At last it dawned upon the collective mind of the Copperhead Company that their Superintendent, the Enthusiast, was digging too much and getting down too little. They accepted his resignation. It mattered little to him, for by this time his mind was overwhelmed by another stupendous mining scheme, to which the Copperhead was barely a priming. He had the happy talent of living in these golden visions which, to him, were perfect realities. He held the philosophy that the idea, the hope, the anticipation of a thing is sometimes more “the thing” than the thing itself. The Enthusiast’s rich mines lay principally in his head, but his belief in them gave him as much pleasure as if they really existed. It was like marrying, sometimes. The long-sought-for, longed-for, wished-for wife, or husband, turns out, as a reality, a very different being from what he or she was deemed while in process of being longed and sought for. The long-longed-for may have been estimated an angel. The angel, after wedlock, may prove to have been a myth. The reality may be a devil, or within a few shades or degrees of a devil. So the shaft was sunk, as they said, properly and scientifically, by the new Superintendent. The rock got harder as we went down, the ore less, the vein narrower, the quantity of water greater, the progress slower, the weekly expenses first doubled and then trebled, the stock became less coveted, and as to reputed value, reached that fatal dead level which really means that it is on its downward descent. The shareholders’ faces became longer and longer at their weekly Sunday afternoon meetings in the Sonora Court-house. The Copperhead Claim and Copperhead City subsided quietly. The shareholders became tired of mining for coin to pay assessments out of their own pockets. They came at last to doubt the ever-glowing hopeful assertion of the Enthusiast that from indications he knew the “ore was forming.” The inevitable came. Copperhead City was deserted by its human inhabitants. The skunk, the snake, the squirrel, the woodpecker, and the buzzard came again into full possession, and I bitterly regretted that I had not sold more at ten dollars a foot when I found the stock a drug at ten cents. CHAPTER XXV. PROSPECTING. The failure of the Copperhead Claim and the collapse of Copperhead City did not discourage me. The flame only burned the brighter to go forth and unearth the veins of mineral wealth which imagination showed me lying far and near in this land still of such recent settlement. This was in 1863-64. The great silver leads of Nevada had but recently been discovered. The silver excitement was at its height. People were thinking that barely the threshold of the mineral richness of the Pacific slope had been reached and that untold treasure underground awaited the prospector’s exploration north, south, and east, so far as he could go.