32. Portrait of Ulysses S. Grant.. 33. The Resident Gentry .... 34. Bibliomania of the Golden Dustman.. 101 72. Interior of a Miner's Cabin ... 77. Interior of the Bodie Bunker ....... 282 | 123. Reduction Works, New Almaden.... 545 552 553 554 91. Portrait of Philip H. Sheridan...... 298 137. Firing up.... 93. Bella righted by the Golden Dustman 373 94. The Lovely Woman's Fortune told.. 384 112. Worshiping Tablets of Ancestors.... 434 158. Refugee Train............... 113. Bride and Bridegroom drinking. .... 435 159. Sherman's Head-Quarters. . . . 122. The Wedding Dinner at Greenwich.. 520 | 168. The Dome of Popocatepetl WAS prepared to find great changes on the Empire City-which was nothing but a sagedesert inhabited by Dutch Nick on the occasion of my early explorations-I was quite bewildered with the busy scenes of life and industry. Quartzmills and saw-mills had completely usurped the valley along the head of the Carson River; and now the hammering of stamps, the hissing of steam, the whirling clouds of smoke from tall chimneys, and the confused clamor of voices from a busy multitude, reminded one of a manufacturing city. Here, indeed, was progress of a substantial kind. Further beyond, at Silver City, there were similar evidences of prosperity. From the deand up the grade to Gold Hill, it is almost a continuous line of quartz-mills, tunnels, dumps, sluices, water-wheels, frame shanties, and grogshops. Gold Hill itself has swelled into the proportions of a city. It is now practically a continuation of Virginia. Here the evidences of busy enterprise are peculiarly striking. The whole hill is riddled and honey-combed with shafts and tunnels. Engine-houses for hoisting are perched on points apparently inaccessible; quartz-mills of various capacities line the sides of the cañon; the main street is well flanked by brick stores, Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1865, by Harper and Brothers, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court for the Southern District of New York. VOL. XXXI.-No. 181.-A hotels, express-offices, saloons, restaurants, groggeries, and all those attractive places of resort which go to make up a flourishing mining town. Even a newspaper is printed here, which I know to be a spirited and popular institution, having been viciously assailed by the same. A runaway team of horses, charging full tilt down the street, greeted our arrival in a lively and characteristic manner, and came very near capsizing our stage. One man was run over some distance below, and partially crushed; but as somebody was killed nearly every day, such a meagre result afforded no general satisfaction. Descending the slope of the ridge that divides Gold Hill from Virginia City a strange scene attracts the eye. He who gazes upon it for the first time is apt to doubt if it be real. Perhaps there is not another spot upon the face of the globe that presents a scene so weird and desolate in its natural aspect, yet so replete with busy life, so animate with human interest. It is as if a wondrous battle raged, in which the combatants were man and earth. Myriads of swarthy, bearded, dust-covered men are piercing into the grim old mountains, ripping them open, thrusting murderous holes through their naked bodies; piling up engines to cut out their vital arteries; stamping and crushing up with infernal machines their disemboweled fragments, and holding fiendish revels amidst the chaos of destruction; while the mighty earth, blasted, barren, and scarred by the tempests of ages, fiercely affronts the foe-smiting him with disease and death, scoffing at his puny assaults with a grim scorn; ever grand in his desolation, ever dominant in the infinity of his endurance. "Come!" he seems to mutter, "dig, delve, pierce, and bore, with your picks, your shovels, and your infernal machines; wring out of my veins a few globules of the precious blood; hoard it, spend it, gamble for it, bring perdition to your souls with it-do what you will, puny insects! Sooner or later the death-blow smites you, and Earth swallows you! From earth you came-to earth you go again!" The city lies on a rugged slope, and is singularly diversified in its uprisings and downfallings. It is difficult to determine, by any system of observation or measurement, upon what principle it was laid out. My impression is that it was never laid out at all, but followed the dips, spurs, and angles of the immortal Comstock. Some of the streets run straight enough; others seem to dodge about at acute angles in search of an open space, as miners explore the subterranean regions in search of a lead. The crossstreets must have been forgotten in the original plan-if ever there was a plan about this eccentric city. Sometimes they happen accidentally at the most unexpected points; and sometimes they don't happen at all where you are sure to require them. A man in a hurry to get from the upper slope of the town to any opposite point below must try it under-ground or over the roofs of the houses, or take the customary circuit of half a mile. Every body seems to have built wherever he could secure a lot. The two main streets, it must be admitted, are so far |