y, of pack mules tumbling fifteen hundred feet down the side of a
mountain. Why bless you, there's scenery on that route. You can stand on
some of those noble peaks and see Jerusalem and the Holy Land. And you
can start a boulder, and send it tearing up the earth and crashing over
trees-down-down-down-to the very devil, Madam. And you would probably
stand up there and look, and stare and wonder at the magnificence spread
out before you till you starved to death, if let alone. But you should
take someone along to keep you moving.

Since you want to know, I will inform you that an eight-stamp water
mill, put up and ready for business would cost about $10,000 to $12,000.
Then, the water to run it with would cost from $1,000 to $30,000--and
even more, according to the location. What I mean by that, is, that
water powers in THIS vicinity, are immensely valuable. So, also, in
Esmeralda. But Humboldt is a new country, and things don't cost so much
there yet. I saw a good water power sold there for $750.00. But here is
the way the thing is managed. A man with a good water power on Carson
river will lean his axe up against a tree (provided you find him
chopping cord-wood at $4 a day,) and taking his chalk pipe out of his
mouth to afford him an opportunity to answer your questions, will look
you coolly in the face and tell you his little property is worth forty
or fifty thousand dollars! But you can easily fix him. You tell him that
you'll build a quartz mill on his property, and make him a fourth or a
third, or half owner in said mill in consideration of the privilege of
using said property--and that will bring him to his milk in a jiffy. So
he spits on his hands, and goes in again with his axe, until the mill is
finished, when lo! out pops the quondam wood-chopper, arrayed in purple
and fine linen, and prepared to deal in bank-stock, or bet on the races,
or take government loans, with an air, as to the amount, of the most
don't care a-d---dest unconcern that you can conceive of. By George,
if I just had a thousand dollars--I'd be all right! Now there's the
"Horatio," for instance. There are five or six shareholders in it, and I
know I could buy half of their interests at, say $20 per foot, now that
flour is worth $50 per barrel and they are pressed for money. But I am
hard up myself, and can't buy--and in June they'll strike the ledge and
then "good-bye canary." I can't get it for love or money. Twenty dollars
a foot! Think of i