We found
comparatively a small proportion of the people who had commenced work
in the morning still at their pans. Numbers were lying asleep under the
trees, or in the shade of their tents and wagons. Others sat smoking
and chatting in circles upon the grass, mending their clothes or
performing other little domestic duties at the same time. It was really
a motley scene. Indians strutted by in all the pride of gaudy calico,
the manners of the savage concealed beneath the dress of the civilized
man. Muscular sun-burnt fellows, whose fine forms and swarthy faces
pronounced that Spanish blood ran through their veins, gossiped away
with sallow hatchet-faced Yankees, smart men at a bargain, and always
on the lookout for squalls. Here, and there one spied out the flannel
shirt and coarse canvas trousers of a seaman--a runaway, in all
probability, from a South Sea whaler; while one or two stray negroes
chattered with all the volubility of their race, shaking their woolly
heads and showing their white teeth. I got into conversation with one
tall American; he was a native-born Kentuckian, and full of the bantam
sort of consequence of his race. He predicted wonderful things from the
discovery of the mineral treasures of California, observing that it
would make a monetary revolution all over the world, and that nothing
similar, at least to so great an extent, was ever known in history.
"Look around! for, stranger," said he to me, "I guess you don't realise
such a scene every day, and that's a fact. There's gold to be had for
the picking of it up, and by all who choose to come and work. I reckon
old John Bull will scrunch up his fingers in his empty pockets when he
comes to hear of it. It's a most everlasting wonderful thing, and
that's a fact, that beats Joe Dunkin's goose-pie and apple sarse."

Farther on we came upon a tremendous-looking tent, formed by two or
three tents being flung into one, which, on examination, we found was
doing duty as a chapel. A missionary, from one of the New England
States, as I hear, was holding forth to a pretty large congregation.
The place was very hot and chokey, and I only stayed long enough to
hear that the discourse abounded in the cloudy metaphors and vague
technicalities of Calvinistic theology.

The remainder of the afternoon I have been devoting to writing my
journal, which I here break off to commence a hearty good supper, in
revenge for the scrambling sort of dinner one has had to-day.