February, eighteen fifty-five. Four months have passed away since I made the last notes but although the above dates indicate the Winter season when in the Eastern States snow and frost are plenty, we still enjoy as beautiful warm and dry weather as one can wish for—no snow, nor cold chilly days but pleasant weather in their place. As miners mainly depend upon the rain to wash their dirt, hove up throughout a period of nine months, a failure of it in Winter when it is _anxiously_ looked for is a great disappointment to the miners all over the country. When mining is stopped, everything else is dull and depressed. We may have some rain yet for California presents such a strange instance of change that it is hard to tell when it will come. It is this morning cloudy and has every indication of rain. Three or four weeks of even moderate rain would furnish a great deal of water—the great commodity for the miner. There appears to be at present a general depression in business all over the country, money tight and provisions dear and labor scarce. Heavy failures happen almost daily in the Atlantic Cities. Houses which enjoyed the greatest public confidence and patronage are suspending payment, not being able to pay their liabilities by a fearful amount. Even Page and Bacon, one of the best and wealthiest banking houses in the Union, has suspended payment which, however, is more ascribed to the detention of gold shipments from California than to deficiency of funds. The main cause for all this embarrassment in the money market appears to lie in the heavy export of gold to England in exchange for English manufactures and in the extravagance of our bankers, brokers and merchant princes in the last ten years. Nothing but a stoppage in the import of foreign manufacture and a more industrious sort of living will save this country from bankruptcy. Even here, the great source of wealth for the last six years, the pressure is felt. Gold diggings are getting scarcer all the time and as living is almost as dear as in forty-nine and fifty when it was easier to make an ounce than it is at the present day to make a dollar—it is easy to imagine how oppressive the hard times must be. The business I am engaged in at the present yields but a very small profit for everything in the mercantile line is high in the market and as miners reap but a very scant harvest for their labor one has to sell just as low as admissible. Profits therefore are but small. Still, making a little is better than making nothing at all and as long as this can be done I intend to stop here.