and Mr. Lacosse
• Good order prevails at the mines
• Timber bought for the cradles
• The cradles made
• The cradles