ally cleared of all grosser substances.

As each panful was dried and blown, the gold was weighed, and put into a
large white breakfast cup, the bottom of which was soon heaped up with
shining particles, varying in size from the smallest visible speck, to
little lumps like grains of corn.

"Bravo!" exclaimed McLeod, as he weighed the last pan, and added the
gold to that already in the cup. "I congratulate you, gentlemen, on
your success. The day's work is equal to one hundred and eighty
dollars--about thirty dollars per man. Few men are so lucky their first
day, I assure you, unless, as has been the case once or twice they
should hit upon a nugget or two."

"That being the case, we shall have supper," cried Ned Sinton; "and
while we are about it, do you go, Larry, to mine host of the hotel, and
pay for the dinner for which he gave us credit. I don't wish to remain
an hour in debt, if I can avoid it."

"Mister McLeod," slowly said Bill Jones--who, during the whole operation
of drying and weighing the gold, had remained seated on a log, looking
on with an expression of imbecile astonishment, and without uttering a
word--"Mister McLeod, if I may make bold to ax, how much is one hundred
and eighty dollars?"

Bill's calculating powers were of the weakest possible character.

"About thirty-six pounds sterling," replied McLeod. Bill's eyes were
wide open before, but the extent to which he opened them on hearing this
was quite alarming, and suggested the idea that they would never close
again. The same incapacity to calculate figures rendered him unable to
grasp correlative facts. He knew that thirty-six pounds in one day was
a more enormous and sudden accumulation of wealth than had ever entered
into his nautical mind to conceive of. But to connect this with the
fact that a voyage and journey of many months had brought him there;
that a similar journey and voyage would be required to reconduct him
home; and that in the meantime he would have to pay perhaps five pounds
sterling for a flannel shirt, and probably four pounds or more for a
pair of boots, and everything else in proportion, was to his limited
intellectual capacity a simple impossibility. He contented himself with
remarking, in reference to these things, that "w'en things in gin'ral
wos more nor ord'nar'ly oncommon, an' w'en incomprehensibles was blowin'
a reg'lar hurricane astarn, so that a man couldn't hold on to the
belayin'-pins he'd bin used to, w