In countries where a large majority of the men are content to give, year after year, their skill, energy, and time, in exchange for a few hundred pieces of gold, or even of silver, the reports of a land where the most precious of these metals turns up under the ploughshare, abounds in the rivers, mingles with the highway-dust, and is picked from the bricks of the houses, are naturally at first received with doubt and misgiving, and suspected of exaggeration, if not condemned as fiction. We confess, for our part, that we attached little weight to the first accounts of Californian marvels, and that long after the wise men of the East had begun to debate, in the shadow of the grasshopper, the possible effect upon the currency of the anticipated influx of the produce of the diggings, we still were sceptics as to the magnitude of the newly-found treasure. But even those who gave readiest credence to the tale of wonder, could hardly, we should have thought, have expected that the ingots were to be gathered without trouble or pain beyond that of performing a long journey and filling a big bag. Evidently this was Mr Johnson's notion, and that of not a few others of his sanguine countrymen, "who left their homes and families, and the decencies of civilisation, with the expectation of acquiring an adequate competency by the efforts of a single year." At what figure Mr Johnson rates an "adequate competency" we know not; but it is evident he expected to be placed on pretty nearly the same footing as those Oriental princes who, after wandering through the desert to the enchanted gardens, had the free pick of trees whose fruits were diamonds and rubies. The real state of affairs proved very different. A few persons, dwellers in California when the golden richness of the soil was first discovered in 1848,[7] may have made large fortunes on easy terms, by being early in the field, and through barter with the Indians, who (before they were frightened and soured by the shooting and scalping practices of the Oregonians and others) were willing enough to labour and trade, and to give gold-dust weight for weight for glass beads and other baubles. We read of one man, a western farmer, owner and occupier of a loghouse, known as the Blue Tent, who arrived in California before the gold discoveries, treated the Indians well, learned their language, employed them to dig, and realised, it is said, two hundred thousand dollars. Another old settler, we are told, accumulated, in the season of 1848, also by help of the Indians, nearly two bushels of gold-dust. Our arithmetic is not equal to the reduction of this into pounds sterling, but at a rough estimate we should take it to represent a very pleasing sum--possibly the competency Mr Johnson aspired to. But those palmy days of gold-gathering have fled, violently driven away; the Indians, welcomed with bullets instead of beads, will work no more, and every man must dig for himself.