“Much sickness prevails among the gold-diggers; many have left the ground sick, and many more have discontinued their labours for the present, and gone into more healthy portions of the country, intending to return after the sickly season has passed.  From the best information I can obtain, there are from two to three thousand persons at work at the gold-washings with the same success as heretofore.”

THE DIGGINGS.—­Extract of a letter from Monterey, Aug. 29.

“At present the people are running over the country and picking it out of the earth here and there, just as a thousand hogs, let loose in a forest, would root up ground-nuts.  Some get eight or ten ounces a-day, and the least active one or two.  They make the most who employ the wild Indians to hunt it for them.  There is one man who has sixty Indians in his employ; his profits are a dollar a-minute.  The wild Indians know nothing of its value, and wonder what the pale-faces want to do with it; they will give an ounce of it for the same weight of coined silver, or a thimbleful of glass beads, or a glass of grog.  And white men themselves often give an ounce of it, which is worth at our mint 18 dollars, or more, for a bottle of brandy, a bottle of soda-powders, or a plug of tobacco.

“As to the quantity which the diggers get, take a few facts as evidence.  I know seven men who worked seven weeks and two days, Sundays excepted, on Feather River; they employed on an average fifty Indians, and got out in these seven weeks and two days 275 pounds of pure gold.  I know the men, and have seen the gold, and know what they state to be a fact—­so stick a pin there.  I know ten other men who worked ten days in company, employed no Indians, and averaged in these ten days 1500 dollars each; so stick another pin there.  I know another man who got out of a basin in a rock, not larger than a wash-bowl, two pounds and a half of gold in fifteen minutes; so stick another pin there!  Not one of these statements would I believe, did I not know the men personally, and know them to be plain matter-of-fact men—­men who open a vein of gold just as coolly as you would a potato-hill.”

ASSAY OF THE GOLD.—­Lieutenant Loeser having arrived at Washington with specimens of the gold from the diggings, the following account of its quality appeared in the “Washington Union,” the government organ:—­

“Understanding last evening that the lieutenant had arrived in this city, and had deposited in the War Office the precious specimens he had brought with him, we called to see them, and to free our mind from all hesitation as to the genuineness of the metal.  We had seen doubts expressed in some of our exchange papers; and we readily admit that the accounts so nearly approached the miraculous, that we were relieved by the evidence of our own senses on the subject.  The specimens have all the appearance of the native gold we had seen from the mines of North Carolina and Virginia, and we are informed that the Secretary