One of these waifs would start out in the morning and visit all the law offices; then he would hang around the courts and public offices; or he would go from shop to shop begging a situation. Only give him something to do, something on which to feed the fire of his ambition, and no matter how hard the work or how small the pay he would gladly undertake it. Give him a trial; he was apt and honest, and he must soon have work or starve. Day after day, from morning till night, and every day for weeks and months, with heart in his throat, and big shamefaced tears now and then slipping out from under his eye-lashes, his very soul sinking within him, he would make his mournful rounds. All was life and bustle, and merry money-making; fortune's favorites jostled him as they hurried past; only he with stifled longings was doomed to walk the streets like a beggar and an outcast. Yet not alone, for there were hundreds of others like him, every steamer emptying out a fresh supply, and the merchants could not furnish places for twenty applicants a day. Often a hundred of these sad earnest faces might have been seen standing at one time, at seven o'clock in the morning, before a store waiting for the door to open in order to answer an advertisement for a bookkeeper. At length heart-sick and disgusted they would scatter off, some finally to do the work of porter or daylaborer, or to drive a cart or milk wagon, or to work on a farm; others, and by far the larger number, going to the mines. There the wanderer, standing in the cold running snow-stream of the Sierra, working in the river-beds or on the cañon-side until his limbs are numb and sharp rheumatic pains shoot through his shoulders, at night tossing in sleepless unrest on his hard bed, or gazing in heartful self-pity on the stars thinking of home, with crushed enthusiasm frets his days and nights away, at morning wishing it were night and at night wishing the morning were come, brooding over his lost estate and the unrewarded

EVER-FLITTING FORTUNE.

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drudgery which has befallen him, over visions of departed promise that rose so flush in his youthful manhood, now all fled, leaving him but the one hope of final rest. So time slowly drags along, while fortune flits before. Talk to the unfortunate of bearing up, of the folly of despair, of the greater difficulties conquered by the heroic struggles of others, and he will point you to years of unrequited toil, to the bright yellow ignis fatuus that ever eludes his grasp, to the many times when undismayed he rose after a fall, and applied himself with new energy to new tasks, until bruised in heart and bleeding he can rise no more. He asks not your sympathy; for his failure he makes no defence; he will never return to his friends humiliated; leave him alone to die!

It is sad to see dead hope entombed in a sound body, to see the vigorous mind cramped as in a cruel prison-house, and the guide of young manhood brought low. To him who was thrown upon himself in youth, and accustomed to the rough cares of life, it makes little difference where or how his lot is cast. If he cannot be cook he can be scullion, line his stomach with satisfying kitchen grease and be happy. But with those who have been carefully guarded in their youth it is not so. Crush the enthusiasm in an ambitious sensitive heart, put out the fire that drives the machinery, and you may bury what is left. Work is not the well-bred young man's misfortune; with an object he will work his fingers to the bone, he will work his brain until the veins on his hot forehead swell almost to bursting; he will leave behind him dead half a score of your mechanical drudges at work. Poverty is not his misfortune; to be well housed, well fed, and well clothed are trifles to him who has a purpose in hand. His misfortune is to have his intuitions stifled, his talents choked, his mind withered for want of development; this it is that makes him sour and misanthropic, all worth living for, growth, development, culture, an intellectual life,

a nobler manhood, or the hope of attaining these, forever lost. Perhaps it would be well for such a one to ask himself if it were not possible to find happiness in something short of the full realization of his original plans.

Success often springs from failure; at all events, it lies in the discipline wrought by noble efforts rather than in the end of wealth and luxury. Many a heartsick wretch in San Francisco has wandered over these sand-hills, out around by the Presidio hills to the Golden Gate bluffs and the ocean, and there gazing forth on the broad waters, or watching the tumbling waves come in and break in silvery surf at his feet, thought of the dead past, of blasted hopes, and a black future; thought in self-pitying woe of home and the loved ones there; thought of the great gulf of separation here, and the dismal blank of the hereafter. Why, O God why is it?" he would ask. "Dost thou delight in breeding men to misery?"

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THE miners of the flush times, their characteristics and quality, their idiosyncrasies and temper, are as far beyond description as the wind and weather of California, where the twenty sides of twenty thousand hills, and the twenty turns of twenty thousand ravines have each an individual climate. Twenty life-times might be spent and twenty volumes written before the story of one mining-camp in all its ramifications could be told. The story of one mining-camp was the story of mankind; and to follow it after death was the story of the gods.

Each man of them should be enriched with heapedup grains of gold brought down by the streams of the Sierra, as Croesus was enriched by the golden sands of Pactolus.

Soon many of the camps could boast their church and schoolhouse, and temperance hotel, and express office and bank; the scattering huts and cabins, and split-board one and two-story houses, and squares of shabby shanties, with a block or two edged on one side with red brick or rough stone stores, all clustering beside swift-running streams, and the now stumpy hillsides, and taking on the dignity of town.

As out of rough stones a smooth even wall is made, so from these sometime uncouth characters, these hairy and woollen-shirted men, were formed staid

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communities, with happy homes and virtuous environment.

Their reading was mostly of the English Reynolds type, and the French Faublas' Liaisons dangereuses order, "where," as Lamartine says, "vice parodied virtue, and riotous liberty, love." Their books were not always as full of charming villainy even as Rousseau's Confessions.

Alexander the Great, manslayer, was a small man; Alexander Small, miner, was a great man. Anyone with men enough could conquer any nation or kill any number; it requires no quality of greatness to do this, and surely no one but a fool would drink himself to death; but I do not know that any great man pretends to deny that he is a fool. On the other hand, he who accomplishes much with little; he who can deny himself, rule himself, is greater than he who can only rule others. Alexander the Great had ambition of which no medicine on earth could physic him; but force was greater than ambition, greater than all glory and all gods. Alexander the Great, dram-drinker, man-killer, and gambler in ordinary to his Satanic majesty, the world has known these two or three thousand years; Alexander Small, gold-digger to the gods, and the greater of the two, the world has never known at all.

Many great men have been underrated during their lives, many small men have been overrated; many small in some things and great in others have been rated small or great in everything. Ralston, as the California bank's president, sitting behind other men's millions, was great, as Croesus was great; Ralston, a week later, dead, self-drowned, out of all his troubles, was a small man indeed.

Evil results sometimes flow from good qualities; some are generous because they are weak, and some are weak because they are generous. The sweep

ing winds of passion palsy the heart, jaundice the eye, and dry of its freshness all the gentler qualities of