“D‘you tell now! only four hours in this great young city. Wall, guess it‘s a bully business. You see, some time back the governor pardoned a road agent after the citizens had voted him a rope. Yes, sir! But that ain‘t all: yesterday, cuss me if he didn‘t refuse ter pardon one of the boys who had jess shot another in play like. Guess he thinks hisself some pumpkins.” I duly expressed my horror, and my informant went on: “Wall, guess the citizens paid him off purty slick. They jess sent him a short thick bit of rope with a label ‘For his Excellency.’ You bet ef he ain‘t mad--you bet! Pass us those molasses, mister.” I was not disappointed: I had not come to Nevada for nothing. To see Virginia City and Carson, since I first heard their fame in New York, had been with me a passion, but the deed thus told me in the dining-room of the “Empire” Hotel was worthy a place in the annals of “Washoe.” Under its former name, the chief town of Nevada was ranked not only the highest, but the “cussedest” town in the States, its citizens expecting a “dead man for breakfast” every day, and its streets ranging from seven to eight thousand feet above the sea. Its twofold fame is leaving it: the Coloradan villages of North Empire and Black Hawk are nine or ten thousand feet above sea level, and Austin, and Virginia City in Montana beat it in playful pistoling and vice. Nevertheless, in the point of “pure cussedness” old Washoe still stands well, as my first introduction to its ways will show. All the talk of Nevada reformation applies only to the surface signs: when a miner tells you that Washoe is turning pious, and that he intends shortly to “vamose,” he means that, unlike Austin, which is still in its first state of mule-stealing and monté, Virginia City has passed through the second period--that of “vigilance committees” and “historic trees”--and is entering the third, the stage of churches and “city officers,” or police. The population is still a shifting one. A by-law of the municipality tells us that the “permanent population” consists of those who reside more than a month within the city. At this moment the miners are pouring into Washoe from north and south and east, from Montana, from Arizona, and from Utah, coming to the gayeties of the largest mining city to spend their money during the fierce short winter. When I saw Virginia City, it was worse than Austin. Every other house is a restaurant, a drinking-shop, a gaming-hell, or worse. With no one to make beds, to mend clothes, to cook food--with no house, no home--men are almost certain to drink and gamble. The Washoe bar-rooms are the most brilliant in the States: as we drove in from Austin at 3 A.M., there was blaze enough for us to see from the frozen street the portraits of Lola Montez, Ada Menken, Heenan, and the other Californian celebrities with which the bar-rooms were adorned.