but no sooner was he fairly at work when he was
greeted with :
"Get out of there, you infernal nigger, or I'll blow your head off!"
" Good Lord, massa, is dis yore hole ? Where, then, shall I dig?"
"Go up on top of the hill and dig, and be damned,," was the reply.
The negro went, not dreaming that he had been directed thither as the most unlikely place to find gold in the whole district. Nevertheless, he sunk a shaft, at the bottom of which he found gold, which he took out to the value of $4,000. The place was named Negro hill, and proved to be the richest diggmgs in all that reoion.
o
Labor was the only honorable occupation, and labor was essential to manhood. He who did not work was a social bastard, and a shirk. Lodging-houses in early times consisted of a shanty, with walls lined with standing berths, having coarse beds always ready made, so that the proprietor had little else to do than to sit on a stool and take the money. A miner once having occasion to occupy such a bed in San Francisco seemed troubled in mind as he weighed out the dust, and finally broke out with :
"Say, stranger, do you just sit thar and take a dol- lar from every man that sleeps on them beds?"
"Yes, that's my business," replied the keeper.
"Then," said the troubled miner, slowly, as if talk- ing to himself, "its a damned mean way to make a living, that's all I've got to say about it."
See that fortnightly steamer, proudly furrowing her way through the great deep from Panama to San Francisco 1 To the scattered inhabitants of this vast Pacific slope she brings intelligence from the old busy east. Here is money and merchandise ; here profit and losses ; here germs of fortune and seeds of bank- ruptcy. This, however, is not all. This oce
