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The miners were pigmies as they toiled in the sides of the towering mountain walls, where they had toiled for many a day. On the lip of a projecting crag, half a mile above were three other pigmies, who neither toiled nor spun.
The class of mines then known as the "dry diggings," and which for several years furnished nearly half of the gold yield of the state, are now, with a few unimportant exceptions, exhausted, or left to the attention of the Chinamen. The purpose of all placer miners is not to catch all the gold in the dirt which they wash, but to catch the greatest possible quantity within a given time.
Yet it was a pretty nutshell quite after the "love in a cottage" fashion though adorned and perfected by the late Mr. Wilson, an old bachelor. "Did he die here?" asked Agatha. "No; in Cornwall," Anne answered. "He had gone over to look at some property I have lately bought there. The people on it, miners thrown out of work, gave him more anxiety than he could bear, for he was not strong.
The opinion which I have formed on the subject leads me to think that, in the event of the diggings proving remunerative, it will now be found impossible to check the course of immigration, even by closing Fraser River, as the miners would then force a passage into the gold district by way of the Columbia River, and the valuable trade of the country in that case be driven from its natural course into a foreign channel, and entirely lost to this country.
They had other reason, than revenge upon the Lipan mission Indians and the Spanish who were helping their enemies. Along the San Saba River there were rich veins of silver which the Tawehash owned. Miners from the mining district of Amalgres, Mexico, came to the mission and worked the veins, and sent the precious metal away.
Mark relapsed into silence, and his guide remained silent too, and went on and on, along passages formed by the busy miners of the past, in following the lode of lead, and along ways that were nature's work.
Presently, the man stooped down and picked up what seemed to be a stone, and he showed it eagerly to the woman and she trembled with excitement and the stone glowed. "It must be gold," said Jackie Tar. "They're gold miners." "But who are they?" "I've got it!" cried Kernel Cob. "They're Jackie and Peggs' motheranfather," and he danced with joy.
She saw bullets go crashing into the door, heard screams of baffled fury, and presently the crash of axes into the panels of the barrier that held them back. It seemed to fade away before her gaze, and instead of it she saw a doorway full of furious crowding miners. Then presently her heart stood still again.
A few years ago we visited the district; and while proceeding in the old-fashioned diligence which runs between Alais and Florac for the district is altogether beyond the reach of railways a French contractor, accompanying a band of Italian miners, whom he was taking into the mountains to search for minerals, pointing to the sterile rocks, exclaimed to us, "Messieurs, behold the very poorest district in France!
So the ores were mined and the metals extracted from them by the miners according to the methods of their ancestors as far back as history or tradition went, and it was all done under a set of mining laws as primitive as the mining methods themselves. There were enormous possibilities of improvement.
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