ld free. The quicksilver, being valuable, is saved and used
again, while the gold, now called bullion, is sent to the mint to be
coined into bright twenties, or tens, or five-dollar pieces.

Some of the gold in the crushed ore will not mix with the quicksilver,
and this is treated to a bath of cyanide, a peculiar acid that melts
the gold as water does a lump of sugar. So all of value is saved, and
the worthless "tailings" go to the dump. Even the black sands on the
ocean beach have gold in them. In the desert also there is gold, which
is "dry-washed" by putting the sand into a machine and with a strong
blast of air blowing away all but the heavy scales of gold.

Though the Argonauts of '49 found much wealth in yellow gold, our
"Golden State," on hillsides, in river-beds, or deep down in hidden
quartz ledges, still holds great fortunes waiting to be found.

MINING STORIES

A large book might be filled with the stories told by the men
who found gold in the early days. Their "lucky strikes" in the
"dry-diggings" sound like fairy tales. Imagine turning over a big rock
and then picking up pieces of gold enough to half fill a man's hat
from the little nest that rock had been lying in for years and years!

And think of finding forty-three thousand dollars in a yellow lump
over a foot long, six inches wide and four inches thick! This was
the biggest nugget on record and actually weighed one hundred and
ninety-five pounds. The next one, too, you might have been glad to
pick up, as it held a hundred and thirty-three pounds of solid gold.
Little seventy-five and fifty-pound treasures were common, and a
soldier stopping to drink at a roadside stream found a nugget weighing
over twenty pounds lying close to his hand.

It paid to get up early those days, also for a man in Sonora, while
taking his morning walk, struck his foot against a large stone, and
forgot the pain when he saw the stone was nearly all gold. Another
man, with good eyes, got a fifty-pound nugget on a trail many people
used all the time. One day, after a heavy rain, a man who was leading
a mule and cart through a street in Sonora, noticed that the wheel
struck a big stone; he stooped to lift it out of the way, and found
the stone to be a lump of gold weighing thirty-five pounds. In less
than an hour all that part of the town and the street was staked off
into mining-claims, but no more was found. One of the largest of these
nuggets was found by three or