atmosphere ; the excessively prim and puritanical, who
when they fell never stopped until they reached bot-
tom; godless young men, of rich and honorable parent-
age, who preferred the woollen shirt and unkempt
beard of the miner with immediate independence to
the more sedate and less venturesome life of plodding
respectability, with the crowning honor of church
deaconship or bank director to gild its latter days.
Notwithstanding the diversity of character here displayed, diverse in thought, customs, beliefs and tongues, there was almost immediately apparent — in the Caucasian portion of the society at least — a re- markable homogeneity and oneness in adaptation to the new order of thino;s. Strangers to each other's faces, to each other's hearts, to each other's idiosyn- crasies, come from strange lands into a land strange to all, and there at once fit themselves to strange and improvised ways never before heard of by any. The facility with which the several elements coalesced may be attributed to two causes. First, although the up- rising was general and proceeded from nations distant and diverse, the exodus was one of certain homogene- ous elements, no less individual and distinct than other migrations of peoples. Human nature the world over is framed on one model, and the component parts of an individual society, though widely scattered origin- ally, may be collected and fused into recognised metal which shall pass current in all societies. Certain qualities and classes throughout all the contributing nations, were alike touched by the knowledge of the gold discovery, and rose up in answer to one common impulse. Secondly, being thus brought together obe- dient to common promptings for the accomplishment, each for himself, of a common object, there was a sympa- thy of interests and a community of though, and action never displayed by characteristics and nationalities so varied and extended since the crusades. The fact is, so- ciety here was at once so unique and abnormal, that it was impossible for anj^one thrown into it not to con-
