Finally, about eight hundred feet down, we stopped, and got out on to firm ground and waited for the others, who came in batches of four.  The air was pumped in, I suppose, from somewhere, because just here it was cool, and not difficult to breathe.  We had such fun, but Nelson was rather pale and silent, I don’t know why.  When everyone was there we started on our explorations, and seemed to walk miles in the weirdest narrow passages, in single file, on a single board sometimes, each carrying our light.  We climbed ladders and had to cross narrow ledges on the edge of the abysses, and it was altogether most interesting to learn the different sounds the rock with ore in it made when hammered on, to the earth rock.  They broke off some with a pickaxe to give to each of us.  “High grade,” he called, and even the scraps about as big as my two hands which I have now, they say will produce about sixteen dollars’ worth of gold; so is not this wonderful riches, Mamma?  What a great and splendid country, and how puny and small seem the shallow little aims of towns and cities, when here is this rich earth, waiting only to be explored.  There, in the strange light of the dip candles, and everyone chaffing, Nelson and the Senator seemed to stand out like two giants, and there was something aloof in their faces, and apart from the rest.  If one searched the world, Mamma, one could not find two nobler men.

At last we climbed into two great caverns out of which they had taken the finest gold, nineteen thousand dollars to a ton of rock.  The miners (I am sure not the lovely courtly creatures we saw last night, but some low other ones) stole so much that now they have to be searched as they leave the mine.  We hated to hear that.  They could conceal about twenty dollars’ worth a day on themselves each, and so it got to be called “high grading.”  Isn’t that a nice word, and what heaps of “highgraders” there are in different walks of life!  Pilfering brains and ideas and thoughts from other people!

They were blasting in the shaft below and the fumes came up and made us all a little faint, so we decided to come to the earth’s surface without going down about two hundred feet lower, which we could have done.  In one long gallery we came upon a single miner working away in a cul-de-sac, with, it seemed, absolutely no air.  Think of the courage and endurance it must take to continue this, day after day!  I do admire them.  Then they have the knowledge that if they like to chance things and go off with an “outfit”—­two donkeys, which are called “burros”—­ carrying their tools, they can prospect in the desert and peg out their own claims, and all have the possibility of becoming millionaires.  It is a wonderful and rugged life.