EPISODES IN THE STORY OF A MINE

No one could live at Silverado and not be curious about the story of the
mine. We were surrounded by so many evidences of expense and toil, we
lived so entirely in the wreck of that great enterprise, like mites in
the ruins of a cheese, that the idea of the old din and bustle haunted
our repose. Our own house, the forge, the dump, the chutes, the rails,
the windlass, the mass of broken plant; the two tunnels, one far below
in the green dell, the other on the platform where we kept our wine; the
deep shaft, with the sun-glints and the water-drops; above all, the
ledge, that great gaping slice out of the mountain shoulder, propped
apart by wooden wedges, on whose immediate margin, high above our heads,
the one tall pine precariously nodded,--these stood for its greatness;
while the dog-hutch, boot-jacks, old boots, old tavern bills, and the
very beds that we inherited from bygone miners, put in human touches and
realised for us the story of the past.

I have sat on an old sleeper, under the thick madronas near the forge,
with just a look over the dump on the green world below, and seen the
sun lying broad among the wreck, and heard the silence broken only by
the tinkling water in the shaft, or a stir of the royal family about the
battered palace, and my mind has gone back to the epoch of the Stanleys
and the Chapmans, with a grand _tutti_ of pick and drill, hammer and
anvil, echoing about the canyon; the assayer hard at it in our
dining-room; the carts below on the road, and their cargo of red mineral
bounding and thundering down the iron chute. And now all gone--all
fallen away into this sunny silence and desertion: a family of squatters
dining in the assayer's office, making their beds in the big sleeping
room erstwhile so crowded, keeping their wine in the tunnel that once
rang with picks.

But Silverado itself, although now fallen in its turn into decay, was
once but a mushroom, and had succeeded to other mines and other flitting
cities. Twenty years ago, away down the glen on the Lake County side
there was a place, Jonestown by name, with two thousand inhabitants
dwelling under canvas, and one roofed house for the sale of whisky.
Round on the western side of Mount Saint Helena, there was at the same
date a second large encampment, its name, if it ever had one, lost for
me. Both of these have perished, leaving not a stick and scarce a memory
behind them. Tide after tide of