_______________
Five years ago there was only a pony-path over the precipitous hills on which now stands the marvelous city of Virginia, with its population of twelve thousand persons, and perhaps more. Virginia, with its stately warehouses and gay shops; its splendid streets, paved with silver ore; its banking houses and faro-banks; its attractive coffee-houses and elegant theatre, its music halls and its three daily newspapers.
_______________
I visit several of the adjacent mining towns, but I do not go to Aurora. No, I think not. A lecturer on psychology was killed there the other night by the playful discharge of a horse-pistol in the hands of a degenerate and intoxicated Spaniard. This circumstance, and a rumor that the citizens are "agin" literature, induce me to go back to Virginia.
_______________
I had pointed out to me at a restaurant a man who had killed four men in street broils, and who had that very day cut his own brother's breast open in a dangerous manner with a small supper knife. He was a gentleman, however. I heard him tell some men so. He admitted it himself. And I don't think he would lie about a little thing like that.
The theatre at Virginia will attract the attention of the stranger, because it is an unusually elegant affair of the kind, and would be so regarded anywhere. It was built, of course, by Mr. Thomas Maguire, the Napoleonic manager of the Pacific, and who has built over twenty theatres in his time and will perhaps build as many more, unless somebody stops him—which, by the way, will not be a remarkably easy thing to do.
As soon as a mining camp begins to assume the proportions of a city, at about the time the whiskey-vender draws his cork or the gambler spreads his green cloth, Maguire opens a theatre, and with a hastily-organized "Vigilance Committee" of actors, commences to execute Shakespeare.
_______________