with mining shafts.  There were more mines than miners.  True, not ten of these mines were yielding rock worth hauling to a mill, but everybody said, “Wait till the shaft gets down where the ledge comes in solid, and then you will see!” So nobody was discouraged.  These were nearly all “wild cat” mines, and wholly worthless, but nobody believed it then.  The “Ophir,” the “Gould & Curry,” the “Mexican,” and other great mines on the Comstock lead in Virginia and Gold Hill were turning out huge piles of rich rock every day, and every man believed that his little wild cat claim was as good as any on the “main lead” and would infallibly be worth a thousand dollars a foot when he “got down where it came in solid.”  Poor fellow, he was blessedly blind to the fact that he never would see that day.  So the thousand wild cat shafts burrowed deeper and deeper into the earth day by day, and all men were beside themselves with hope and happiness.  How they labored, prophesied, exulted!  Surely nothing like it was ever seen before since the world began.  Every one of these wild cat mines—­not mines, but holes in the ground over imaginary mines—­was incorporated and had handsomely engraved “stock” and the stock was salable, too.  It was bought and sold with a feverish avidity in the boards every day.  You could go up on the mountain side, scratch around and find a ledge (there was no lack of them), put up a “notice” with a grandiloquent name in it, start a shaft, get your stock printed, and with nothing whatever to prove that your mine was worth a straw, you could put your stock on the market and sell out for hundreds and even thousands of dollars.  To make money, and make it fast, was as easy as it was to eat your dinner.

Every man owned “feet” in fifty different wild cat mines and considered his fortune made.  Think of a city with not one solitary poor man in it!  One would suppose that when month after month went by and still not a wild cat mine (by wild cat I mean, in general terms, any claim not located on the mother vein, i.e., the “Comstock”) yielded a ton of rock worth crushing, the people would begin to wonder if they were not putting too much faith in their prospective riches; but there was not a thought of such a thing.  They burrowed away, bought and sold, and were happy.

New claims were taken up daily, and it was the friendly custom to run straight to the newspaper offices, give the reporter forty or fifty “feet,” and get them to go and examine the mine and publish a notice of it.  They did not care a fig what you said about the property so you said something.  Consequently we generally said a word or two to the effect that the “indications” were good, or that the ledge was “six feet wide,” or that the rock “resembled the Comstock” (and so it did—­but as a general thing the resemblance was not startling enough to knock you down).  If the rock was moderately promising, we followed the custom of the country, used strong adjectives