r, and towards night slowly dwindled away.
Another mob followed in a few days; but the merchants had sold their
flour at sacrifices, and the booty was only a few sacks. The want of
this staff of life caused great suffering. All other vegetable food was
rapidly consumed, and for six weeks the poorer classes were forced to
live on beef alone. The effect was in all cases an inability to labor,
and in some cases serious sickness.

While thus cut off from all communication with the outer world, and
buried in the dull town, there was little for us to do save to study
each other's characters and talk the miners' language. In all new and
thinly settled countries, many ideas are expressed by figures drawn from
the pursuits of the people. Among the Indians, more than half of every
sentence is expressed by signs. And miners illustrate their conversation
by the various terms used in mining. I have always noticed how clearly
these terms conveyed the idea sought. Awkwardness in comprehending this
dialect easily reveals that the hearer bears the disgrace of being a
"pilgrim," or a "tender-foot," as they style the new emigrant. To master
it is an object of prime necessity to him who would win the miner's
respect. Thus the term "adobe," the sun-dried brick, as applied to a
man, signifies vealiness and verdancy. A "corral" is an enclosure into
which the herds are gathered; hence a person who has everything arranged
to his satisfaction announces that he has everything "corralled." A man
fortunate in any business has "struck the pay-dirt"; unfortunate, has
"reached the bed-rock." Everything viewed in the aggregate, as a train,
a family, or a town, is an "outfit." I was much at a loss, on my first
arrival, to comprehend the exact purport of a miner's criticism upon a
windy lawyer of Virginia,--"When you come to pan him out, you don't find
color." But this vocabulary is not extensive, and the pilgrim soon
learns to perceive and use its beauties.

Helena, the second point of importance in the Territory, is one hundred
and twenty-five miles north from Virginia. We travel to it over a fine,
hard road, through the low valleys of the Missouri. The beauty and
richness of these valleys increase as we leave Virginia, and everywhere
the green spots are becoming the homes of thrifty farmers. On the divide
near Boulder Creek are wonderful proofs of the gradual levelling of the
mountains, in the huge blocks of rock piled up in the most grotesque
shapes