HANNEY’S DIGGINGS certainly needed a missionary, if any place ever did; but, as one of the boys once remarked during a great lack of water, “It had to keep on a-needin’.” Zealous men came up by steamer via the Isthmus, and seemed to consume with their fiery haste to get on board the vessel for China and Japan, and carry the glad tidings to the heathen. Self-sacrificing souls gave up home and friends, and hurried across, overland, to brave the Pacific and bury themselves among the Australasian savages. But, though they all passed in sight of Hanney’s, none of them paused to give any attention to the souls who had flocked there. Men came out from ’Frisco and the East to labor with the Chinese miners, who were the only peaceable and well-behaved people in the mines; but the white-faced, good-natured, hard-swearing, generous, heavy-drinking, enthusiastic, murderous Anglo-Saxons they let severely alone. Perhaps they thought that hearts in which the good seed had once been sown, but failed to come up into fruit, were barren soil; perhaps they thought it preferable to be killed and eaten by cannibals than to be tumbled into a gulch by a revolver-shot, while the shootist strolled calmly off in company with his approving conscience, never thinking to ascertain whether his bullet had completed the business, or whether a wounded man might not have to fight death and coyotes together. At any rate, the missionaries let Hanney’s alone. If any one with an unquenchable desire to carry the Word where it is utterly unknown, a digestion without fear, and a full-proof article of common sense (these last two requisites are absolute), should be looking for an eligible location, Hanney’s is just the place for him, and he need give himself no trouble for fear some one would step in before him. If he has several dozens of similarly constituted friends, they can all find similar locations by betaking themselves to any mining camp in the West.