I wanted to visit the mines and take a farewell look at the camps where I had lived and worked in a period now fast becoming “old times,” and I went. The term antiquity is relative in its character. Twenty years may involve an antiquity as much as 200 or 2,000. Indeed, as regards sensation and emotion, the more recent antiquity is the more strongly is it realized and more keenly felt. Standing to-day on the hillside and looking down on the site of the camp where you mined twenty-five years ago, and then going down that hill and treading over that site, now silent and deserted, and you realize, so to speak, a live antiquity. So far as ancient Greece or Rome are concerned, their histories would make no different impression on us if dated 600 years ago or 6,000. We are imposed upon by these rows of ciphers. They convey really no sense of time’s duration. They are but mathematical sounds. We know only that these nations and these men and women lived, ate, slept, drank, quarrelled, coveted, loved, hated, and died a long time ere we were born and that of it all we have but fragments of their history, or rather fragments of the history of a few prominent individuals. But when you stand alone at Dry Bar, where you mined when it was a lively camp in 1857, with its score of muddy sluice streams coursing hither and thither, its stores, its saloons, its hotel and its express office, and see now but one rotting pine-log cabin, whose roof has tumbled in and whose sides have tumbled out; where all about is a silent waste of long-worked-off banks or bare ledge and piles of boulders in which the herbage has taken root; where every mark of the former houses and cabins has disappeared, save a mound here, or a pile of stone indicating a former chimney there, you have a lively realization of antiquity, though it be a recent one. You knew the men who lived here; you worked with them; you know the sites of the houses in which they lived; you have an event and a memory for every acre of territory hereabout. Down there, where the river narrows between those two high points of rock, once stood a rickety bridge. It became more and more shaky and dangerous, until one day Tom Wharton, the Justice of the Peace, fired by a desire _pro bono publico_ and rather more than his ordinary quantity of whiskey, cut the bridge away with his axe and it floated down stream. Over yonder, on that sandy point, was the richest claim on the bar.