had heard anything of Boggs or the school report.  We stated the case, and all turned out to help hunt for the delinquent.  We found him standing on a table in a saloon, with an old tin lantern in one hand and the school report in the other, haranguing a gang of intoxicated Cornish miners on the iniquity of squandering the public moneys on education “when hundreds and hundreds of honest hard-working men are literally starving for whiskey.” [Riotous applause.] He had been assisting in a regal spree with those parties for hours.  We dragged him away and put him to bed.

Of course there was no school report in the Union, and Boggs held me accountable, though I was innocent of any intention or desire to compass its absence from that paper and was as sorry as any one that the misfortune had occurred.

But we were perfectly friendly.  The day that the school report was next due, the proprietor of the “Genessee” mine furnished us a buggy and asked us to go down and write something about the property—­a very common request and one always gladly acceded to when people furnished buggies, for we were as fond of pleasure excursions as other people.  In due time we arrived at the “mine”—­nothing but a hole in the ground ninety feet deep, and no way of getting down into it but by holding on to a rope and being lowered with a windlass.  The workmen had just gone off somewhere to dinner.  I was not strong enough to lower Boggs’s bulk; so I took an unlighted candle in my teeth, made a loop for my foot in the end of the rope, implored Boggs not to go to sleep or let the windlass get the start of him, and then swung out over the shaft.  I reached the bottom muddy and bruised about the elbows, but safe.  I lit the candle, made an examination of the rock, selected some specimens and shouted to Boggs to hoist away.  No answer.  Presently a head appeared in the circle of daylight away aloft, and a voice came down: 

“Are you all set?”

“All set—­hoist away.”

“Are you comfortable?”

“Perfectly.”

“Could you wait a little?”

“Oh certainly—­no particular hurry.”

“Well—­good by.”

“Why?  Where are you going?”

“After the school report!”

And he did.  I staid down there an hour, and surprised the workmen when they hauled up and found a man on the rope instead of a bucket of rock.  I walked home, too—­five miles—­up hill.  We had no school report next morning; but the Union had.

Six months after my entry into journalism the grand “flush times” of Silverland began, and they continued with unabated splendor for three years.  All difficulty about filling up the “local department” ceased, and the only trouble now was how to make the lengthened columns hold the world of incidents and happenings that came to our literary net every day.  Virginia had grown to be the “livest” town, for its age and population, that America had