While at work in his claim his fire is always kindled near by, and over it a tea-pot. This is his beverage every half hour. His tea must be hot, strong and without milk or sugar. He also consumes a terrible mixture sold him by white traders, called indiscriminately brandy, gin or whisky, yet an intoxicated Chinaman is the rarest of rare sights. Rice he can cook elegantly, every grain being steamed to its utmost degree of distension. Soup he makes of no other meat than pork. The poorest among his hordes must have a chicken or duck for his holiday. He eats it merely parboiled. He will eat dog also, providing it is not long past maturity. The Chinese grocery-stores are museums to the American. There are strange dried roots, strange dried fish, strange dried land and marine plants, ducks and chickens, split, pressed thin and smoked; dried shellfish; cakes newly made, yellow, glutinous and fatty, stamped with tea-box characters; and great earthen jars filled with rottenness. I speak correctly if perhaps too forcibly, for when those imposing jars are opened to serve a customer with some manner of vegetable cut in long strips, the native-born American finds it expedient to hold his nose. American storekeepers in the mines deal largely in Chinese goods. They know the Mongolian names of the articles inquired for, but of their character, their composition, how they are cooked or how eaten, they can give no information. It is heathenish "truck," by whose sale they make a profit. Only that and nothing more. A Chinese miner's house is generally a conglomeration of old boards, mats, brush, canvas and stones. Rusty sheets of tin sometimes help to form the edifice. Anything lying about loose in the neighborhood is certain in time to form a part of the Mongolian mansion.