xperience, all accustomed
surroundings, all the restraints of training, and they were embarked on
the great adventure. I do not now remember many of them individually.
They were of a piece with the thousands we were destined to encounter.
But I do retain a most vivid mental picture of them collectively, with
their red shirts, their slouch hats, their belts full of weapons, their
eyes of eagerness, their souls of dreams; brimming with pent energy;
theorizing, arguing, disputing; ready at an instant's notice for any
sort of a joke or excitement that would relieve the tension; boisterous,
noisy, laughing loudly, smothering by sheer weight of ridicule
individual resentments--altogether a wonderful picture of the youth and
hope and energy and high spirits of the time.

Never before nor since have I looked upon such a variety of equipment as
strewed the decks and cabins of that ship. A great majority of the
passengers knew nothing whatever about out-of-door life, and less than
nothing as to the conditions in California and on the way. Consequently
they had bought liberally of all sorts of idiotic patent contraptions.
India rubber played a prominent part. And the deck was cumbered with at
least forty sorts of machines for separating gold from the soil: some of
them to use water, some muscular labour, and one tremendous affair with
wings was supposed to fan away everything but the gold. Differing in
everything else, they were alike in one thing: they had all been devised
by men who had never seen any but manufactured gold. I may add that I
never saw a machine of the kind actually at work in the diggings.

Just now, however, I looked on the owners of these contraptions with
envy, and thought ourselves at a disadvantage with only our picks,
shovels, and axes.

But we had with us a wonderful book that went far toward cheering up the
poorly equipped. Several copies had been brought aboard, so we all had a
chance to read it. The work was entitled "Three Weeks in the Gold
Mines," and was written by a veracious individual who signed himself H.
I. Simpson. I now doubt if he had ever left his New York hall bedroom,
though at the time we took his statements for plain truth. Simpson could
spare only ten days of this three weeks for actual mining. In that
period, with no other implement than a pocket knife, he picked out fifty
thousand dollars. The rest of the time he preferred to travel about and
see the country, picking up only what in