As I sat at dinner in a miner‘s restaurant, my opposite neighbor, finding that I was not long from England, informed me he was “the independent editor of the _Nevada Union Gazette_,” and went on to ask: “And how might you have left literatooral pursoots? How air Tennyson and Thomas T. Carlyle?” I assured him that to the best of my belief they were fairly well, to which his reply was: “Guess them ther men ken sling ink, they ken.” When we parted, he gave me a copy of his paper, in which I found that he called a rival editor “a walking whisky-bottle” and “a Fenian imp.” The latter phrase reminded me that, of the two or three dozen American editors that I had met, this New Englander was the first who was “native born.” Stenhouse, in Salt Lake City, is an Englishman, so is Stanton, of Denver, and the whole of the remainder of the band were Irishmen. As for the earlier assertion in the “editorial,” it was not a wild one, seeing that Virginia City has five hundred whisky-shops for a population of ten thousand. Artemus Ward said of Virginia City, in a farewell speech to the inhabitants that should have been published in his works: “I never, gentlemen, was in a city where I was treated so _well_, nor, I will add, so _often_.” Through every open door the diggers can be seen tossing the whisky down their throats with a scowl of resolve, as though they were committing suicide--which, indeed, except in the point of speed, is probably the case. The _Union Gazette_ was not the only paper that I had given me to read that morning. Not a bridge over a “crick,” not even a blacked pair of boots, made me so thoroughly aware that I had in a measure returned to civilization as did the gift of an _Alta Californian_ containing a report of a debate in the English Parliament upon the Bank Charter Act. The speeches were appropriate to my feelings; I had just returned not only to civilization, but to the European inconveniences of gold and silver money. In Utah, gold and greenbacks circulate indifferently, with a double set of prices always marked and asked; in Nevada and California, greenbacks are as invisible as gold in New York or Kansas. Nothing can persuade the Californians that the adoption by the Eastern States of an inconvertible paper system is anything but the result of a conspiracy against the Pacific States--one in which they at least are determined to have no share. Strongly Unionist in feeling as were California, Oregon, and Nevada during the rebellion, to have forced greenbacks upon them would have been almost more than their loyalty would have borne. In the severest taxation they were prepared to acquiesce; but paper money they believe to be downright robbery, and the invention of the devil.