228" EL DORADO,
what may we not look for in the book of human follies ?
The miseries of a miner might fill a chapter of woes. Digging and delving with eager anxiety day after day, up to the waist in water, exposed now to the rays of the burning sun, and now to cold, pitiless rains, with liberal potations of whisk e}^ during the day, and mad carousals at night, flush with great buckskin bags of gold-dust, or toiling throughout the long summer without a dollar, indebted to the butcher, baker, and grocer, heart and brain throbbing and bounding with success, or prostrate under accumulated disappoint- ments, it was more than a man with even an iron frame could endure. When disease made him its prey, there was no gentle hand to minister to his wants, no soft voice to whisper words of love and com- fort, no woman's heart on which to rest his aching head. Lying on the hard earth, or rolling in feverish agony on the shelf-bed of his cabin, often alone and unattended throughout the livelong day, while the night was made hideous by the shouts and curses of rioters, the dying miner, with thoughts of home, of parents, wife, and sister, and curses on his folly, passed away. That was the last of him in this world, name- less, graveless, never heard from ! Meanwhile, and for years after, those he left at the old home despair- ingly dwell upon his fate. Such cases were sad enough, but there were others still more melancholy. The patient, devoted wife, waiting and watching for the husband's return, toiling early and late for the support of their children, ever faithful, ever having him in her thoughts, and so passing her life away, until hope became charred and black, while the object of all this love, of this devotion, was, maybe, spending his substance with harlots, writhing under the delirium of drunkenness, without at any time bestowing even a thought upon that devoted wife and those abandoned
