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Show EARLY CALIFORNIA MINERS.<br><br> Salt Lake City supplied a resting-place for the Argonauts from the East, and they had so little confidence in the success of their mission that one of them said that the sluice-boxes which they carried to wash the gold would, in the event of ill-success, make first-class coffins. They fell on strange fates, and exile revealed to them unsuspected capacities. The lecturer was attended at a restaurant by a waiter who bore a strange resemblance to a person he had always admired as the model of refined good breeding. Not caring to wound the feelings of the waiter - who carried a revolver - Mr. Harte had inquired of the proprietor of the hotel whether the waiter was not, in fact, a person who in the East had filled a much higher position. The landlord confirmed the suspicion, and added that his servant's command of language often beguiled the visitor who was waiting for a plot delayed. The varied capabilities of those early emigrants depended on their character; but what their character was he had rather not say. Some had left behind them wives and families, some of them had left behind them officers of the law, deploring their absence. But their past was no clew [clue] to their future. "The boys seem to have taken a fresh deal all round," observed a noted gambler to Mr. Harte; and the gambler was himself an illustration. He came of a family who would not touch cards because they held such things too trifling and amusing, but might, perhaps, have been converted by the remark their descendant made on rising with $5,000 after ten minutes' play. "To think there is folks as believes that cards is a waste of time!" In San Francisco in those early days everybody played, and when a gambler died at the table, and three doctors who happened to be there examined him and pronounced that the cause of death was disease of the heart, the coroner, who was accidentally present, empaneled a jury from the other players, who returned a verdict in accordance with the evidence, and went on with the game.<br><br> Female society was so scarce that even a gratuitously ugly face was followed by admirers. A married captain's wife was escorted home from a ball by every officer in the garrison and observed that now at length she understood the meaning of the expression "the pleasure of your company." When a baby cried in the theater everybody shouted "Encore!"<br><br> The miner lived a wilder life upon the hills [line missing/ unreadable] nourished his inner man; the track was marked with empty oyster-cans; he met the native upon the common footing of beans. He was generous to a fault. The "sanitary" subscription, by which North and South benefitted alike, was started in a California bar. "It is rough on those poor fellows; I am sorry for them." "How much are you sorry?" "Four hundred dollars." The next man gave $1,000; in half an hour donations of $15,000 were telegraphed to Washington, and the total subscription of California was $3,000,000 in gold. The miners were, above all faithful to their partners, and loved them with a love passing that of women. It was dangerous to interfere in partners' quarrels, and once a stranger at a bar, who had not, so far as he knew, given offense to any person present, suddenly found himself upon the floor and a tall Kentuckian standing over him with his revolver out. When the tall gentleman was courteously asked for an explanation, he said: "I ain't nothing against the stranger myself, but he said something just now against Quakers, and I want him to understand that my partner is a Quaker and a peaceful man."<br><br> The Argonauts were not prone to sentimentalisms, although they knew what homesickness was; and when they dealt in sarcasm their inuendo [innuendo] was grim and striking. Lynch law determined that horse-stealing should be punished by death; but once a jury took several minutes after retiring to consider their verdict, perhaps from humanity, perhaps because there had, in consequence of the rigor of the law, been a great mortality among the male population. The leader of the crowd put his head into the jury-room and said he did not wish to hurry the gentlemen, but they wanted that room to lay out the corpse in.-Bret Harte's London Lecture. |