“As with lotteries, the few who draw large prizes become subjects of conversation; but nothing is heard of the many who draw blanks, or prizes too small to pay the cost of the tickets. * * *
“Divesting the newspaper accounts from California of certain expressions bordering rather too much upon the hyperbolic order, they amount to the fact that the outcrops of certain veins”—of gold-bearing quartz—“have been removed. Such expressions might have materially increased the fever but for the frequency of similar causes, which at length but slightly affect the body politic, because, like the body corporate in certain cases, it is becoming acclimated. Some of the expressions alluded to, and copied from California papers into our own, about ‘gold-bearing quartz said to be found in inexhaustible masses or quarries through the whole mountainous region which forms the western slope of the Sierra Nevada,’ and ‘these quartz mountain quarries, and divers others, are indicative of a state of aurimania. Accounts are also given of the yield of gold said to be averages of these great gold ‘quarries.’ That the specimens from which the gold was extracted contained the stated proportions is most likely, but that is a very different affair from the average rate of productions of a vein.”
THE END.
LIGHT READING FOR TRAVELERS,
PUBLISHED BY
HARPER & BROTHERS, 82 CLIFF STREET, N. Y.
Harper’s Library of Select Novels.
No.
1. PELHAM. By Bulwer. 25 cents.