We went first to a gambling saloon. Think of a huge room with no carpet and a horseshoe kind of bar up the middle, with every sort of drink on it; and up at the end and round the sides gambling tables of all kinds of weird games that I did not understand, and can't explain--except roulette. There were hundreds of men in there, of all sorts, miners in their miners' dress; team drivers, superintendents--every species. If one said "gambling hell" in Europe it would sound as if it meant a most desperate place, with people drunk, and impossible to go into, but here not at all! Naturally, Octavia and I looked remarkable, although we were dressed in the plainest clothes, and yet not a soul stared or was the least rude. The only thing that was horrid was their spitting on the floor, but we tried not to see that. Otherwise not a soul was drunk or rude or anything but courteous. And such interesting types! Massed together one could judge of them, and the remarkable thing was there was no smell, like there would have been in any other country where workmen in their ordinary clothes were grouped together;--only tobacco smoke. They were some of them playing very high, and it looked so quaint to see a rough miner putting $500 on a single throw. We had a sheriff among our party. There was to have been a raid of the state police on this particular saloon, for some new rule which had been made, but the sheriff quietly said the law might wait a night; as they were showing round some English ladies! Now, don't you call that exquisite courtesy, Mamma? And what a sensible sort of administration of law, knowing its suitable time like that, the essence of tact and good taste, I call it; but I can't say in every way what darlings all these Westerners are. Our escort presented numbers of them to us, and without exception they had beautiful manners, the quiet ease of perfect breeding. It is upsetting all Octavia's theories, and she is coming round to Mrs. Van Brounker-Courtfield's view that it is the life a man leads more than blood even, which tells; and there they are fighting the earth for the ore with great courage and endurance and hard manual labour, and so it produces finer expressions of faces, and lither forms than using your brains to be sharper in business than your neighbour.