Wandering through the only remaining street of Placerville before I left for the Southern country, I saw that grapes were marked “three cents a pound;” but as the lowest coin known on the Pacific shores is the ten-cent bit, the price exists but upon paper. Three pounds of grapes, however, for “a bit” is a practicable purchase, in which I indulged when starting on my journey South: in the towns you have always the hotel supply. If the value of the smallest coin be a test of the prosperity of a country, California must stand high. Not only is nothing less than the bit, or fivepence, known, but when fivepence is deducted from a “quarter,” or shilling, fivepence is all you get or give for change--a gain or loss upon which Californian shopkeepers look with profound indifference. Hearing a greater jingling of glasses from one bar-room than from all the other hundred whisky-shops of Placerville, I turned into it to seek the cause, and found a Vermonter lecturing on Lincoln and the war to an audience of some fifty diggers. The lecturer and bar-keeper stood together within the sacred inclosure, the one mixing his drinks, while the other rounded off his periods in the inflated Western style. The audience was critical and cold till near the close of the oration, when the “corpse revivers” they were drinking seemed to take effect, and to be at the bottom of the stentorian shout, “Thet‘s bully,” with which the peroration was rewarded. The Vermonter told me that he had come round from Panama, and was on his way to Austin, as Placerville was “played out” since its “claims” had “fizzled.” They have no lecture-room here at present, as it seems; but that there are churches, however small, appears from a paragraph in the Placerville news-sheet of to-day, which chronicles the removal of a Methodist meeting-house from Block A to Block C, _vice_ a Catholic chapel retired, “having obtained a superior location.” A few days were all that I could spend in the valleys that lie between the Sierra and the Contra Costa Range, basking in a rich sunlight, and unsurpassed in the world for climate, scenery, and soil. This single State--one of forty-five--has twice the area of Great Britain, the most fertile of known soils, and the sun and sea-breeze of Greece. Western rhapsodies are the expression of the intoxication produced by such a spectacle; but they are outdone by facts.