ut town often receive as high as
2500 dollars and their board. The principal waiter in the hotel where I
board is paid 1700 dollars per year, and several others from 1200 to
1500 dollars! I fortunately have an Indian boy, or I should be forced
to clean my own boots, for I could not employ a good body servant for
the full amount of my salary as a government officer. I believe every
army officer in California, with one or two exceptions, would have
resigned last summer could they have done it, and been free at once to
commence for themselves. But the war was not then terminated, and no
one could hope to communicate with Washington correspondents, to get an
answer in less than six, and perhaps ten, months. For some time last
summer (August and July) the officers at Monterey were entirely without
servants; and the governor (Colonel Mason) actually took his turn in
cooking for his mess."

EFFECTS OF THIS DISCOVERY ON THE UNITED STATES.--The following remarks
upon the influence of this immense discovery, which appeared in a
popular New York journal on the 23rd January, proves the extent of
impression produced upon society in the States by the intelligence of
this new source of natural wealth:--

"The news (February 12) from California will attract the observation of
the whole community, A spirit is generated from those discoveries,
which is more active, more intense, and more widely spread, than that
which agitated Europe in the time of Columbus, Cortez, and Pizarro.
There seems to be no doubt that, in a short time--probably less than
two years--those mines can be made to produce 100,000,000 dollars per
year. The region is the most extensive of the kind in the world, being
800 miles in length, and 100 in width, with every indication that gold
exists in large native masses, in the rocks and mountains of the Sierra
Nevada. But these vast gold mines are not the only mineral discoveries
that have been made. The quicksilver in the same region seems to be as
abundant as the gold, so that there are approximated to each other two
metals, which will have a most important effect and utility in making
the gold mines more valuable. Heretofore the gold and silver mines of
Mexico and Peru have been valuable to Spain, because she possessed a
monopoly of the quicksilver mines at Almaden in the Peninsula. This is
surpassed by California. According to the last accounts now given to
the public, emigrants were crowding in from every port in t