silver being stored in bonanzas, often solid deposits of almost Shafts had been pure metal. sunk in all directions: tunnels and adits were branching away in gloomy labyrinths on both sides of the main gallery. That transept for the length of nearly two miles was loftier than the roof of the noblest cathedral, and, like the cathedral, it was reared upon stately columns. Pillars of the rock had been left; but they could not be trusted, and were supplemented by massive supports of timber, where the tree-trunks, as thick as the body of a man, were bratticed and riveted by strong clamps of iron. They bore up a network of ponderous crossbeams and rafters. Yet not infrequently, and in spite of all precautions, rock and timber succumbed to the pressure of the hill, burying a gang of workers under a stone avalanche. The Spaniards, who had their own experience of mining, say that it needs a gold-mine to run a silver-mine, and there never That

was

a truer proverb. colossal timbering cost infinitely more than the marbles and sculpturing of many splendid fanes. Each tree had been felled in some distant forest, dragged laboriously over snow or rutted tracks by interminable teams of oxen, hauled up the steep slopes of Mount Davidson, and painfully lowered by huge derricks. And, apropos to the derricks, it must be remembered that all the machinery was transported from San Francisco. Before the erection of the mills, when the first

to California for crushing, the freights had swallowed fivesixths of the profits. And a continuance of that excessive outlay was the history of all the mines: when the best were making enormous yields, perhaps not a tenth might be distributed in dividends. The quicksilver alone was an enormous item. Never was more powerful pumping - machinery erected than on the Comstock. At one time the pumps were lifting about ten million gallons a-day; yet they were too feeble to cope with the flooding of the lower levels when the shafts had only gone down to 400 or 500 feet. That was one of the chief reasons for the projection of the Sutro tunnel.

"Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink,"

sang Coleridge in "The Ancient Mariner." When the miner ran a fair chance of being drowned below, above he had the choice between slow poisoning and perishing of thirst. Water there was, though in no great profusion, but it was impregnated with alkali, or even tainted with arsenic; and that, perhaps, was the best excuse for the hard drinking. Afterwards, when the first fever of the silver-chase had calmed down, the community came forward in a public-spirited manner, fetching the pure element from distant lakes in channels and long aqueducts worthy of the Romans.

As for the Sutro tunnel, it is not only one of the most stupendous achievements of modern

engineering, but one of the grandest monuments to individual determination. Sutro, by sheer indomitable strength of will, actually forced it upon the hostile capitalists it was to benefit. He was a young man with no influential connections, who owned a small quartz-mill on the Carson river. His ambition was as aspiring as his means were small. He set himself to solve the drainage and ventilation problems, so that the mines might be worked profitably, and more or less salubriously, at the deepest levels. He was no man for half-measures. He proposed to He proposed to pierce the mountain at the depth of 2000 feet with lateral branches his tunnel was to be six miles in length: and though the estimates fluctuated as conditions changed, the ultimate cost was a million sterling. The tale of his trials and disappointments is a long one. At first his hopes were high, and everything ran in his favour. He had obtained the signed support of all the leading owners. He obtained Acts conferring certain privileges from the State Legislature and from Congress. Then the Bank of California, which was all-powerful on the Comstock, took alarm, and induced the owners to repudiate their pledges. Most men would have given up in despair. Sutro, by selling himself up, cleared a sufficiency of dollars to pay his expenses to Washington. His trip was successful, for Congress confirmed its grant, and, moreover, he got some substantial financial assistance. He came back to

make burning appeals to the miners of the Comstock, by explaining to them that they were missing their sole chance of relief from discomfort and immunity from accidents. The fierce agitation put pressure on the capitalists. Next he crossed the Atlantic to stump France and England: there he raised sums by subscription which were swelled on his return, till the funds were secured for commencing the enterprise. When the financial difficulties were overcome, the engineering troubles had to be surmounted. We have heard something of similar troubles from the St Gothard works; but the Swiss engineers benefited by the Sutro experiences. We cannot enter into details, but the labour was carried through in face of fire and water. The vertical shafts sunk from above were flooded by the drain from the porous rock, and the labourers, whose shifts were changed every two hours, were drawing their breaths in the blasts of a burning furnace. Notwithstanding the use of all scientific appliances, the temperature, towards the end of the work, had risen to 114°. The strongest men would drop asphyxiated, and the mules refused to face the heat. Human endurance had wellnigh reached its limit when the final wall of partition was breached and free ventilation established with the cooler drift on the other side, in a drift of dust and débris that nearly suffocated the exhausted pioneers.

Going back to the spring of 1860, Virginia City was already

in a hot fit of speculation. Never was seen such strange gambling: it was all for counters, with no cash. The ready money was planked down in the gamblingdens or on the drinking-bars. No one had any credit, yet any number of sales were effected without even the formality of setting them down on paper. But as genuine lodes yielded real profits, and exaggerated reports of the results reached San Francisco, transactions became serious. The Californian The Californian capitalists were beset in the passes of the Sierra by penniless prospectors, offering the most tempting bargains. When they got to Virginia the shrewdest of them saw that the reefs were quite good enough to gamble on. Now and again a shaft struck a bonanza which showed the value of the prizes to be gained. The simple enormity of the sums nominally paid for claims sufficed to float a prospectus and rig a market: 500 dollars per mining foot was no extraordinary price, and as much as 2000 dollars had been given. The formation of new companies, the shares of which were readily subscribed, went on with unexampled rapidity. In two or three years they were to be numbered by the hundred: some had a more or less fictitious capital of a million sterling. A regular Stock Exchange had been established in Virginia, and in San Francisco from three rival board - rooms the buyers and sellers overflowed into the adjacent streets. It was a case of Law's South Sea Bubble over again, and with more universal excitement. For everybody,

without exception, was trafficking in stocks, from the state governor and the mayors to the bootblack at the block corner. Yet still, and for long, the claims were only held by right of occupation; important transactions were carried out without the execution of title-deeds, which was to give the primitive law courts excessive occupation, and enrich a class of legal specialists. One mine, the Ophir, went in for nearly thirty lawsuits in three years: there was such a rush on the services of one popular pleader that for a single fee he had 160,000 dollars. That litigation, by the way, was responsible for a large proportion of the crime. A Galway sessions in the beginning of the century was a scene of millennium peace compared to the proceedings of a Virginia tribunal. The judge, like he of the 'Bon Gaultier Ballads,' backed up his judgments with his Colt; the litigants took shots at the opposing counsel, and subsequently argued the questions out among themselves, when they drew and fired over their whisky-skins.

The capitalists who came to the front would never have become millionaires had they made much pretence of playing fair. It was the small investors who went to the wall: as one was beggared another came in; and the great object was to tempt them, and then squeeze them out. If small holders refused to be scared, irresistible pressure was put upon them by increasing the calls for the development of the mine. They failed to pay up, and their shares were

forfeited. So each speculation, whether good or bad, was at the mercy of the innermost circle who controlled it. It was such a commanding position which enabled the Bank of California, holding large interests either in property or on mortgage, nearly to balk the gigantic enterprise of Sutro, when success seemed practically within his grasp.

Reticence was of the essence of that shady speculation. The gloom of the deepest recess of the Comstock was not so dark as the ideal secrecy observed in the working of a favourite quartz-mine. Surprises of one kind or another were always to be sprung, and the shareholders had any amount of sensation for their money. No outsider was admitted to the workings on any pretext. The superintendent and foremen were well paid to be silent, and only a chosen few of the miners were engaged for "the secret shifts." One company tried the plan of imprisoning their people in the works at proportionate wages, but the plan did not answer. The free born Americans refused to be enslaved. Yet it is astonishing how staunchly the employed stood in with the employers, and how seldom important revelations were made. For the surface swarmed with spies of the speculators, who had carte blanche to bribe to any amount, and who stood drinks in the saloons that they might worm out invaluable confidences. But when there was no authentic intelligence, reports were invented, and being accredited by the sales of leading banks

and brokers, they served pretty much the same purpose. At length, after crying wolf time after time, a Nemesis overtook the largest operators. In 1864 the inflation suddenly collapsed, when Gould & Curry burst up. The owners had bought it for a trifle from Gould, who wandered off to get a livelihood by lumbering. It had paid three million dollars in a couple of years, and now it was said to have given out. There was a simultaneous fall in other stocks: the panic spread: the small shareholders went bankrupt: no calls could be enforced: the pumps ceased to work, and the lower adits were drowned: the mills were abandoned: buildings and timbering fell into decay, and temporarily the Comstock was а solitude. The ruin was universal, yet it was a false alarm, for ten years afterwards the biggest bonanza of all was discovered. When industries and speculation were resumed with redoubled vigour, the victims of that unreasoning scare had sad cause to repent their precipitation.

For a time there was consternation and general perturbation. The fever of speculation was succeeded by a cold fit, and many thousands of immigrants saw their subsidiary occupations threatened. tions threatened. Not to speak of the actual workers in the mines, for three years the three hundred miles of mountain and valley from the coast to Washoe had been overcrowded with everincreasing traffic. The teamsters who brought machinery and provided supplies were to be numbered by the thousand.

Lumbering camps doing lively business had been set up in the lonely forests of the Sierras. Now the Stock Exchanges were deserted, there was a stoppage in the passes, and the axe of the woodman was thrown aside. But the momentary set-back proved a blessing in disguise. In 1864 the mining activity of the West was still severed from the settled States to the eastward by dreary expanses of unpeopled territory. The collapse at Washoe made adventurous men desperate, and sent forth a lost legion of prospectors, who had to choose between discovery and starvation. Reckless as they were, they argued reasonably that the wealth of Washoe could be no isolated phenomenon. Nor were they without material proof of the theory, for the year before, in another district of Nevada, fresh ground had been broken at the promising diggings of the Reese river. There was a scattering rush from east to west, and new treasure-troves lured on the advance-guards of the army. On the Reese river they struck it gold- and silverrich, beyond the most sanguine hopes of the prospectors. Oregon ledge ran a good second to the Comstock lode. Austin City sprang up in a couple of years, from two to twenty thousand inhabitants. Again at Austin there was the sharp pinch of famine, when flour was fetching two shillings the pound; again the constraining force of hunger opened up regular communications, and with the trains of waggons setting in from Washoe there

mingled picturesque strings of camels, who found themselves at home in the sandy wastes, and breathed freely in the sulphureous atmosphere. Again adventurers had to endure the tortures of Tantalus. There was wealth at will, but it cost dear to realise it. Remoteness from sea and rivers made the outlay almost prohibitive. Timber brought from a distance fetched a dollar for the two feet. But the chief trouble was the cost of the smelting ore which would have paid well at Virginia, at Austin was barely worth the working. Nevertheless the settlements flourished, and made another start with the approach of the eastern railways. Then gold placers, which were always the preludes to the silver finds, were discovered in the Black Hills, the Mauvaise Terres of Dacotah. That unkindly and repulsive region began to be colonised, and the prospectors had pioneered the the way for the ranchers. Next the tide of exploration swelled up in Montana, where at the euphoniously named Silver Bow, and round "Granite Mountain," richest of all the Montana mines, it reached high-water mark. Thence it overflowed into Idaho, and the more remote territory of Washington was not unsuccessfully exploité. We do not say that the prospectors were disappointed, but more systematic investigations were indefinitely deferred.

But the second stage of the great boom was the revival of enthusiasm over Washoe.

In