r silver bar that
belonged to me? Don't you know that people who always feel jolly,
no matter where they are or what happens to them--who have the organ
of hope preposterously developed--who are endowed with an
uncongealable, sanguine temperament--who never feel concerned about
the price of corn--and who cannot, by any possibility, discover any
but the bright side of a picture--are very apt to go to extremes and
exaggerate with a 40-horse microscopic power?

"But--but--

In the bright lexicon of youth,
There is no such word as fail,
and I'll prove it."

Whereupon he soars again, adding page after page full of glowing
expectations and plans such as belong only with speculation in treasures
buried in the ground--a very difficult place, indeed, to find them.

His money was about exhausted by this time, and funds to work the mining
claims must come out of Orion's rather modest salary. The brothers owned
all claims in partnership, and it was now the part of "Brother Sam" to do
the active work. He hated the hard picking and prying and blasting into
the flinty ledges, but the fever drove him on. He camped with a young
man named Phillips at first, and, later on, with an experienced miner,
Calvin H. Higbie, to whom "Roughing It" would one day be dedicated. They
lived in a tiny cabin with a cotton roof, and around their rusty stove
they would paw over their specimens and figure the fortune that their
mines would be worth in the spring.

Food ran low, money gave out almost entirely, but they did not give up.
When it was stormy and they could not dig, and the ex-pilot was in a
talkative vein, he would sit astride the bunk and distribute to his
hearers riches more valuable than any they would dig from the Esmeralda
hills. At other times he did not talk at all, but sat in a corner and
wrote. They thought he was writing home; they did not know that he was
"literary." Some of his home letters had found their way into a Keokuk
paper and had come back to Orion, who had shown them to an assistant on
the "Territorial Enterprise," of Virginia City. The "Enterprise" man had
caused one of them to be reprinted, and this had encouraged its author to
send something to the paper direct. He signed these contributions
"Josh," and one told of:

"An old, old horse whose name was Methusalem,
Took him down and sold him in Jerusalem,
A long time ago."

He received no pay for these offerings and ex