They welcomed the Senator and his party as friends, and as we went at walking pace they conducted us to the hotel.  And it was a hotel!!!  Think of one long, long board barn of two storeys high, not finished quite, being built, with kind of little rabbit hole rooms off each side of a long passage on both floors, in some the boards not meeting, so that you can see into the next person’s apartment, or into the open air as the case may be, and in all, if a knot is out of the wood, a peep hole!  The flimsiest door not fitting, with the number of each room printed on a bit of paper and fastened on with a tack; furniture consisting of a rickety iron bed, a box that has been a packing case for a table, another for a washstand, a rough single chair, sometimes a rocking chair, and all crowned by a looking-glass that makes half your nose in one part of your face, and one eye up in your forehead—­too deliciously comic.  It was all very clean, except the bed clothes, but we won’t speak of them; their recollection shivers me.

Octavia and Tom had one room at the very end, and the rest of our party had to scatter where we could, as numbers were taken, and it was difficult to get even enough to go round.  Mine was a very grand one, because it had newspapers pasted on the boards partition, but it was very deceptive, because one could not at once discern the knots and cracks, and anyone might surprise one by poking a finger through in unexpected places.  Gaston had the next on my right, and Mercedes and Columbia the one beyond him, and I did wonder, under the circumstances, which of us he would peep at.  I felt it would be me, because Mercedes and Columbia being jeune filles, and he being a Frenchman, they would be sacred.  Nelson and the Senator together had a rather larger one on my left, and that side my newspapers were torn, but I felt no apprehension.  The chivalry of American men is temptation proof.

Downstairs there was a bar and gambling saloon in one, with a sort of hall place, a few feet square, but no dining room or any place for food.  It was merely a shelter from outside air.  One had to trot along the street to another shed called a restaurant, for meals.

How we laughed and the fun we had over it all!  Nothing has delighted us so much.  Only Randolph Vinerhorn doesn’t like it, but he is afraid to say it before the Senator, though I heard him grumbling from across the passage to Lola because he has not got his valet to shave him!  Tom, of course, is just as happy as we are.  How I love an adventure, Mamma!  Did you ever?  And if you could see Tom in his flannel shirt and his shabbiest old grey suit, and a felt slouch hat, you could not tell him from one of these lovely miners.  Octavia says she is getting in love with him again on account of it.  Her one unfortunately had to stay in Osages, but the one with the beautiful teeth has come in his place.

We couldn’t wash or brush up much because we had only each either a cracked pudding dish or an old cake tin to wash in, but we did our best and started off for our dinner.  Three of the most prominent young mine owners had invited us to a feast, and when we got to the tent in which it was held we found that was the chief restaurant, and lots of miners were already there at different tables.