My Dear Jeremy,—In my last I promised you a reminding hint, a sketch reflective and suggestive of mining operations, as an offset to the brilliant visions of “Gold Placers,” which haunt the mind, sleeping and waking, of Uncle Sam’s children. While multitudes are making haste to grow rich, by going around the Horn, and at the terminus of their long voyage will find themselves coming out of the little end of it, you and I may amuse ourselves over a subject somewhat kindred—a retrospective folly—feeling the while a good deal like the boy on getting rid of the jumping tooth-ache—“a heap better” are we, “now it is over.”
Copper! You have heard of it before, I believe? and may have about you a memorandum of a few thousands, entered on the credit side, not available now at your bankers. It was a very happy delusion, was it not? I’ll warrant me that you had already planned your cottage orné and had the walks laid out, and the shrubbery planted quite tastefully and imaginatively picturesque. Several castles, with steeples rather airy, of my own, were toppled down, and elegantly bronzed as they were, are quite useless now for purposes of reproduction, so that we may say, that we have had some of the advantages of wealth without a present care in disposing of it. The servant girl who wished for riches “that she might ride in her carriage and feel like missus,” had the delights of anticipation only, poor soul! while ours are embodied in the delicious reflection of having passed that “missus” on the road, with a pair of fast trotters—taking the air with quite an air, at the rate of “two forty.”
“Come easy, go fast,” was the remark of an old German Uncle, who, having made a fortune by hard knocks at the anvil, looked with a quiet smile at these thousands in perspective. In regard to the horses, the old gentleman was right—but as the money never came, I think his premises were altogether wrong. One thing is certain, real estate rose very rapidly in our vicinity at that time, and as several lots went off at spanking prices, to be kept out of our clutches, we may be said to have been benefactors to the sellers and conveyancers. So that copper—the vilest of metal—may, in some crucibles, be transformed into gold. But not to anticipate.
Grubemout had been upon the mountain-side, which overlooks the delightful village of Fleeceington, for a month or more, making careful chiselings from rocks, and excavations at their sides. Uptosnuff carried his pick-axe and his basket. The “collection” gradually swelled upon their hands, until it became quite formidable; and the “choice specimens,” were without number, rich, and without reason, rare. Drawitwell, the host of “The Hawk and Buzzard,” had his eye upon their movements, and always made it a point to take a peep at their basket when they descended in the evening. He was an open-eyed sort of an old lark, who had had his own way in the village at election times and at trainings, by virtue of a colonelcy and aidship to the governor—a cheap sort of payment for service rendered—and he felt as if nothing of importance ought to transpire in the place, unless he had a hand in it. Drawitwell did not like the air of mystery with which his lodgers slipped the covered basket up stairs, after they had performed their ablutions; nor the roaring noise made overhead, as the “specimens” were poured into the two great chests, previously prepared; and he was just the man to get at the bottom of a mare’s nest. So, by virtue of appliances best known to himself, he contrived to get a look at the collected specimens, and made up his mind at once that the thing was too slily managed by half, and that if there was wealth in the rocks he would have a finger in the transaction. “He would at any rate.”
Crispin, the village cobbler, had thrown his eyes from his lapstone, across the creek, and up the hill-side, to take note of the motions of “the wandering stone-crackers,” as he called them, and his brain was in a pother.
The blacksmith had sharpened their pick more than once, which had put on edge his curiosity, and had “contrived to pick their brains, while they pecked the rocks,” as he jocosely remarked, and he had smelt metal in their movements.
Over their evening ale, at the tavern, the probabilities and possibilities of gold or silver being found in the mountain, were discussed with various degrees of profundity, and the certainty that something of the kind was there, was most sagely resolved on. Time, in whose crucible all doubts are solved, soon confirmed their sagacity by a “copper button” presented to the landlord with the compliments of Uptosnuff, with hints, but not positive injunctions as to secrecy. He knew his man.
“What do you think of that?” asked Drawitwell, of his cronies the same evening, with an air of authority, holding up the copper button. “What do you think of that, my lads?”
“Hellow!” exclaimed the bewildered cobbler, “landlord, why—why is that goold?”