different signs of life; but when he saw the hand fall
heavily from my own, he again set up his cries, which now lasted for
several minutes. The scene was a sad and touching one. The poor old
miner,--for such his dress and the scattered implements of the craft
bespoke him,--forgotten by all the world save by his dog, lay in all
the seeming calm of sleep. A cup of water stood near him, and a little
wooden crucifix lay on the bed, where probably it had fallen from his
fingers. Everything around betokened great poverty. The few articles of
furniture seemed as if they had been fashioned by himself, being of the
rudest workmanship: his lamp was a dried gourd, and his one chair had
been a stump, hollowed out with a hatchet. The most striking feature
of all was a number of printed paragraphs cut from old newspapers and
magazines and nailed against the planking of the hut; and these seemed
to convey a little history of the old miner, so far, at least, as
the bent and object of his life were implied. They were all, without
exception, exaggerated and high-flown accounts of newly discovered
"Placers,"--rich mines of gold,--some in the dark plains of the Ukraine,
some in the deep forests of Mexico, some in the interior of Africa
and on the far-away shores of the Pacific. Promises of golden harvest,
visions of wealth rolling in vast abundance, great oceans of gain before
the parched and thirsting lips of toil and famine I Little thought they
who, half in the wantonness of fancy, colored these descriptions, what
seeds they were sowing in many a rugged nature! what feverish passions
they were engendering! what lures to wile men on and on, through youth
and manhood and age, with one terrible fascination to enslave them!

If many of these contained interesting scraps of adventure and
enterprise in remote and strange countries, others were merely dry
and succinct notices of the discovery of gold in particular places,
announcements which nothing short of an innate devotion to the one theme
could possibly have dwelt upon; and these, if I were to judge from the
situations they occupied, were the most favored paragraphs, and those
most frequently read over; they were the daily food with which he fed
his hope, through, doubtless, long years of suffering and toil. It was
the oil which replenished the lamp when the wick had burned to the very
socket!

How one could fancy the old Gambusino as he sat before his winter fire,
half dozing in the s