Still, any kind of effort-making is
better than inaction, and there is something sublime in seeing men
working in dead earnest at anything, pursuing an object with
glacier-like energy and persistence. Many a brave fellow has recorded a
most eventful chapter of life on these Calaveras rocks. But most of the
pioneer miners are sleeping now, their wild day done, while the few
survivors linger languidly in the washed-out gulches or sleepy village
like harried bees around the ruins of their hive. "We have no industry
left _now_," they told me, "and no men; everybody and everything
hereabouts has gone to decay. We are only bummers--out of the game, a
thin scatterin' of poor, dilapidated cusses, compared with what we used
to be in the grand old gold-days. We were giants then, and you can look
around here and see our tracks." But although these lingering pioneers
are perhaps more exhausted than the mines, and about as dead as the dead
rivers, they are yet a rare and interesting set of men, with much gold
mixed with the rough, rocky gravel of their characters; and they
manifest a breeding and intelligence little looked for in such
surroundings as theirs.
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