n we went to the ball given by the ladies of Juneau in our honor.
Half a dozen young Indian maidens sat on a bench against the wall and
munched peanuts while they smiled; a few straggling settlers gathered at
the bar while they smiled; two fiddlers and a guitar made as merry as
they could under the circumstances in an alcove at the top of the hall.
Round dances were in vogue,--round dances interspersed with flirtations
and fire-water; round dances that grew oblong and irregular before
sunrise--and yet it was sunrise at the unearthly hour of 3.30 a. m., or
thereabout. We all felt as if we had been cheated out of something when
we saw his coming; but perhaps it was only the summer siesta that had
been cut short,--the summer siesta that here passes for the more
wholesome and old-fashioned sleep of the world lower down on the map.

During the night, having discharged freight and exhausted the resources
of Juneau, including a post-office, and a post-mistress who sorts the
mail twice a month, we steamed back to Douglas Island, and dropped many
fathoms of noisy chain into the deep abreast of the camp. The eve of the
Fourth in the United States of America is nothing in comparison with the
everlasting racket at this wonderful mine. The iron jaws of the
120-stamp mill grind incessantly, spitting pulverized rock and ore into
the vats that quake under the mastication of the mighty molars; cars
slip down into the bowels of the earth, and emerge laden with precious
freight; multitudinous miners relieve one another, watch and watch.
Electric light banishes even a thought of dusk; and were it now
winter--the long, dark, dreary winter of the North, with but half a
dozen hours of legitimate daylight out of the four and twenty--the work
at Douglas Island would go on triumphantly; and it will go forever--or,
rather, until the bottom drops out of the mine, just as it drops out of
everything in this life. All night long the terrible rattle and rumble
and roar of the explosive agent robbed us of our rest. I could think of
nothing but the gnomes of the German fairy tale; the dwarfs of the black
mountain, with their glowworm lamps, darting in and out of the tunnels
in the earth like moles, and heaping together the riches that are the
cause of so much pleasure and pain, and envy and despair, and sorrow and
sin, and too often death.

CHAPTER IX.

By Solitary Shores.

Probably no one leaves Juneau with regret. Far more enjoyable was the