In the smaller towns near Placerville, there is still a wide field for the discovery of character as well as gold; but eccentricity among the diggers here seems chiefly to waste itself on food. The luxury of this Pacific country is amazing. The restaurants and cafés of each petty digging-town put forth bills-of-fare which the “Trios Frères” could not equal for ingenuity; wine lists such as Delmonico‘s cannot beat. The facilities are great: except in the far interior or on the hills, one even spring reigns unchangeably--summer in all except the heat; every fruit and vegetable of the world is perpetually in season. Fruit is not named in the hotel bills-of-fare, but all the day long there are piled in strange confusion on the tables, Mission grapes, the Californian Bartlet pears, Empire apples from Oregon, melons--English, Spanish, American and Musk; peaches, nectarines, and fresh almonds. All comers may help themselves, and wash down the fruit with excellent Californian-made Sauterne. If dancing, gambling, drinking, and still shorter cuts to the devil have their votaries among the diggers, there is no employment upon which they so freely spend their cash as on dishes cunningly prepared by cooks--Chinese, Italian, Bordelais--who follow every “rush.” After the doctor and the coroner, no one makes money at the diggings like the cook. The dishes smell of the Californian soil; baked rock-cod à la Buena Vista, broiled Californian quail with Russian River bacon, Sacramento snipes on toast, Oregon ham with champagne sauce, and a dozen other toothsome things--these were the dishes on the Placerville bill-of-fare in an hotel which had escaped the fire, but whose only guests were diggers and their friends. A few Atlantic States dishes were down upon the list: hominy, cod chowder--hardly equal, I fear, to that of Salem--sassafras candy, and squash tart, but never a mention of pork and molasses, dear to the Massachusetts boy. All these good things the diggers, when “dirt is plenty,” moisten with Clicquot, or Heidsick cabinet; when returns are small, with their excellent Sonoma wine. Even earthquakes fail to interrupt the triumphs of the cooks. The last “bad shake” was fourteen days ago, but it is forgotten in the joy called forth by the discovery of a thirteenth way to cook fresh oysters, which are brought here from the coast by train. There is still a something in Placerville that smacks of the time when tin-tacks were selling for their weight in gold.