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Updated: July 27, 2025
Before that time it was the universal practice to throw the ordure out of the windows, during the night, into the street, where numbers of men were employed to remove it, with shovels, from the upper parts of the city to the lower, where it lay till it was dry, and was then carried away in carts, and deposited without the gates.
Men of the operating department paced the bench impatiently, and trackmen working below in the flare of scattered torches looked up oftener from their shovels to where a chain of active figures moved on the face of the cliff.
This was their business. There was little chance that they would succeed. Probably they would have to drop shovels at the last moment and run an unequal foot race for their lives. But this was the law, that every man must stay and try to make his own little clearing the point of an entering wedge to that advancing wall of fire. No man, no ten thousand men could stop the fire.
Against such a color-background he could defy the tiniest yellow speck to elude him. Still moving down the stream, he panned again. A single speck was his reward. A third pan contained no gold at all. Not satisfied with this, he panned three times again, taking his shovels of dirt within a foot of one another.
The coolie crowd huddled here alone, clutching their futile picks and shovels, grovelling in helpless panic. Disaster had overtaken them. The Dragon was upon them, and they were unprotected. All about them in scattered heaps lay discarded equipment, guns, even the sharp-barking death-spitting, tiny instrument that the soldiers handled so lovingly and so gently when it was not in action.
These were so heavy as to threaten the tree's stability. Therefore, they had to be placed about its base on the floor. The blacksmith had made a lot of little axes, shovels, picks, and hammers, all of which had been filed and polished with the greatest care and affectionate regard for the tiny man whose tree and Christmas all desired to make the finest in the world.
As Murphy had predicted, a tree had fallen across the trail, so close to their passing that they had heard the crash of it and had come up to see the branches still quivering from the impact. Before then Mrs. Singleton Corey had learned the feel of biting cold, when she waited on a bald nose of the hill while three shovels lifted the snow out of the road so that they could go on.
They took the scoot with them, and in wild confusion our ten led horses followed madly after them. Bags, harnesses, axes, and shovels flew off the scoot. Halters crossed and crisscrossed. I was pulled off the load, and came near being trodden on by the horses behind. I could not see what had become of old Tommy or the bears. Still hanging to his reins, Asa had jumped from the scoot.
They took up a claim, and bought a tent. Then they got a wages-man to help them, and all four used to work like niggers. The crowd christened them 'The Three Honourables', and used to have great fun watching them working away in their jerseys, and handling their picks and shovels like men.
A fireplace with an enormous mantel, under which a whole family might warm themselves, occupied the middle of one side of the room. There was a large oven in one corner which opened its huge mouth, the door partly hiding the shovels and tongs employed in its service.
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