on the way, and twice a petrol and drink
station of one board shed, and a man with a jolly Irish face and a gun
openly in his belt, to attend to it. We had no breakdowns, and just at
sunset got into the one and only street of Moonbeams. But there were no
stone houses or anything but sheds of one storey, generally, and more
often rows of tents. The Moonbeams is not three months old! So quickly
do these places grow when a rush for newly discovered rich gold is made.
We had passed quantities of "claims" on the way; piles of stones like
little cairns marking their four corners; and I wonder if in five
hundred years the socialists of that day will scream and try to
demonstrate that the descendants of those brave adventurers have no
right to their bit of land, but should give it up to them, who only talk
and fume and do no work upon it.

Everyone was in from the mines, which are all close, shafts sticking
up from every hill and heaps of broken rock and earth rising like mole
hills. The straggling street was full of men, and I should not think
in the world there can be a collection of more splendid looking
humanity--all young and strong and wholesome. The Senator says life is
so impossibly difficult here that only those in the best of health can
stand it, and to face such chances requires the buoyancy and hope of
youth. Whatever the cause they were all lovely creatures, just like our
guardsmen, numbers tall and slender and thin through, and many of them
might have been the Eton eleven or Oxford eight, and all with the
insouciance and careless grace I have already told you of.

You know what I mean by "thin through," Mamma: that lovely look of
narrow hips and slender waist and fine shoulders, not padded and not
too square, and looked at sideways not a bit thick; the chest, not the
tummy, the most sticking out part, and the general expression of race
horses. You would have to melt off layers of hips and other bits of most
of the Eastern American, and then alter the set of their bones to get
them to resemble any of these. And yet I suppose they are all Americans,
too, drifted here from other States; but they look so absolutely
different; I expect they are not the conglomeration of all nations who
have emigrated, like in New York, but the original pure stock. Or can it
be the life after all? In any case it is too attractive, and I wish you
could see them, Mamma?

They welcomed the Senator and his party as friends, and as we wen