rage twenty tons of
rock a day and this rock worth $50 as a general thing, and you have the
actual work of our one hundred mills figured down "to a spot"--$1,000 a
day each, and $30,000,000 a year in the aggregate.--Enterprise.
[A considerable over estimate--M. T.]]

Two tons of silver bullion would be in the neighborhood of forty bars,
and the freight on it over $1,000. Each coach always carried a deal of
ordinary express matter beside, and also from fifteen to twenty
passengers at from $25 to $30 a head. With six stages going all the
time, Wells, Fargo and Co.'s Virginia City business was important and
lucrative.

All along under the centre of Virginia and Gold Hill, for a couple of
miles, ran the great Comstock silver lode--a vein of ore from fifty to
eighty feet thick between its solid walls of rock--a vein as wide as some
of New York's streets. I will remind the reader that in Pennsylvania a
coal vein only eight feet wide is considered ample.

Virginia was a busy city of streets and houses above ground. Under it
was another busy city, down in the bowels of the earth, where a great
population of men thronged in and out among an intricate maze of tunnels
and drifts, flitting hither and thither under a winking sparkle of
lights, and over their heads towered a vast web of interlocking timbers
that held the walls of the gutted Comstock apart. These timbers were as
large as a man's body, and the framework stretched upward so far that no
eye could pierce to its top through the closing gloom. It was like
peering up through the clean-picked ribs and bones of some colossal
skeleton. Imagine such a framework two miles long, sixty feet wide, and
higher than any church spire in America. Imagine this stately
lattice-work stretching down Broadway, from the St. Nicholas to Wall
street, and a Fourth of July procession, reduced to pigmies, parading on
top of it and flaunting their flags, high above the pinnacle of Trinity
steeple. One can imagine that, but he cannot well imagine what that
forest of timbers cost, from the time they were felled in the pineries
beyond Washoe Lake, hauled up and around Mount Davidson at atrocious
rates of freightage, then squared, let down into the deep maw of the mine
and built up there. Twenty ample fortunes would not timber one of the
greatest of those silver mines. The Spanish proverb says it requires a
gold mine to "run" a silver one, and it is true. A beggar with a silver
mine is a