And does the reader remember, a few pages back, the calculations, of a quoted correspondent, whereby the ore is to be mined and shipped all the way to England, the metals extracted, and the gold and silver contents received back by the miners as clear profit, the copper, antimony and other things in the ore being sufficient to pay all the expenses incurred?  Everybody’s head was full of such “calculations” as those —­such raving insanity, rather.  Few people took work into their calculations—­or outlay of money either; except the work and expenditures of other people.

We never touched our tunnel or our shaft again.  Why?  Because we judged that we had learned the real secret of success in silver mining—­which was, not to mine the silver ourselves by the sweat of our brows and the labor of our hands, but to sell the ledges to the dull slaves of toil and let them do the mining!

Before leaving Carson, the Secretary and I had purchased “feet” from various Esmeralda stragglers.  We had expected immediate returns of bullion, but were only afflicted with regular and constant “assessments” instead—­demands for money wherewith to develop the said mines.  These assessments had grown so oppressive that it seemed necessary to look into the matter personally.  Therefore I projected a pilgrimage to Carson and thence to Esmeralda.  I bought a horse and started, in company with Mr. Ballou and a gentleman named Ollendorff, a Prussian—­not the party who has inflicted so much suffering on the world with his wretched foreign grammars, with their interminable repetitions of questions which never have occurred and are never likely to occur in any conversation among human beings.  We rode through a snow-storm for two or three days, and arrived at “Honey Lake Smith’s,” a sort of isolated inn on the Carson river.  It was a two-story log house situated on a small knoll in the midst of the vast basin or desert through which the sickly Carson winds its melancholy way.  Close to the house were the Overland stage stables, built of sun-dried bricks.  There was not another building within several leagues of the place.  Towards sunset about twenty hay-wagons arrived and camped around the house and all the teamsters came in to supper—­a very, very rough set.  There were one or two Overland stage drivers there, also, and half a dozen vagabonds and stragglers; consequently the house was well crowded.

We walked out, after supper, and visited a small Indian camp in the vicinity.  The Indians were in a great hurry about something, and were packing up and getting away as fast as they could.  In their broken English they said, “By’m-by, heap water!” and by the help of signs made us understand that in their opinion a flood was coming.  The weather was perfectly clear, and this was not the rainy season.  There was about a foot of water in the insignificant river—­or maybe two feet; the stream was not wider than a back alley in a village, and its banks were scarcely higher than a man’s head.