“Well, they informed him that if he would buy it he could break it open and see what was inside it. So he bought it for a trifle and he got one of the boys to take a beetle and wedge and split it open.
“The Professor took the pieces up carefully in his hand, put on his gold specks, and after looking at the stone for a minute, said:
“‘Oh, mine gracious, shentlemens, does you know vot I was found here; dis vas vonderful; vo here in dis stone I does found dem leetle commencements ov our lives.’
“Then he told us that the soft stuff that he found in the center of it was spasms-splasms. It sounded something like photo, or protoplasms. He was very much excited over it, and said he:
“‘I takes dis vonderful stone to Sharmany mit me, because you Americans don’t understand about dese tings so mooch.’”
Some one asked Jeff if he had ever heard anything about the Professor or his duff, since.
“Well,” says Jeff, “a short time ago I saw the picture in some pictorial paper of a stone statue that was erected somewhere in Europe in honor of some great scientific man who had recently died, and he was holding in his outstretched hand a great round spotted stone. And, boys, blamed if it didn’t look exactly like that same old plum-duff that I biled for the boys up in Shasta nearly forty years ago, and I’ll jest bet it was, too.”
Some one present asked Yank if his old pard, who was robbed of part of his gold dust on his way home in ’51 on board of the steamship “Illinois,” ever recovered it. Yank replied that he never did, and, being requested to relate the particulars, he stated that his pard made a visit to his friends in the East in the fall of ’51, and was robbed on the way home by a gambler by the name of——.
“He took advantage when my pard had gone up on deck for a few minutes and went to his bunk, cut open his valise and took from a buckskin belt two purses containing $800 or $1,000. Miller was arrested upon arrival in Panama and thoroughly searched, but nothing could be found upon him. He had an accomplice on board who secreted it for him. Perhaps some of you remember this man. He was not a regular gambler, but what they called a bar-room scrub-gambler, and would, in company with a few others of the same species, sit at a little table in one corner and play poker for ten cents ante day and night. When my old pard decided to return home this scrub-gambler concluded to go in the same steamer.”
