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Her people were accustomed to take care of themselves, and managed on the whole to get along. A general conflagration was not a new thing. Four times during gold-digging days San Francisco was destroyed by fire, and each time new houses were going up before the ashes were cold.
Now that deep sinking was in vogue, gold-digging no longer served as a play-game for the gentleman and the amateur; the greater number of those who toiled at it were work-tried, seasoned men.
Those who had no learning, but had good birth, genteel manners and kid gloves and feeble loins, sunk lower and became the dregs of gold-digging society ere a week's digging had passed over their backs. Not that all wit yielded to muscle. Low cunning often held its own; hundreds of lazy leeches settled on labor's bare arm and bled it.
The Miss Gilpins told their brother that the universal subject of conversation during the voyage was gold, gold-digging, gold-washing, gold-scraping. "Like the old man in the `Pilgrim's Progress' with his muck-rake, always scraping with downcast looks, never gazing upwards," remarked James.
Nevermore and The Sphinx of Eaglehawk give other views of the gold-digging days, chiefly of their seamy side, but these stories offer nothing that equals in interest the splendid panorama of pioneer life revealed in The Miner's Right.
"Tit you effer vind a nokket?" inquired the inarticulate German, eagerly. "No. I have been most kinds of fool in my time," returned Loudon, "but not the gold-digging variety. Every man has a sane spot somewhere." "Well, then," suggested some one, "did you ever smuggle opium?" "Yes, I did," said Loudon. "Was there money in that?" "All the way," responded Loudon.
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