OCR Text |
Show ever found. In one the North Star seems to be a near neighbor, in the, other the Southern Cross lights continually the nights. In both the Anglo-Saxon Anglo-Saxon is the dominant race, and the one faces the Leat, the famine of water with the same stubborn grit that the other puts on to meet the cold, the blizzard bliz-zard and the unexplored wastes. The same dream is behind both. One is thinking of sunny fields and bright-eyed girls in some State of the Union, the other the green fields and clear complexions that j are found in lands that are kissed by the winds that steal in after having first been warmed by the Gulf stream. The old struggle for gold. It never ceases. Nature can interpose no obstruction that will stay the prospector's feet. It is the same on the deserts of Nevada; amid the mountains of Idaho; up where the glacier with solemn flow is making of the crests of Alaska's mountains soil for some race yet to be; the same under the Southern Cross in Australia and South Africa. Whether on the southern desert the miner dies of thirst, or up under the Arctic Circle he dies of cold, there is no difference. The same hopes drive them on, the same silence hushes their last hours and folds them in its arms. The old rule that it required a dollar's worth of toil to secure a dollar in mining, is still in force. No one should ever be envious of fortunes made in mining. mi-ning. They have all cost more than they figure up. While one man succeeds, a thousand fail, but they want no sympathy. They did the best they could, and while trying they were bappy, for was there not a golden mountain just over the next little hill? Was not the trail plain? Were they not sure to win? And which one of them while he lives is too old to keep trying? THE SAME NORTH AND SOUTH. j j The products of mines in, West Australia seem I to be i decreasing, those of Alaska increasing. The I ' reason ascribed for the falling off in the South Con-! Con-! tinent is that prospecting is decreasing; the reverse is doubtless one cause of the steady increase at the north. The comparison between the two countries is interesting. One is up almost under, the Arctic ! -circle, the other, is far south. In the first the win ters are long, the cold intense, and there is but a brief summer. In the other the heat is intense ""-i through more than half the year, and the winters are like those of California. In the one the miner can, if he pleases, break the ice from a glacier to melt and make his coffee; in the other there are everlasting wastes where there is no water, where through most of the year no rain falls. But there is gold in both countries, and the mines so far found ' in the south land are richer than in the north, but j ; the ores are more rebellious than in any other spot j , . : ; ; . |