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shellfish; cakes newly made, yellow, glutinous and fatty, stamped with
tea-box characters; and great earthen jars filled with rottenness. I
speak correctly if perhaps too forcibly, for when those imposing jars
are opened to serve a customer with some manner of vegetable cut in
long strips, the native-born American finds it expedient to hold
his nose. American storekeepers in the mines deal largely in Chinese
goods. They know the Mongolian names of the articles inquired for,
but of their character, their composition, how they are cooked or
how eaten, they can give no information. It is heathenish "truck," by
whose sale they make a profit. Only that and nothing more.

A Chinese miner's house is generally a conglomeration of old boards,
mats, brush, canvas and stones. Rusty sheets of tin sometimes help to
form the edifice. Anything lying about loose in the neighborhood is
certain in time to form a part of the Mongolian mansion.

When the white man abandons mining-ground he often leaves behind very
serviceable frame houses. John comes along to glean the gold left by
the Caucasian. He builds a cluster of shapeless huts. The deserted
white man's house gradually disappears. A clapboard is gone, and then
another, and finally all. The skeleton of the frame remains: months
pass away; piece by piece the joists disappear; some morning they are
found tumbled in a heap, and at last nothing is left save the cellar
and chimneys. Meantime, John's clusters of huts swell their rude
proportions, but you must examine them narrowly to detect any traces
of your vanished house, for he revels in smoke, and everything about
him is soon colored to a hue much resembling his own brownish-yellow
countenance. Thus he picks the domiciliary skeleton bare, and then
carries off the bones. He is a quiet but skillful plunderer. John No.
1 on his way home from his mining-claim rips off a board; John No.
2 next day drags it a few yards from the house. John No. 3 a week
afterward drags it home. In this manner the dissolution of your
house is protracted for months. In this manner he distributes the
responsibility of the theft over his entire community. I have seen a
large boarding-house disappear in this way, and when the owner, after
a year's absence, revisited the spot to look after his property, he
found his real estate reduced to a cellar.

John himself is a sort of museum in his character and habits. We must
be pardoned for giving details of these, m