periodical manias that
regularly seize a commercial people once in ten years, and for which
there is no accounting, and no remedy but to let it have its way and
work out its own cure in the ruin of thousands. It is the same in our
own country.[74]

DESCENT INTO A MINE.

After a hearty breakfast at the tavern, I called at the office, or, as
it is here called, "the Grand House" (_Casa Grande_), and was
introduced by Mr. Auld, the director, to the foreman, who took me to
the dressing-room, where I was stripped, and clad in the garb of a
miner except the boots, which were all too short for my feet. My rig
was an odd one; a skull-cap formed like a fireman's, a miner's coat and
pants, and my own calf-skin boots. But in California I had got used to
uncouth attire, and now thought nothing of such small matters. We
therefore walked on without comments to the house built over the great
shaft, where my good-natured English companion, the foreman, stopped me
to complete my equipment, which consisted of a lighted tallow candle
stuck in a candlestick of soft mud, and pressed till it adhered to the
front of my miner's hat. Having fixed a similar appendage to his own
hat and to the hat of the servant that was to follow us, we were
considered fully equipped for descending the mine.

While standing at the top of the shaft, I was astonished at the size
and perfect finish of a steam-pump that had been imported from England
by the late English mining company. With the assistance of balancing
weights, the immense arms of the engine lifted, with mathematical
precision, two square timbers, the one spliced out to the length of a
thousand, the other twelve hundred feet, which fell back again by their
own weight: these were the pumping-rods, which lifted the water four
hundred feet to the mouth of a tunnel, or _adit_, which carried it a
mile and a quarter through the mountain, and discharged it in the creek
above the stamping-mill. There is a smaller pump, which works
occasionally, when the volume of water in the mines is too great for
the power of a single pump.

A trap-door being lifted, we began to descend by small ladders that
reached from floor to floor in the shaft, or, rather, in the half of
the shaft. The whole shaft was perhaps fifteen or twenty feet square,
with sides formed of solid masonry, where the rock happened to be soft,
while in other parts it consisted of natural porphyry rock cut smooth.
Half of this shaft was divided