pitiable pauper indeed if he cannot sell.

I spoke of the underground Virginia as a city. The Gould and Curry is
only one single mine under there, among a great many others; yet the
Gould and Curry's streets of dismal drifts and tunnels were five miles in
extent, altogether, and its population five hundred miners. Taken as a
whole, the underground city had some thirty miles of streets and a
population of five or six thousand. In this present day some of those
populations are at work from twelve to sixteen hundred feet under
Virginia and Gold Hill, and the signal-bells that tell them what the
superintendent above ground desires them to do are struck by telegraph as
we strike a fire alarm. Sometimes men fall down a shaft, there, a
thousand feet deep. In such cases, the usual plan is to hold an inquest.

If you wish to visit one of those mines, you may walk through a tunnel
about half a mile long if you prefer it, or you may take the quicker plan
of shooting like a dart down a shaft, on a small platform. It is like
tumbling down through an empty steeple, feet first. When you reach the
bottom, you take a candle and tramp through drifts and tunnels where
throngs of men are digging and blasting; you watch them send up tubs full
of great lumps of stone--silver ore; you select choice specimens from the
mass, as souvenirs; you admire the world of skeleton timbering; you
reflect frequently that you are buried under a mountain, a thousand feet
below daylight; being in the bottom of the mine you climb from "gallery"
to "gallery," up endless ladders that stand straight up and down; when
your legs fail you at last, you lie down in a small box-car in a cramped
"incline" like a half-up-ended sewer and are dragged up to daylight
feeling as if you are crawling through a coffin that has no end to it.
Arrived at the top, you find a busy crowd of men receiving the ascending
cars and tubs and dumping the ore from an elevation into long rows of
bins capable of holding half a dozen tons each; under the bins are rows
of wagons loading from chutes and trap-doors in the bins, and down the
long street is a procession of these wagons wending toward the silver
mills with their rich freight. It is all "done," now, and there you are.
You need never go down again, for you have seen it all. If you have
forgotten the process of reducing the ore in the mill and making the
silver bars, you can go back and find it again in my Esmeralda chapters
if