The fable of a city paved with gold is realised in San Francisco. Mr. Taylor reports:—“Walking through the town, I was quite amazed to find a dozen persons busily employed in the street before the United States Hotel, digging up the earth with knives and crumbling it in their hands. They were actual gold-hunters, who obtained in this way about five dollars a day. After blowing the fine dirt carefully in their hands, a few specks of gold were left, which they placed in a piece of white paper. A number of children were engaged in the same business, picking out the fine grains by applying to them the head of a pin, moistened in their mouths. I was told of a small boy having taken home fourteen dollars as the result of one day’s labour. On climbing the hill to the Post Office I observed in places, where the wind had swept away the sand, several glittering dots of the real metal, but, like the Irishman who kicked the dollar out of his way, concluded to wait till I should reach the heap. The presence of gold in the streets was probably occasioned by the leakings from the miners’ bags and the sweepings of stores; though it may also be, to a slight extent, native in the earth, particles having been found in the clay thrown up from a deep well.” The prices paid for labour were at that time equally _romantic_. The carman of one firm (Messrs. Mellus, Howard, and Co.) drew a salary of twelve hundred a year; and it was no uncommon thing for such persons to be paid from fifteen to twenty dollars, or between three and four pounds sterling per day. Servants were paid from forty to eighty pounds per month. Since this time (August, 1849), however, wages had fallen; the labourers for the rougher kinds of work could—poor fellows—get no more than something above the pay of a Lieutenant-Colonel in the British army, or about four hundred per annum. The scarcity of labour is best illustrated by the cost of washing, which was one pound twelve shillings per dozen. It was therefore found cheaper to put out washing to the antipodes; and to this day, San Francisco shirts are washed and “got up” in China and the Sandwich Islands. So many hundred dozens of dirty, and so many hundred dozens of washed linen form the part of every outward and inward cargo to and from the Golden City.