e boys were ready enough to do
if my father did not object.

He did not object; being, indeed, very willing that we should put in a
day's work for the benefit of our friend. For, as he said, to undertake
one day's prospecting for a friend was a very different matter from
taking to prospecting as a business.

It is a fascinating pursuit; men who contract the prospecting disease
seldom get the fever entirely out of their systems again, and it was
for this reason my father was so set against it, considering that no
greater misfortune could befall two farmer-boys like ourselves than to
be drawn into such a way of life. Now that we were seventeen years old,
however, and might be supposed to have some discretion, he had little
fear for Joe and me, knowing, as he did, that we shared his sentiments.
We had seen enough of the life of the prospector to understand that a
more precarious way of making a living could hardly be invented.

How many men get rich at it? I have heard it estimated at one man in
five thousand; and whether this estimate--or, rather, this guess--is
right or wrong, it shows the trend of opinion.

Suppose a prospector does strike a vein of ore: what is the common
result? By the time he has sunk a shaft ten feet deep he must have a
windlass and a man to work it, and being in most cases too poor to hire
a miner, his only way of getting help is to take in a partner. The two
go on sinking, until presently the hole is too deep to use a windlass
any more--a horse-whim is needed and then a hoisting engine. But it is
seldom that the ore dug out of a shaft will pay the expense of sinking
it--for powder and drills, ropes, buckets and timbers, are expensive
things--much less enable the owner to lay by anything, and the
probability is that to buy a hoisting engine he must sell another
portion of his claim. And so it goes, until, by the time his claim has
been turned into a mine--for, as the common and very true saying is,
"Mines are made, not found"--his share of it will probably have been
reduced to one-quarter or less; while it is quite within the limits of
probability that, becoming wearied by long waiting for the slow
development of his prospect, he will have sold out for what he can get
and gone back to his old life.

But though I do not advocate the business of prospecting as a way of
making a living--I had rather pitch hay or dig potatoes myself--I am far
from wishing to disparage the prospector himself or to