et with a couple of baskets of apples in
your hands, and you meet a friend, you naturally invite him to take a
few. That describes the condition of things in Virginia in the "flush
times." Every man had his pockets full of stock, and it was the actual
custom of the country to part with small quantities of it to friends
without the asking.

Very often it was a good idea to close the transaction instantly, when a
man offered a stock present to a friend, for the offer was only good and
binding at that moment, and if the price went to a high figure shortly
afterward the procrastination was a thing to be regretted. Mr. Stewart
(Senator, now, from Nevada) one day told me he would give me twenty feet
of "Justis" stock if I would walk over to his office. It was worth five
or ten dollars a foot. I asked him to make the offer good for next day,
as I was just going to dinner. He said he would not be in town; so I
risked it and took my dinner instead of the stock. Within the week the
price went up to seventy dollars and afterward to a hundred and fifty,
but nothing could make that man yield. I suppose he sold that stock of
mine and placed the guilty proceeds in his own pocket. [My revenge will
be found in the accompanying portrait.] I met three friends one
afternoon, who said they had been buying "Overman" stock at auction at
eight dollars a foot. One said if I would come up to his office he would
give me fifteen feet; another said he would add fifteen; the third said
he would do the same. But I was going after an inquest and could not
stop. A few weeks afterward they sold all their "Overman" at six hundred
dollars a foot and generously came around to tell me about it--and also
to urge me to accept of the next forty-five feet of it that people tried
to force on me.

These are actual facts, and I could make the list a long one and still
confine myself strictly to the truth. Many a time friends gave us as
much as twenty-five feet of stock that was selling at twenty-five dollars
a foot, and they thought no more of it than they would of offering a
guest a cigar. These were "flush times" indeed! I thought they were
going to last always, but somehow I never was much of a prophet.

To show what a wild spirit possessed the mining brain of the community,
I will remark that "claims" were actually "located" in excavations for
cellars, where the pick had exposed what seemed to be quartz veins--and
not cellars in the suburbs,