I resolved to go to the mines. I went. By boat and stage, I got over the two hundred miles intervening ’twixt San Francisco and the “diggings.” I had friends on Hawkins’ Bar on the Tuolumne River in Tuolumne County. Thither I went. When I “struck” Hawkins’ in 1858, it was on its last legs. Still it boasted a store and a dozen houses. Golden hopes were still anchored in the bed of the river. Expensive river claims were then being worked from Red Mountain down to French Bar. But a premature rain and consequent freshet swept the river that season from end to end with the bosom of destruction, and sent for the winter the miners back to their two dollar per day bank diggings. And from that time henceforward the Bar steadily declined. The store was kept open for two seasons with great loss to its proprietor. He was a new man. When he came to the Bar the “boys” held a consultation on a big drift log. They concluded they could go through him in one season, provided he gave credit. But he was a discriminating man as regarded giving credit. So it required two seasons to get through him. Then he moved away forever, and with tears in his eyes at his losses. The Bar lingered on for several years. Steadily it lessened in houses and population. The store was torn down and the lumber carted away. In 1864 I made a pilgrimage thither and found remaining one house and one man. That man was Smith. Alex. Smith, a ’49er, a Baltimorean and a soldier during the Mexican war. Smith’s house was high up on the hillside and his back yard brought up against the camp graveyard. A score of Smith’s old companions there lay buried. And here this man lived alone with the dead and the memories of the last eighteen years. I said to him: “Smith, how do you stand it here? Do you never get lonesome?” “Well, yes; once in a while I do,” replied Smith; “but when I feel that way I go up the hill and bring down a log for firewood.” Smith was a philosopher, and thought that the best remedy for melancholy is physical exertion.