is dollars and pennies together to keep the mines going. He
is constantly warned to buy no claims on his own account and promises
faithfully, but cannot resist now and then when luring baits are laid
before him, though such ventures invariably result in violent and profane
protests from Aurora.

"The pick and shovel are the only claims I have any confidence in now,"
the miner concludes, after one fierce outburst. "My back is sore, and my
hands are blistered with handling them to-day."

But even the pick and shovel did not inspire confidence a little later.
He writes that the work goes slowly, very slowly, but that they still
hope to strike it some day. "But--if we strike it rich--I've lost my
guess, that's all." Then he adds: "Couldn't go on the hill to-day. It
snowed. It always snows here, I expect"; and the final heart-sick line,
"Don't you suppose they have pretty much quit writing at home?"

This is midsummer, and snow still interferes with the work. One feels
the dreary uselessness of the quest.

Yet resolution did not wholly die, or even enthusiasm. These things were
as recurrent as new prospects, which were plentiful enough. In a still
subsequent letter he declares that he will never look upon his mother's
face again, or his sister's, or get married, or revisit the "Banner
State," until he is a rich man, though there is less assurance than
desperation in the words.

In 'Roughing It' the author tells us that, when flour had reached one
dollar a pound and he could no longer get the dollar, he abandoned mining
and went to milling "as a common laborer in a quartz-mill at ten dollars
a week." This statement requires modification. It was not entirely for
the money that he undertook the laborious task of washing "riffles" and
"screening tailings." The money was welcome enough, no doubt, but the
greater purpose was to learn refining, so that when his mines developed
he could establish his own mill and personally superintend the work. It
is like him to wish us to believe that he was obliged to give up being a
mining magnate to become a laborer in a quartz-mill, for there is a grim
humor in the confession. That he abandoned the milling experiment at the
end of a week is a true statement. He got a violent cold in the damp
place, and came near getting salivated, he says in a letter, "working in
the quicksilver and chemicals. I hardly think I shall try the experiment
again. It is a confining business, and I will not be co