Every atom of food for Moonbeams has to be drawn over this ninety miles of desert by waggons or mule carts, and every drop of water comes in six miles from the camp.  What splendid pluck and daring to wrest gold from the earth under such circumstances!  What general would fight an enemy so far from his food supply?

We seemed to be no time being raced and shaken over the flat sand basin, meeting and passing more teams on the way, and twice a petrol and drink station of one board shed, and a man with a jolly Irish face and a gun openly in his belt, to attend to it.  We had no breakdowns, and just at sunset got into the one and only street of Moonbeams.  But there were no stone houses or anything but sheds of one storey, generally, and more often rows of tents.  The Moonbeams is not three months old!  So quickly do these places grow when a rush for newly discovered rich gold is made.  We had passed quantities of “claims” on the way; piles of stones like little cairns marking their four corners; and I wonder if in five hundred years the socialists of that day will scream and try to demonstrate that the descendants of those brave adventurers have no right to their bit of land, but should give it up to them, who only talk and fume and do no work upon it.

Everyone was in from the mines, which are all close, shafts sticking up from every hill and heaps of broken rock and earth rising like mole hills.  The straggling street was full of men, and I should not think in the world there can be a collection of more splendid looking humanity—­all young and strong and wholesome.  The Senator says life is so impossibly difficult here that only those in the best of health can stand it, and to face such chances requires the buoyancy and hope of youth.  Whatever the cause they were all lovely creatures, just like our guardsmen, numbers tall and slender and thin through, and many of them might have been the Eton eleven or Oxford eight, and all with the insouciance and careless grace I have already told you of.

You know what I mean by “thin through,” Mamma:  that lovely look of narrow hips and slender waist and fine shoulders, not padded and not too square, and looked at sideways not a bit thick; the chest, not the tummy, the most sticking out part, and the general expression of race horses.  You would have to melt off layers of hips and other bits of most of the Eastern American, and then alter the set of their bones to get them to resemble any of these.  And yet I suppose they are all Americans, too, drifted here from other States; but they look so absolutely different; I expect they are not the conglomeration of all nations who have emigrated, like in New York, but the original pure stock.  Or can it be the life after all?  In any case it is too attractive, and I wish you could see them, Mamma?