Italian straw hats were in favor at one time to the disgust of a Panama hat dealer who vainlv souo-ht to get rid of his high-priced wares. One day he bethought himself to buy five dozen hats from the Italian rival, and donate them to the chain-gang working in the street. When the straw-hat wearers saw these men decked therein, they at once discarded theirs and patronized the dealer.
Swan tells the following story of a tall Irishman named Frank, whom he knew at the mines in '48. Frank found a great deal of gold, but threw it away on drink. He used to go on a spree for two or three days at a time. One day he was drinking at a liquor tent, and had his buckskin bag open in his hand. A looker-on told him to be more careful or he would lose his gold; whereupon he seized the bag by the bottom and scattered it all around on the ground outside the tent, saying he could get plenty more. He had three pounds in the bag at the time, and it was nearly all lost. Some time after that Frank made $7,000 at the Middle fork, which lasted him just six weeks.
In the summer of 1850 five dollars was not an unusual price to be paid for a watermelon in the mines. Joshua Griffith, an old pioneer, planted six acres in the spring of 1851 on the Merced, and confidently expected to realize a handsome sum from them when ripe. Sometime previous to this he had purchased a thousand straw hats which he still had on hand, their sale being dull and when the young watermelon plants came up, to protect them from the frosts, he determined to utilize the hats, and at night each vine \vould be carefully covered; and in the morning when the sun would commence to pour his warm beams on the earth the vines would be uncovered. Everything was auspicious, until one morning Griffith went as usual to uncover the vmes, when not a hat, vine, nor any of the soil that had been turned up by the
