“Gentlemen,” said I, “I don’t say anything—­I haven’t been around, you know, and of course don’t know anything—­but all I ask of you is to cast your eye on that, for instance, and tell me what you think of it!” and I tossed my treasure before them.

There was an eager scramble for it, and a closing of heads together over it under the candle-light.  Then old Ballou said: 

“Think of it?  I think it is nothing but a lot of granite rubbish and nasty glittering mica that isn’t worth ten cents an acre!”

So vanished my dream.  So melted my wealth away.  So toppled my airy castle to the earth and left me stricken and forlorn.

Moralizing, I observed, then, that “all that glitters is not gold.”

Mr. Ballou said I could go further than that, and lay it up among my treasures of knowledge, that nothing that glitters is gold.  So I learned then, once for all, that gold in its native state is but dull, unornamental stuff, and that only low-born metals excite the admiration of the ignorant with an ostentatious glitter.  However, like the rest of the world, I still go on underrating men of gold and glorifying men of mica.  Commonplace human nature cannot rise above that.

CHAPTER XXIX.

True knowledge of the nature of silver mining came fast enough.  We went out “prospecting” with Mr. Ballou.  We climbed the mountain sides, and clambered among sage-brush, rocks and snow till we were ready to drop with exhaustion, but found no silver—­nor yet any gold.  Day after day we did this.  Now and then we came upon holes burrowed a few feet into the declivities and apparently abandoned; and now and then we found one or two listless men still burrowing.  But there was no appearance of silver.  These holes were the beginnings of tunnels, and the purpose was to drive them hundreds of feet into the mountain, and some day tap the hidden ledge where the silver was.  Some day!  It seemed far enough away, and very hopeless and dreary.  Day after day we toiled, and climbed and searched, and we younger partners grew sicker and still sicker of the promiseless toil.  At last we halted under a beetling rampart of rock which projected from the earth high upon the mountain.  Mr. Ballou broke off some fragments with a hammer, and examined them long and attentively with a small eye-glass; threw them away and broke off more; said this rock was quartz, and quartz was the sort of rock that contained silver.  Contained it!  I had thought that at least it would be caked on the outside of it like a kind of veneering.  He still broke off pieces and critically examined them, now and then wetting the piece with his tongue and applying the glass.  At last he exclaimed: 

“We’ve got it!”