ugh.

"True for ye, it _is_ quare, but it's what I'm redooced to, so av you'll
be so kind as plaze to blow the sand on to this here tray, it'll be
doin' a poor man a good turn, an' costin' ye nothin'."

He held up a tin tray as he spoke, and the miner cheerfully blew the
sand off his gold-dust on to it.

Thanking him with all the fervour peculiar to his race, the Irishman
emptied the sand into his bag, and heaving a heavy sigh, left the hut to
request a similar favour of other miners.

"You may depend on it," said Frank, as the old man went out, "that
fellow is humbugging you. It is gold, not sand, that he wants."

"That's a fact," said Joe Graddy, with an emphatic nod and wink.

"Nonsense," said the miner, "I don't believe we lose more than a few
specks in blowing off the sand--certainly nothing worth speaking of."

The man was wrong in this, however, for it was afterwards discovered
that the sly old fellow carried his black sand to his hut, and there,
every night, by the agency of quicksilver, he extracted from the sand
double the average of gold obtained by the hardest working miner in the
Canon!

At each end of this place there was a hut made of calico stretched on a
frame of wood, in which were sold brandy and other strong liquors of the
most abominable kind, at a charge of about two shillings for a small
glass! Cards were also to be found there by those who wished to gamble
away their hard-earned gains or double them. Places of iniquity these,
which abounded everywhere throughout the diggings, and were the nightly
resort of hundreds of diggers, and the scene of their wildest orgies on
the Sabbath-day.

Leaving the Great Canon, our travellers--we might almost term them
inspectors--came to a creek one raw, wet morning, where a large number
of miners where at work. Here they resolved to spend the day, and test
the nature of the ground. Accordingly, the vaquero was directed to look
after the mules while Frank and Joe went to work with pick, shovel, and
pan.

They took the "dirt" from a steep incline considerably above the winter
level of the stream, in a stratum of hard bluish clay, almost as hard as
rock, with a slight surface-covering of earth. It yielded prodigiously.
At night they found that they had washed out gold to the value of forty
pounds sterling! The particles of gold were all large, many being the
size of a grain of corn, with occasional nuggets intermixed, besides
quartz amalgamations.