“In the bright lexicon of youth,
               There’s no such word as Fail—­”
                                             and I’ll prove it!

And look here.  I came near forgetting it.  Don’t you say a word to me about “trains” across the plains.  Because I am down on that arrangement.  That sort of thing is “played out,” you know.  The Overland Coach or the Mail Steamer is the thing.

You want to know something about the route between California and Nevada Territory?  Suppose you take my word for it, that it is exceedingly jolly.  Or take, for a winter view, J. Ross Brown’s picture, in Harper’s Monthly, of pack mules tumbling fifteen hundred feet down the side of a mountain.  Why bless you, there’s scenery on that route.  You can stand on some of those noble peaks and see Jerusalem and the Holy Land.  And you can start a boulder, and send it tearing up the earth and crashing over trees-down-down-down-to the very devil, Madam.  And you would probably stand up there and look, and stare and wonder at the magnificence spread out before you till you starved to death, if let alone.  But you should take someone along to keep you moving.

Since you want to know, I will inform you that an eight-stamp water mill, put up and ready for business would cost about $10,000 to $12,000.  Then, the water to run it with would cost from $1,000 to $30,000—­and even more, according to the location.  What I mean by that, is, that water powers in this vicinity, are immensely valuable.  So, also, in Esmeralda.  But Humboldt is a new country, and things don’t cost so much there yet.  I saw a good water power sold there for $750.00.  But here is the way the thing is managed.  A man with a good water power on Carson river will lean his axe up against a tree (provided you find him chopping cord-wood at $4 a day,) and taking his chalk pipe out of his mouth to afford him an opportunity to answer your questions, will look you coolly in the face and tell you his little property is worth forty or fifty thousand dollars!  But you can easily fix him.  You tell him that you’ll build a quartz mill on his property, and make him a fourth or a third, or half owner in said mill in consideration of the privilege of using said property—­and that will bring him to his milk in a jiffy.  So he spits on his hands, and goes in again with his axe, until the mill is finished, when lo! out pops the quondam wood-chopper, arrayed in purple and fine linen, and prepared to deal in bank-stock, or bet on the races, or take government loans, with an air, as to the amount, of the most don’t care a-d—–­dest unconcern that you can conceive of.  By George, if I just had a thousand dollars—­I’d be all right!  Now there’s the “Horatio,” for instance.  There are five or six shareholders in it, and I know I could buy half of their interests at, say $20 per foot, now that flour is worth $50 per barrel and they are pressed for money.  But