The process of finding the amount of gold or silver in a sample of ore is very interesting. After the ore is reduced to a fine powder, a small quantity of it, perhaps a teaspoonful, is nicely weighed out, and put into an earthern saucer, with perhaps ten times that amount of lead ore in the same powdered state. The saucer is placed in a furnace, and the lead soon absorbs the gold and silver and settles to the bottom, leaving the worthless part of the powder to rise to the top in the shape of dark-colored glass. This button of lead, with the gold and silver absorbed in it, is then placed in a little cup made of burnt bone. This cup is then placed in the furnace and the bone absorbs all the lead, leaving a speck of the precious metal about as large as the head of a small pin. The gold and silver are then separated by placing this speck in nitric acid, which absorbs the silver, and the pure gold is left in the bottom of the glass. I understand that this process, on a small scale, is practically the same as that employed at the large smelting works. In this way miners can find out at a very little expense just what their ore is worth per ton from a comparatively small sample. We started up Boulder Cañon, a gorge in the mountain that is very picturesque, but whose sides are not so perpendicular as those of Williams Cañon at Manitou. We rode and walked up this cañon nine miles to Salina, where we stayed at night. A large stream comes roaring down the cañon, and the narrow gauge track of the Colorado Central Railroad goes up at a very steep grade. The course of the stream is so crooked and the cañon so narrow, that in the nine miles there are over fifty railroad bridges. All along up the cañon the sides of the mountain are fairly honey-combed with holes, dug during the mining excitement in 1859, and since, but now the holes, shanties, and everything about the region seems to be deserted. Salina is a genuine mining town of perhaps a hundred inhabitants, and entirely different from anything that I expected. I supposed that even now a man took his life in his hands when he visited one of these mining towns, but during the evening, and all the time we were there, the place was as quiet and peaceable as any New England town--decidedly more so than any factory village. I saw many well-dressed young ladies and gentlemen all going in one direction, and found it was the night for the temperance lodge to meet, and that the members include all but about a dozen persons in the community. During the evening two little boys at the boarding-house seemed to want to get acquainted, and so I asked one how old he was. "My brother is eight years old, and I am ten days older than he is," he answered. How that could be the little fellow was unable to explain, and so am I.