and by a judicious investment of labor and the capital
of friends, became the owner of about all the worthless wild cat mines
there were in that part of the country. Assessments did the business
for me there. There were a hundred and seventeen assessments to one
dividend, and the proportion of income to outlay was a little against
me. My financial barometer went down to 32 Fahrenheit, and the
subscriber was frozen out.

I took up extensions on the main lead-extensions that reached to
British America, in one direction, and to the Isthmus of Panama in the
other--and I verily believe I would have been a rich man if I had ever
found those infernal extensions. But I didn't. I ran tunnels till I
tapped the Arctic Ocean, and I sunk shafts till I broke through the roof
of perdition; but those extensions turned up missing every time. I am
willing to sell all that property and throw in the improvements.

Perhaps you remember that celebrated "North Ophir?" I bought that mine.
It was very rich in pure silver. You could take it out in lumps as large
as a filbert. But when it was discovered that those lumps were melted
half dollars, and hardly melted at that, a painful case of "salting" was
apparent, and the undersigned adjourned to the poorhouse again.

I paid assessments on "Hale and Norcross" until they sold me out, and
I had to take in washing for a living--and the next month that infamous
stock went up to $7,000 a foot.

I own millions and millions of feet of affluent silver leads in
Nevada--in fact the entire undercrust of that country nearly, and if
Congress would move that State off my property so that I could get at
it, I would be wealthy yet. But no, there she squats--and here am I.
Failing health persuades me to sell. If you know of any one desiring
a permanent investment, I can furnish one that will have the virtue of
being eternal.

I have been through the California mill, with all its "dips, spurs and
angles, variations and sinuosities." I have worked there at all the
different trades and professions known to the catalogues. I have
been everything, from a newspaper editor down to a cow-catcher on a
locomotive, and I am encouraged to believe that if there had been a few
more occupations to experiment on, I might have made a dazzling success
at last, and found out what mysterious designs Providence had in
creating me.

But you perceive that although I am not a Pioneer, I have had a
sufficiently variegated time of