and for the quarter ending on the 30th of last June, about $1,600,000.  Thus in a year and a half, the Virginia office only shipped $5,330,000 in bullion.  During the year 1862 they shipped $2,615,000, so we perceive the average shipments have more than doubled in the last six months.  This gives us room to promise for the Virginia office $500,000 a month for the year 1863 (though perhaps, judging by the steady increase in the business, we are under estimating, somewhat).  This gives us $6,000,000 for the year.  Gold Hill and Silver City together can beat us—­we will give them $10,000,000.  To Dayton, Empire City, Ophir and Carson City, we will allow an aggregate of $8,000,000, which is not over the mark, perhaps, and may possibly be a little under it.  To Esmeralda we give $4,000,000.  To Reese River and Humboldt $2,000,000, which is liberal now, but may not be before the year is out.  So we prognosticate that the yield of bullion this year will be about $30,000,000.  Placing the number of mills in the Territory at one hundred, this gives to each the labor of producing $300,000 in bullion during the twelve months.  Allowing them to run three hundred days in the year (which none of them more than do), this makes their work average $1,000 a day.  Say the mills average twenty tons of rock a day and this rock worth $50 as a general thing, and you have the actual work of our one hundred mills figured down “to a spot”—­$1,000 a day each, and $30,000,000 a year in the aggregate.—­Enterprise. [A considerable over estimate—­M.  T.]]

Two tons of silver bullion would be in the neighborhood of forty bars, and the freight on it over $1,000.  Each coach always carried a deal of ordinary express matter beside, and also from fifteen to twenty passengers at from $25 to $30 a head.  With six stages going all the time, Wells, Fargo and Co.’s Virginia City business was important and lucrative.

All along under the centre of Virginia and Gold Hill, for a couple of miles, ran the great Comstock silver lode—­a vein of ore from fifty to eighty feet thick between its solid walls of rock—­a vein as wide as some of New York’s streets.  I will remind the reader that in Pennsylvania a coal vein only eight feet wide is considered ample.

Virginia was a busy city of streets and houses above ground.  Under it was another busy city, down in the bowels of the earth, where a great population of men thronged in and out among an intricate maze of tunnels and drifts, flitting hither and thither under a winking sparkle of lights, and over their heads towered a vast web of interlocking timbers that held the walls of the gutted Comstock apart.  These timbers were as large as a man’s body, and the framework stretched upward so far that no eye could pierce to its top through the closing gloom.  It was like peering up through the clean-picked ribs and bones of some colossal skeleton.  Imagine such a framework two miles long, sixty feet wide, and